In the first article in this series [1], 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 [2], we examined the culmination of those trends in the horror of the Holocaust. Part three [3] discussed the plight of migrants during the terror of the Cold War.

Towards the end of the 80s, the world entered a new period: one of generalised, social decomposition [4]. This phenomenon was the result of the failure of the working class to politicise and push forward the struggles it had begun in the 70s. But although the ruling class was able to beat back the proletariat's resurgence it was unable to inflict a decisive defeat, one that would have enabled it to impose an outright march towards war.

The result was a descent into a protracted struggle of attrition which, while inflicting grevious wounds on the proletariat, also began to destabilise the bourgeoisie's economic and political apparatus. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc heralded a new stage in this process, a "New World Disorder" with weaker states disintegrating entirely. As soon as one devastated region seemed to recover, another began to fall apart. Faced with what seemed like a new wave of post-Apocalyptic nightmares, with entire societies seemingly dissolving into anarchy, more people than ever before began the desperate search for safety in a collapsing world.

It is this period we will now examine.

With the return of the economic crisis in the middle of the 1970's, the policy of immigration was greatly reduced. Migratory policies became much more restrictive concerning entry over borders. Capital did continue to hire cheap immigrant workers despite the massive increase in unemployment, but it could no longer absorb a whole mass of foreigners heading for the major industrial centres.

Crisis, state "bunkerism" and the explosion of migrants and refugees

From the end of the 80's and beginning of the 90's packed charter flights took immigrants back to their countries of origin. And this happened despite the context of the exacerbation of conflicts and the deepening of the economic crisis which multiplied the number of potential candidates for migration.  A new phenomenon thus came to the fore throughout the world: that of the "illegals".  With the closure of frontiers, an illegal immigration which was already difficult to quantify, exploded in a spectacular fashion. A real mafia economy, made up of transnational networks, could then be deployed with impunity, made up of unscrupulous crooks and all forms of modern slavery like prostitution, but also feeding the labour black market of low pay, particularly in building and agriculture. The United States itself profited from this situation in order to super-exploit the sweat of illegal immigrants coming mainly from Latin America. So, for example "the number of Mexicans registered outside of Latin America (the majority in the United States) tripled between 1970 and 1980, reaching more than two million. If one took into account the enormous number of clandestine immigrants, the exact figure must be very much higher: between 1965-1975, the number of illegals fluctuated around 400,000 a year reaching between 1975 and 1990 about 900,000 migrants"[i].

The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the quasi-autarkic Stalinist regimes, accelerated this process and opened up a new spiral of war, chaos and unprecedented disorder. While after 1945 displacements were essentially those of victims of war, mainly of expelled Germans, followed by those fleeing the German Democratic Republic before the construction of the wall in 1961, migrations after 1989 were rather the product of a new international wave. Up to 1989, migrants from Eastern Europe were blocked by the Iron Curtain. Migratory waves thus went from the South towards the North, notably from northern Africa and the countries of the Mediterranean towards the large urban centres of the European countries. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and with the integration of the countries of central Europe into the European Union (EU), a worker from the East could again move to the countries of the West. At the same time, the massive and rapid growth of China led to the beginning of a vast internal migration, stirring hundreds of millions to leave the countryside for the towns. Because of the growth of the Chinese economy these masses could be absorbed. A contrario , with the advance of the crisis in Europe and the United States, the flow coming from other countries was restricted by the numbers already there.

The horrors generated by militarism

The dynamic of militarism and of the world chaos which followed the dislocation of the Eastern Bloc and the disintegration of the alliances around the United State aggravated the tendency of "each for themselves" and the tensions between different nations, pushing populations to flee the fighting and/or growing misery. The real barrier which separated East from West, whose objective was not only the demarcation of borders on the imperialist level but also the prevention of emigration, disappeared, provoking an anguished response from the governments of Western Europe faced with the presumed threat of a "massive immigration" from the countries of the East. After 1989, a wave of migrants did come towards the West, notably from Romania, Poland and central Europe, looking for work, even if badly paid. Despite the tragic episode of the Balkans War between 1990 and 1993 and the recent conflict in Ukraine, the migratory flow within Europe was relatively "under control". And this while at the same time the pressure from migration at its periphery became stronger and stronger on the EU[ii].

At the beginning of the 1990s, new wars were sowing chaos in the Middle-East, the Balkans, in the Caucuses and Africa, provoking ethnic cleansing and all sorts of pogroms (Rwanda, Congo, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Myanmar, Thailand, etc.). Millions were looking for refuge but the majority of refugees still remained in their regions. Only a limited number of them turned towards Western Europe. During the first Gulf War (1991) the US-led "coalition" used the local Kurd and Shi'ite populations for its intervention, which resulted in at least 500,000 deaths and a new wave of refugees[iii]. The "humanitarian" and "peace-making" alibis of the West allowed the covering-up of the worst imperialist exactions in the name of the "protection of refugees" and populations, in particular the Kurdish minorities. The bourgeoisie then promised us an era of "peace" and "prosperity" along with the triumph of democracy. In reality, as we can see today, the major powers and all the states involved were to be dragged along by the logic of militarism into a downward spiral that becomes ever more murderous and destructive. Moreover, war rapidly returned to Europe, in ex-Yugoslavia, resulting in more than 200,000 deaths. In 1990, 35,000 Albanians from Kosovo began to flee towards Western Europe. A year later, following Croatia's declaration of independence, 200,000 people fled the horror of the conflict and 350,000 others were displaced within the old, now carved-up territory. In 1995, the war spread to Bosnia and 700,000 supplementary people were driven out, notably following the daily bombardments on Sarajevo[iv]. A year earlier, the genocide in Rwanda, equally with the complicity of the French and, to a lesser extent, the British and USA, saw close to a million victims (mainly from the Tutsi population, but also some Hutus) provoked the massive and tragic stampede of Rwandan refugees escaping towards the province of Kivu in the Congo (1.2 million displaced and thousands more deaths due to cholera, revenge attacks, etc.). Every time the refugees become the hostages and victims of the worst atrocities. At best they were considered "collateral damage" or as a simple nuisance from the point of view of military logistics.

There were many who were ready to think that the spectre of war was a distant prospect but in the reality and logic of capitalism, the war-like spiral can only continue. Entire zones of the planet found themselves polluted by warlords and the appetites of the major powers, hunting down and terrorising the populations, obliging still more to flee the barbarity of the combat zones. Millions fled the atrocities of gangs and mafias, as in Latin America with the narco-wars, or those left adrift by states collapsing in tatters, such as Iraq, where we saw the rise of the obscurantism of al-Qaida and then "Islamic State”. The same thing was happening in Africa where inter-ethnic tensions and armed bands of murderous terrorists multiplied their attacks.. The interventions of the main powers, notably the United States in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, awakened the ambitions of the regional  powers, further destabilising these extremely fragile countries, devastating wider zones and delivering them up to war. All this aggravated the problems of refugees, multiplying the camps and the tragedies. The refugees were prey to the mafias, submitting to brutality, theft, violations, with women often enrolled or kidnapped by prostitution networks[v].

Throughout the globe these same phenomena are coming together, fed by the hot-points of war as in the Middle-East, condemning hundreds of thousands of  families to wander in exile or stagnate in the camps.

Up to this time the majority of the refugee victims of war around Europe, remained in their regions. But, for some years now, faced with ever-wider spreading war-zones, notably the Middle-East and Africa, a much higher number of refugees head for Western Europe and that at the same time as more "economic" migrants from Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Mediterranean or others hit by the economic crisis.

The same thing goes for the U.S. continent: more emigrating from Mexico, a growing number of refugees fleeing the violence of Central America, trying to escape towards Mexico in order to get to the United States.

Obama’s Wall

“President Barack Obama has already earned the damning nickname “Deporter in Chief” for kicking out of the country more than 2.5 million undocumented people during his two terms in office. Fear of deportation has sharply escalated since Trump’s election”.

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/multimedia/The-Global-Rise-of-Xenophob... [5]

The war in Syria and the massive flow of refugees

Over the past five years and more, Iraq, Libya and Syria have fallen prey to an uncontrollable chaos which is pushing still more of the population to flee in large numbers. At the same time thousands of people are taken hostage by the rival imperialisms involved, as in Aleppo for example, where they are condemned to die under massive bombardments and bullets as well as dying of hunger and thirst. About 15 million people are displaced today from the Middle-East alone. In 2015, more than a million people were sent into exile, counting only the flow towards Germany. For the first time since 1945, waves of refugees, victims of wars and bombardments, are heading towards a Europe perceived as an "Eldorado", but are brutally pushed back or languish in camps. In Ukraine the war has flared up again and thousands of Ukrainians have fled the fighting, asking for asylum in neighbouring countries, notably in Poland which is growing more and more hostile to refugees.

Between 2000 and 2014, 22,400 people were drowned or disappeared in the Mediterranean trying to reach this idealised European Union, despite police numbers making access to the borders difficult. This exodus has provided a major opportunity to unscrupulous “people smugglers” whose organisations have prospered on what's become an industrial scale. As a result the richest states have become real bunkers multiplying their walls, barbed wire, patrols and police numbers. It's an irony of sorts that the champions of "democratic freedom", the United States, which didn’t have enough harsh words to stigmatise the Berlin "wall of shame" have already constructed a giant wall along its southern border in order to keep out the "Chicanos"[vi].

In many countries refugees have not only become undesirable but are also presented as criminals or potential terrorists, justifying a paranoia which deliberately aims to divide and control populations and prepare the repression of future social struggles. And to the police repression, can be added, outside of hunger and cold, deliberate administrative and bureaucratic harassment. The major powers have thus deployed a whole juridical arsenal whose job is to filter out the "good migrants" (those who can be useful for the valorisation of capital) notably the best educated, the products of the "Brain Drain". "Asylum-seekers" and the "bad migrants", the hungry majority without qualifications, must... go home, or go somewhere else. According to demographic and economic needs, different states and national capitals thus "regulate" the number of refugees available to be integrated into the labour market.

A good number are brutally sent back. Men, women and children, notably in camps in Turkey, are victims of the police who, if tasers, baton blows, etc., are not enough, don't hesitate to shoot them in cold blood. The EU is perfectly aware of these terrifying practices and the bodies which continue to wash up on Mediterranean beaches. Not only does this carnage leave them cold, but they are busy but organising a whole military and man-hunting apparatus to push back the refugees.

An immense and moral combat for the proletariat

With this very general tableau of the history of refugees and the migratory flux, we've tried to show that capitalism has always used force and violence, either directly or indirectly, initially with the aim of forcing peasants to abandon their land and sell their labour power wherever they can. We have seen that these migrations, their numbers, their status (clandestine or legal), their direction, depend on the fluctuations of the world market and change according to the economic situation. War, which became more intense, more frequent and more widespread during the 20th century, means that the number of refugees and victims of war has constantly increased. With recent conflicts this flow has made its way to Europe and the other major industrial centres. Added to this is the fact that for some time now more and more movements of refugees are linked to the destruction of the environment. Today, climatic ecological changes and disasters can be added to all the other ills. By 2013, there were already 22 million climatic refugees. According to some sources there will be three times as many refugees from climate change than those fleeing war. For 2050, the UNO forecasts the number of 250,000 climatic refugees, a greatly underestimated figure when we are already seeing the air in some zones and cities becoming unbreathable (e.g. Beijing and New Delhi). The convergence of all these factors combines to increase the scale of the tragedy. There is now a growing number of refugees that capital, as a result of its historic crisis, can no longer integrate into production.

Thus the tragic fate of the refugees poses a real moral problem for the working class. The capitalist system is carrying out the hunt for illegals, repression, deportation, imprisonment in camps, while multiplying xenophobic campaigns which end up feeding the preparation for all sorts of violence against migrants. Further, in trying to distinguish "real asylum-seekers" from the rapidly-growing numbers of undesirable "economic refugees", the bourgeoisie accentuates these divisions. Faced with the reality of the economic crisis throughout Europe, and by exploiting the fear of terrorism, the bourgeoisie is stoking up xenophobia while at the same time presenting the state as the sole guarantor of stability. The propaganda of the ruling class cranks up concerns about competition for work, for housing and health benefits, favouring a reactionary, pogromist mentality. All this constitutes fertile soil for the spread of populism[vii].

This is confirmed by the growth of anti-immigrant and ultra-conservative parties in Europe and the United States,  parties which have gained an influence in the more marginalised parts of the proletariat in the old industrial regions. The result of the referendum in Great Britain, like the election of Trump in America, is the most evident expression of this.

Faced with the thorny question of migration and refugees, the working class will have to take on a growing moral responsibility. It will be necessary to banish both the expressions of open hatred, such as "Throw out the immigrants", and the more “democratic” version which says "we can't take on the entire world's misery". It has to avoid the traps of official propaganda which are an obstacle to a basic necessity of the class struggle: solidarity, which will have to be affirmed in an increasingly conscious manner. The bourgeoisie, which does fear for a future loss of control faced with a more and more chaotic situation, willingly fosters a climate of terror, pushing isolated individuals to put themselves under the “protection” of the state. Faced with the anxiety-ridden official speeches and the security measures of the state apparatus, proletarians must act in an absolutely conscious manner and reject the reflexes of fear conditioned by the media, recognising that before everything refugees are the victims of capitalism and the barbaric policies of these same states. This is what we have tried to show in this series of articles. In time, the working class will have to be able to see that behind the question of migrants and refugees is the question of the international unity of the working class and its revolutionary fight against the capitalist system.

"If our class aims to recover its class identity, solidarity can be an important means of unification in its struggle. If, on the contrary, it only sees in the refugees competition and a threat, if it doesn’t form an alternative to capitalist misery,  to a system which forces millions to flee under the threat of war or of hunger, then we will be under threat of a massive extension of the pogromist mentality and the proletariat at the heart of it will not be spared."[viii]

WH, November 2016

The ruling class in Britain was not prepared for the Brexit result. That there was no plan in place has become evident in the subsequent months. The Cameron government had no measures prepared. Those who campaigned to Leave the EU have gone back on slogans such as ‘£350 million a week to be spent on the NHS’ but not suggested anything in their place. The British bourgeoisie had partly lost control of its political apparatus and was looking for strategies to limit the damage to the economy, to stabilise a situation in which, especially after the advent of President Trump in the USA, instability and uncertainty are rapidly spreading.

May’s “brighter future”

The government’s February 2017 White Paper spends nearly 25,000 words trying to resolve a raft of contradictions. In a speech in January Theresa May said that the “British people … voted to shape a brighter future”. The White Paper aims at paving the way for a “smooth, mutually beneficial exit” and wants to “avoid a disruptive cliff-edge.” Whether this future will be ‘brighter’ remains to be seen.

You can read that “We will not be seeking membership of the Single Market, but will pursue instead a new strategic partnership with the EU, including an ambitious and comprehensive Free Trade Agreement and a new customs agreement.” So, the UK is going to leave the Single Market and then come to some arrangement with the 27 remaining countries. To leave the EU there need only be the agreement of 20 of the remaining countries, whereas a trade deal may need the backing of all the remaining 27 EU states. With trade, the government thinks that “An international rules based system is crucial for underpinning free trade and to ward off protectionism.” At a time when the US under President Trump seems to be going in a protectionist direction, putting America First, and renegotiating trade deals, this is not a welcome prospect for British capitalism as the US is the UK’s single biggest export market on a country-by-country basis. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has suggested that, while the UK’s contributions to the EU budget will cease, the loss of trade will have a much bigger impact on the British economy.

May proposes an alternative to the Single Market “If we were excluded from accessing the single market – we would be free to change the basis of Britain’s economic model.”  Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond, speaking to Welt am Sonntag (15/1/17) said “If we have no access to the European market, if we are closed off, if Britain were to leave the European Union without an agreement on market access, then we could suffer from economic damage at least in the short-term. In this case, we could be forced to change our economic model and we will have to change our model to regain competitiveness. And you can be sure we will do whatever we have to do.” The proposal to do “something different” has been greeted with much speculation. Will the UK become a tax haven? Will it get stuck into a trade and tariff war? There are only so many options, one of which is certainly not Britain undergoing a revival of manufacture on any significant scale, despite vague promises in this direction.

One reason that British access to the single market seems impossible to many commentators is that it would involve a commitment to freedom of movement for EU citizens. May has said “We want to guarantee the rights of EU citizens who are already living in Britain”, but at the same time her government is prepared to use these nearly 3 million people as bargaining chips. Liam Fox was reported as describing EU nationals in the UK as one of the “main cards” in Brexit negotiations. A leaked document from the European parliament’s legal affairs committee said there could be an EU backlash against this.

The contradictions in the British government’s position reflect the position that British capitalism is stuck in. “We will take back control of our laws”, says May, but, at the same time, “as we translate the body of European law into our domestic regulations, we will ensure that workers’ rights are fully protected”. The goal is to have everything ‘beneficial’ about the EU, plus every advantage of ‘independence’. The British bourgeoisie will employ any and every manoeuvre it can. It will blame the EU for every difficulty. But it’s not starting from a position of strength.

Adapting to crisis

The British bourgeoisie has historically been noted for the ability of its political apparatus to act in defence of the interests of the national capital. The result of the referendum showed a growing loss of cohesion within the ruling class, but it also showed the capacity of the British ruling class to adapt to its difficulties. This was demonstrated after the referendum when May was quite evidently ‘selected’ as Tory leader to resolve a temporary government crisis. Similarly, subsequent legal and parliamentary battles, and the role of the media, have to be seen in this context. The case brought against the government, to stop it acting on its own and insisting on a role for parliament, produced a wave of populist media rage against the judges of the Court of Appeal: the Daily Mail branding them as “Enemies of the People”, while the  liberal media defended the ‘independence of the judiciary’.

But what was being touted as a ‘constitutional crisis’ soon subsided. When the government’s appeal to the Supreme Court was also dismissed there was far less hysteria. The House of Commons performed its duty and rubber stamped the proposals of the executive, despite the majority of MPs having been in favour of remaining in the EU. The Labour Party was particularly helpful. Jeremy Corbyn imposed a three-line whip on MPs to ensure they supported the latter stages of Brexit legislation. Corbyn was loyally supported by the Trotskyists of Socialist Worker (9/2/17) “He had rightly insisted that Labour MPs vote for a bill that would begin the process of leaving the European Union”. For all Corbyn’s attempts to pose as a ‘radical’ he remains a very conventional participant in the battles over Brexit, as he said in a speech on 10 January 2017. “Labour is not wedded to freedom of movement for EU citizens as a point of principle”. Labour principles start from the defence of British capital and the manoeuvres of bourgeois democracy.

Elsewhere in parliament, a government source said “If the Lords don’t want to face an overwhelming public call to be abolished they must get on and protect democracy and pass this bill”.  Brexit Secretary David Davis called on peers to “do their patriotic duty”. Threats to the House of Lords from the Conservative party are intriguing evidence of the divisions within the bourgeoisie, even though at a deeper level they are united as parts of one state capitalist class

Britain’s imperialist options are narrowing

Despite all the declarations of ‘freedom for the UK’, in January 2017 the reality of British imperialism’s position was seen in May’s visit to the US and Turkey. With Trump, she held hands, and clearly grasped at any straws available. The so-called ‘special relationship’ has always been one-sidedly weighted to the US’s benefit and there seems little prospect that the imbalance will be modified in the foreseeable future. In Turkey May “issued a stern warning to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoðan about respecting human rights yesterday as she prepared to sign a £100m fighter jet deal that Downing Street hopes will lead to Britain becoming Turkey’s main defence partner” (Guardian 28/1/17).

This is the current international face of the British bourgeoisie. Unsure of prospects outside the EU, desperate for any crumbs from American imperialism, uncertain about the prospects for its financial sector, but at least able to rely on arms sales to a country in conflict. A leaked government document showed the industries that are set to be prioritised by the government during Brexit talks. High priorities included aerospace, air transport, gas markets, financial services, land transport (excluding rail), insurance, and banking and market infrastructure. Low priorities included steel construction, oil and gas, telecoms, post, environmental services, water, medical, and education. Behind the scenes decisions are being made as to which sectors might survive, or can be sacrificed, and which need more serious backing.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (Telegraph 11/2/17) doesn’t underestimate the abilities of the British bourgeoisie to intrigue and conspire, “the Brits will manage without big effort to divide the remaining 27 member states”. And the British government does have a fall-back position as, in May’s words “no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain”. That is the ‘hard Brexit’ position that the British bourgeoisie appears to be rallying round. The ruthlessness of the British bourgeoisie hasn’t vanished, but its ability to function cohesively in a period of growing decomposition has declined.

The problems faced by the working class in Britain echo those faced internationally. In 1989 the momentous transitions in the regimes of eastern Europe were accomplished with the working class just a spectator, not playing any independent role. In the last couple of years, we have seen the spread of terrorism to the streets of western Europe, the EU Referendum, the election of Trump, and the resurgence of Marine Le Pen’s Front National. Again, for all the talk about the tremendous changes that are taking place, and the discontent of the people up against the elites, the working class has not been an active factor in the situation. The bourgeoisie will try and use the decomposition of its system against the working class, whether promoting the populist option or ‘anti-populist’ battles and campaigns. But whereas the bourgeoisie is defending a society in decline, the working class has the capacity to create new social relations based on solidarity rather than exploitation and nihilism.

Car 15/2/17

The bourgeoisie has made no mistake in spending decades concocting the shabbiest lies about the revolution in Russia in 1917. 100 years after the soviets took power in Russia, the propagandists of the ruling class continue to sing the same hymn to the virtues of bourgeois parliamentary ‘democracy’ and spew out the worst falsifications about the reality of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia. In fact, despite a whole number of quibbles, these historians of the bourgeois order have unceasingly presented the February 1917 revolution as a movement for ‘democracy’, hijacked by the Bolshevik ‘coup d’etat’. February 1917 was an authentic ‘democratic festival’, October 1917 a vulgar ‘coup d’etat’, a Bolshevik manipulation of the backward masses of Tsarist Russia. This shameless brainwashing is the product of the fear and rage felt by the world bourgeoisie faced by the collective work and solidarity, the conscious action of the exploited class, daring to raise its head and put in question the existing order. The shock waves from this proletarian earthquake still haunt the memory of the bourgeoisie, which has done everything possible, then as now, to separate the working class from its historic experience. Today, falsifying the nature of the Russian revolution and degrading the essence of the workers’ councils is part of capitalism’s odious campaign on the ‘death of communism’, identifying the proletarian revolution with its executioner, Stalinism. This is the misleading idea that revolution can only lead to the Gulag. Faced with this torrent of calumnies and mystifying propaganda, the defence of the Russian revolution is a duty for revolutionaries in order to help the working class rid itself of all the ideological muck spilled by the bourgeoisie, and re-appropriate the whole richness of this vital experience.

February 1917: first episode in the world proletarian revolution

The workers’ rising in St Petersburg (Petrograd) in Russia did not come like a bolt from the blue. It was in continuity with the economic strikes launched by the Russian workers since 1915 in reaction against the savagery of the world butchery, against hunger, misery, excessive exploitation and the permanent terror of war. These strikes and revolts were in no way a specificity of the Russian proletariat, but an integral part of the struggles and demonstrations of the international proletariat. A similar wave of workers’ agitation developed in Germany, Austria and Britain. At the front, especially in the Russian and German armies, there were mutinies, mass desertions, fraternisation between soldiers on the two sides. In fact, after allowing themselves to be carried away by the government’s patriotic venom and ‘democratic’ illusions, after being led astray by the treason of the majority of the social democratic parties and unions, the international proletariat raised its head and started to come out of the fog of chauvinist intoxication. The internationalists were at the head of the movement - the Bolsheviks, the Spartacists, all the lefts of the 2nd International who had intransigently denounced the war since its outbreak in August 1914 as an imperialist pillage, as a manifestation of the collapse of world capitalism, and as a signal for the proletariat to complete its historic mission: the international socialist revolution. This historic challenge would be raised internationally by the working class from 1917 to 1923. The vanguard of this vast proletarian movement, which stopped the war and opened the possibility of the world revolution, was the Russian proletariat in February 1917. The outbreak of the Russian revolution was not, then, a national affair or an isolated phenomenon - that is to say, a late bourgeois revolution, limited to the overthrow of feudal absolutism. It was the highest moment of the world proletarian response to the war, and more profoundly to the entry of the capitalist system into its decadence.

The formation of the workers’ councils: specific organs of the revolution

From 22nd to 27th February, the workers of St Petersburg launched an insurrection in response to the historic problem represented by the world war. Started by the textile workers - overcoming the hesitations of revolutionary organisations - the strike involved almost all the factories in the capital in 3 days. On the 25th there were 240,000 workers who had stopped work and, far from remaining passive on their shop floors, meetings and street demonstrations proliferated, where their slogans, in the first hours, demanded “bread”, soon reinforced by the calls “down with the war”, “down with autocracy”.

On the evening of the 27th February, the insurrection, lead by the armed proletariat, reigned supreme in the capital, while strikes and workers’ demonstrations were starting in Moscow, spreading in the following days to other towns in the province, Samara, Saratov, Kharkov... Isolated, incapable of using the army, profoundly undermined by the war, the Tsarist regime was forced to abdicate.

Once having broken the first chains, the workers did not want to retreat and, in order not to advance blindly, they revived the experience of 1905 by creating soviets which had appeared spontaneously during this first great mass strike. These workers’ councils were the direct emanation of thousands of workers’ assemblies, who centralised their action through elected and instantly revocable delegates.

Trotsky had, after 1905, already shown what a workers’ council was: “What was the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies? The Soviet came into being as a response to an objective need - a need born of the course of events. It was an organisation which was authoritative and yet had no traditions; which could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of thousands of people ... which was capable of initiative and spontaneous self-control.” (Trotsky, 1905). This “finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat”, as Lenin said, rendered the permanent organisation in unions null and void. In the period in which the revolution is on the historical agenda, struggles explode spontaneously and tend to generalise to all sectors of production. So the spontaneous way the workers’ councils arise results directly from the explosive, rather than planned or programmed, character of the revolutionary struggle.

The workers’ councils in the Russian revolution were not the simple passive product of exceptional objective conditions, but also the product of a collective coming to consciousness. The movement of the councils itself carried the means for the self-education of the masses. The workers’ councils mingled the economic and political aspects of the struggle against the established order. As Trotsky wrote: “in that lies its strength. Every week brings something new to the masses. Every two months creates an epoch. At the end of February, the insurrection. At the end of April, a demonstration of the armed workers and soldiers in Petrograd. At the beginning of July, a new assault, far broader in scope and under more resolute slogans. At the end of August, Kornilov’s attempt at an overthrow beaten off by the masses. At the end of October, conquest of power by the Bolsheviks. Under these events, so striking in their rhythm, molecular processes were taking place, welding the heterogeneous elements of the working class into one political whole.” (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, ‘Shifts in the Masses’) “Meetings were held in the trenches, on village squares, in the factories. For months, in Petrograd and in the whole of Russia, every street corner became a public tribune.” (ibid).

The role of the Bolshevik Party in the workers’ councils

Although the Russian proletariat gave itself the means for its combat by forming the workers’ councils, as early as February it encountered an extremely dangerous situation. The forces of the international bourgeoisie immediately attempted to turn the situation to its advantage. Unable to crush the movement in blood, they tried to orient it towards bourgeois ‘democratic’ objectives. On the one hand they formed an official Provisional Government with the aim of continuing the war. On the other hand, the soviets were invaded by Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries straight away.

These latter, of whom the majority had passed into the bourgeois camp during the war, enjoyed an enormous confidence among the workers at the start of the February revolution. They were naturally put on the Executive of the Soviet. From this strategic position they used all means to try and sabotage and destroy the soviets.

From a situation of “dual power” in February, a situation of “dual powerlessness” had emerged in May and June 1917, with the Executive of the Soviets serving as a mask for the bourgeoisie to realise its objectives: the re-establishment of order at home and at the front in order to continue the imperialist butchery. Menshevik and Social Revolutionary demagogues made ever more promises of peace, “the solution to the agrarian problem”, the 8 hour day etc., without ever putting them into practice.

Even if the workers, at least those in Petrograd, were convinced that only the power of the soviets would be able to respond to their aspirations, and although they saw that their demands were not being taken into consideration, elsewhere and, among the soldiers, there was still a strong belief in the “conciliators”, in the partisans of a so-called bourgeois revolution.

It fell to Lenin in his April Theses, two months after the opening of the movement, to unveil an audacious platform to rearm the Bolshevik Party, which had also drifted towards conciliation with the Provisional Government. His theses clearly explained where the proletariat was going, and formulated the perspectives of the party:

“In our attitude towards the war, ...not the slightest concession to ‘revolutionary defencism’ is permissible...

“No support for the Provisional Government: the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations. Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding ‘demand’ that this government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government...

“Not a parliamentary republic - to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step - but a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country from top to bottom.”

Armed with this solid compass, the Bolshevik Party was able to make proposals for action corresponding to the needs and possibilities at each moment of the revolutionary process, keeping in mind the perspective of taking power, and to do this by the work of “persistent and patient explanation” (Lenin, op cit). And through this struggle for the masses to take control of their organisations against bourgeois sabotage, after several political crises in April, June and especially in July, it became possible to renew the Soviets, within which the Bolsheviks became the majority.

The decisive activity of the Bolsheviks had the central axis of developing consciousness in the class, based on confidence in the masses’ capacity for criticism and analysis, confidence in their capacity for unity and self-organisation. The Bolsheviks never pretended to make the masses submit to a preconceived ‘plan of action’, raising the masses as one raises an army. “The chief strength of Lenin lay in his understanding the inner logic of the movement, and guiding his policy by it. He did not impose his plan on the masses; he helped the masses to recognise and realise their own plan.” (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, “Rearming the Party”).

From September the Bolsheviks clearly posed the question of the insurrection in the assemblies of the workers and soldiers. “The insurrection was decided, so to speak, for a fixed date, the 25th of October. It was not fixed by a secret meeting, but openly and publicly, and the triumphant revolution took place precisely on the 25th of October” (ibid). It raised an unequalled enthusiasm among the workers of the entire world, becoming the “beacon” which lit the future for all the exploited.

Today, the destruction of the political and economic power of the ruling class is still an imperious necessity. The dictatorship of the proletariat, organised in sovereign councils, remains the only way to open the way to a communist society. This is what proletarians need to re-appropriate in the light of the experience of 1917. 

SB (Originally published in WR203, March 1997, and published again in WR 301, February 2007)

Ken Loach’s latest film, I, Daniel Blake, has already generated a lot of ink. First because it is the work of a very expressive film-maker who is well-versed in criticising the capitalist world. Second, because the film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, to widespread surprise. Since then there have been numerous articles in the press, praising or attacking the film, seeing it either as a real social thermometer or as an alarmist tear-jerker.

We don’t intend to portray Ken Loach as a new Eisenstein[1], or his film as a new equivalent to the Communist Manifesto, or to see it as a sentimentalist apology for the British Labour Party, as one or two reviewers have claimed. Even though Loach denounces the “conscious cruelty” of David Cameron and has all kinds of illusions in the new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, none of this really effects the quality of the film: it sometimes happens that a work of art escapes its author and takes on a life of its own.

In this film, Loach inveighs against the destruction of whole sectors of the economy and sides with the unemployed who are told to go out looking for non-existent jobs. This reality of de-industrialisation and this approach by the state are certainly realities. Ken Loach has the merit of showing this while going beyond observing how miserable everything is, pushing his audience towards a real indignation against the current state of affairs. He has the rather rare quality of providing a lucid and dynamic image of the consequences of the capitalist crisis in Britain – consequences which can easily be transposed elsewhere – and of exposing the totalitarian face of the state through its practice of social exclusion, repression, and dehumanisation.

All the passages in the film showing the “treatment”, via the telephone,  of the unemployed by “healthcare professionals” who are made to function as the guard-dogs of the system, would be laughable if they were not so realistic. This facet of the democratic state – in fact its dictatorship – is no fiction: the capitalist system, its democratic institutions, including those which are supposed to support or protect vulnerable, elderly, sick or unemployed people, function like a juggernaut and like tools of exclusion. Trying to get the minimum needed to live on becomes a real battle where you pay heavily for the least slip in writing, the slightest sign of the “wrong” attitude, and often end up starving. Daniel’s partner Katie is more or less cornered when she falls hungrily on a tin of beans after going with him to a food bank.

But what’s really at stake in this “social” movie, as with all the others, is whether it can envisage a perspective of resistance, of struggle against the crisis and the capitalist Moloch. Is such a struggle possible? Who could lead it? It’s on this level that you have to judge the real qualities of this kind of film and few are up to it. Most remain at the stage of merely recognising powerlessness or retreating into ethereal ideals.

On the first question, Ken Loach’s film expresses all the difficulties of the working class to fight back and confront the state. Today, most attempts to resist, to keep your head above water, are limited to the level of the individual or to narrow networks of mutual aid. The title of the film, I, Daniel Blake, is a clue in itself: individual self-assertion as the only possibility.

Here we are very far indeed from a collective, offensive class solidarity, which is a real weapon in the struggle and in developing a long-term perspective of going beyond capitalist society. This is not in the frame of the film and none of its characters gives any sign of raising it. The only situation where we catch a glimpse of something more collective is when Daniel reacts by daubing graffiti on the walls of the job centre. Enthusiastic reactions and applause from passers-by: they understand his action and perhaps live in the same situation, but at no point do they express solidarity by coming to talk to him or opposing the cops who come to arrest him. They are no more than impotent spectators. Only one individual reacts more openly: a homeless person, who you imagine to be marginalised, probably alcoholic – a whole symbol of powerlessness.

But the film does have some small, limited moments, where we see human reactions, people listening to each other, helping each other, taking pleasure in sharing. Between Daniel and Katie, her children, with a former work-mate, a neighbour, an employee at the job centre who really wants to help but whose initiatives come to nothing – all this is a source of humanity, even if none of them can see how to go any further.

Clearly, behind the immediate incapacity to change anything, we feel that there are sparks of life, possibilities that contain the basis of really human social relations. This is not at all like the film by Stéphane Brizé, La loi du marché, where behind the same observation of social problems and the reality of unemployment the most awful nihilism is advertised, without a trace of hope, without any perspective, a totally static vision of society, which can give rise to nothing but “no future”, to death[2].

Another aspect emerges very strongly from this film: the dignity of the characters, their sense of self-worth. This is definitely one of the qualities of the film. The key to any proletarian’s self-worth is to hold on to moral values, to defend their dignity whatever the circumstances. The defence of this proletarian morality is what reveals the possibility of a future in which humanity can go beyond barbarism, beyond each-against-all. Daniel Blake expresses this when he discovers that Katie has had to resort to prostitution to avoid dying of hunger. This devastates him more than anything, even more than his own drama. Dignity again when Daniel insists that “When you lose your self-respect you're done for”.

But this proletarian dignity is also contradicted by the words attributed to him and read out at his funeral:

“My name is Daniel Blake, I am a man, not a dog…I, Daniel Blake, am a citizen, nothing more, nothing less”. Daniel sees himself as a citizen rather than a proletarian. But to be a citizen means belonging to a nation, not a social class. The difference is fundamental, above all for the proletarians. It’s always in the name of citizenship or the defence of democracy, or the Republic, that the ruling ideology tries to mobilise us for the interests of our exploiters. This can only be the logic of the bourgeoisie. The defence of citizenship is not the logic of the proletariat. It leads to competition and division and the perpetuation of the capitalist world.

As Daniel Blake expresses it, his situation is shared by millions of exploited proletarians, thrown into precariousness, excluded by the capitalist system. Whether it’s in Britain, France, China or anywhere else, the same capitalist laws of wage labour exert their violence on us. Even when it wears a democratic mask, capital divides us, grinds us down, kills us.

Real class solidarity, which is a necessity for the future of humanity, must above all be expressed by struggle: a conscious, collective struggle which goes beyond national frontiers. The phrase from the Communist Manifesto, “the workers have no country” is no dream. It’s the key to transforming the world.

Stopio, 15.12.16

Today everyone wants to talk about the working class. At the last UK general election Cameron claimed to speak in the name of “hard working people” and Theresa May has gone one better in wanting to represent the working class, while UKIP claims to be able to speak for – and take the votes of – the workers who have become disillusioned with the Labour Party which imposed austerity on them for the 13 years of the Blair and Brown governments.

But when workers struggle for their own interests it is a different story: Mrs May’s spokesperson condemned the strikes called in December as “completely unacceptable” and showing a “shared contempt” for ordinary people.

Although strike days are at a historic low at present, the disputes going on this winter involve many of the concerns all workers face, especially when they are an average of £20 a week worse off than before the financial crash. To take some examples: BA cabin crew taken on since 2010, in the “mixed fleet branch” with worse pay and conditions, have rejected a derisory 2% pay offer and are concerned about cuts in training courses; workers at Crown post offices are concerned about job security, due to closure of offices, as well as pension changes; tube workers also concerned about jobs with closure of ticket offices, as well as bullying management; rail workers are concerned about safety on trains, as well as jobs for guards. These disputes illustrate the fact that what members of the working class sell to the capitalist, their labour power, is not simply a commodity like any other sold at around the minimum cost of production. If supply outstrips demand it results in the suffering of unemployment. And the cost of labour power, the wage or salary, has a cultural and moral component according to what is considered an acceptable standard of living, and according to what the workers can win by struggling. While there is a working class there will be class struggle.

Trade unions are not the voice of the working class

Does this mean that the trade unions, which after all are negotiating these disputes, speak for the working class? Not at all. If we take the example of the strikes on Southern Rail over driver operated trains, an issue of safety that affects drivers, guards and passengers, we can see that the unions are not working according to the principles of solidarity that underpin all workers’ struggles. Not only have ASLEF and the RMT kept the drivers and guards separate, when they both face the same issue, but ASLEF, the TUC and Southern Rail cooked up a deal for drivers that would isolate and undermine the guards’ struggle, and actively oppose any tendencies for solidarity. They are acting according to the principles of insurance – pay your dues to ASLEF and we will provide certain benefits – in opposition to the working class principle of solidarity. The vote to reject the deal shows that this principle remains alive in the working class.

At this time it is certainly very difficult to grasp the nature of the working class and its struggle, and the revolutionary potential it carries within it. Not only are the unions able to reduce almost every struggle to a question of their negotiation, over the heads of the workers; not only is almost every politician claiming to defend capitalism and nationalism in the name of the working class; but this comes more than a quarter of a century after 1989 when the fall of the Soviet Union was used for a barrage of propaganda purporting to show that there is no possibility of any better society than capitalism, as the Stalinist counter-revolution performed one last service for capital through its collapse. Nevertheless proletarian struggle still contains the revolutionary perspective it showed 100 years ago in the Russian revolution. The solidarity necessary for any struggle is a small indication of this, contradicting the capitalist principle of “every man for himself”.  

Alex 17.2.17

The first part of our reply to Link’s ICC forum posts was on the ICC’s 40 year balance sheet of its existence[1]. This second part concentrates on the problem of the Fraction and the article in the International Review ‘The ICC as a Fraction’[2]. This is what Comrade Link wanted to ask in his second post:

“This is an important text giving an orientation for future activities of the ICC.  It appears as an organisation statement that significant changes to intervention even from resolutions of recent congresses.  It changes the way the organisation is to behave in the coming period.  Yet it has been ignored by sympathisers  and has not been elaborated by the organisation (as far as I am aware) and the promised second part of this document has not appeared.

I must say I am confused by this document as it focuses on long historical justifications without explaining and justifying the change clearly in terms of the period or of a change in the ICCs approach to intervention from relatively recently.  The ICC appears to be now adopting a role as a Fraction but I am struggling to understand the reasons and the possible consequences.  What does this role mean and what is the political justification for this change ie what is the analysis of current situation leading to this outcome.

I have previously made the statement on this forum that the ICC has given up on its role as ‘pole of regroupment’ and drew no criticism or rebuttal.  The ICC has simply avoided explaining or clarifying its direction.  It would appear however to tie in with this new role of the Fraction.  I’m afraid I do need this explaining further but it appears to be a role of analysing previous events to determine lessons for the future.  OK not a problem, that is always a role for militants but it is presented as a primary role in the context of a downturn of struggle and the inability of a revolutionary organisation to have an impact on the class.

So, is it being said that the class has been defeated in the past couple of decades or is this change just a response to a downturn in struggle and if so why has it taken so long to realise this?  I’m afraid it remains very unclear what analysis is being made of the current period and how that justifies this course of action.  Is this going to be an extended period of balance of the working class and the bourgeoisie where neither can impose its will?  Is the class a defeated class and is the Bourgeoisie able to move towards war? Is the perspective of the historic course altered in some way or even rejected. 

One contradiction I see is that this period of decomposition is still being called the final crisis of capitalism in the texts.  However if we now enter a new period where this new role for the organisation is based on recognition of a defeat of the class, then surely for this to be the final phase, the ICC is really denying that neither a period of world war nor a period of revolution can follow. Can this current period of downturn of struggle not be followed by a revolutionary period and what’s more cannot that be following either by a period of working class power or a period of restoration of capitalism (or barbarism)?

There clearly are changes in the world that need analysing but I’m afraid that the ideas presented in these texts do not clarify them for me.  No one in the 1970s was expected such an elongated period of low class struggle, so does this result void the theory of the historic course to war or revolution or is it just a new wrinkle to analyse.   

There is clearly a downturn in class struggle that, with hindsight, negates the idea of the 80s as ‘Years of Truth’.   I personally would stress the current low level of struggle is a product of enormous impact of nationalist ideologies.  The referendum, the hullabaloo around it and the responses to current migration levels demonstrate clearly how the Bourgeoisie has taken the initiative today and sets the agenda for events.  In this content there is clearly an impact on the abilities of militants to intervene in class struggle but the text leaves me with the uncertain impression that the the ICC is saying the working class has now been defeated?”

As in the first of Link’s posts about the balance sheet of  the ICC’s 21st Congress[3] the comrade is surprised by the dearth of responses from sympathisers or anyone else in the revolutionary milieu to this significant article about the ICC and the fraction. Our response to this important observation is the same as we made to a similar remark by Link about the lack of reaction by the milieu in his first post:

“Your surprise is understandable, since the fate of the ICC, a significant organisation of the communist left for the past 40 years, is surely of concern for those who espouse the politics of the communist left, even if they disagree with many of our political positions and analyses. More: one would think surely that many of those who disagree with the ICC on whatever question would want to express themselves publicly on the subject as you have done.

While from this political point of view the silence about our self-critique is surprising and regrettable, from the vantage point of the past four decades, such indifference has not been that unusual. Ever since the re-emergence of the left communist milieu internationally since the end of the sixties, it has lacked a significant sense of common purpose which, if it had been pursued, despite the disagreements within it, would have strengthened this whole milieu and accelerated its internationalist impact on the working class much more than it actually has. In hindsight the three Conferences of Groups of the Communist Left in the late seventies which had the goal of confronting these often profound disagreements at the necessary theoretical and political level, and making common public statements on vital current questions facing the working class, were a high water mark. The collapse of these Conferences at the end of the decade has led to a long period of dispersal of the left communist milieu – even if polemics and other limited instances of mutual collaboration have sometimes occurred.  The emergence of the phenomenon of political parasitism in 1981 has tended to further exacerbate the atomisation of the left communist milieu and reduce the solidarity between its individuals and groups. The low morale of the left communist milieu in general may help to explain the background to the dearth of response to the 40 year self-critique of the ICC.”

The reasons for this indifference are also related to the recognition of the responsibilities of the fraction.

It’s safe to say that the article ‘ICC as a  fraction’ has left Link confused. He asks whether it means that the ICC is completely changing course. If so what will be its new tasks? Will it mean an end to intervention and regroupment? Does it mean that the working class is now defeated as far as the ICC are concerned? Has the historic course therefore changed fundamentally?

Let’s try and clarify some of these questions.

Party or Fraction?

The article ‘Report on the role of the ICC as a fraction’[4] was part of the 40 year review set in motion by the last international congress of the ICC, re-examining our vision of the function of revolutionary organisation in a necessarily historical way. It wasn’t to proclaim a complete change of course: ‘we are now a fraction’, but to set out the historical parameters - and precedents - of the role of revolutionaries today, not with the aim of reversing our original conception of the role of the ICC, but of restating it from a particular vantage point so that we can better measure our self-critique of the past 4 decades.

In the wake of each of the crises the ICC has overcome in its history, there has been an attempt by the organisation to return to fundamental principles by which to judge the reasons for the crisis. In 1982 for example, after the famous Chenier crisis of 80-81, a text on the function of revolutionary organisation was published which went back to fundamentals[5], further elaborating the original vision of the ICC in order to respond to the new problems that had arisen. Is this not an essential historical part of the Marxist method: to judge new situations according to fundamental principles, measuring the new circumstances with the main lessons of the past and thus developing those principles?

This is why the article recapitulates the historical justifications for the existence of the ICC. And the question ‘fraction or party’ is an important part of this recapitulation. It would seem perhaps that Link is not that interested in ‘long historical justifications’ and would prefer to remain in the present. But from the point of view of the Marxist method the establishment of historical reference points are necessary, short or long, in order to understand the present and future.

The way we treat the question of the fraction in this article does not represent a departure from our previous conceptions. One of the defining principles of the ICC is its explicit dependence on the work of Bilan from 1928–38 and of the Gauche Communiste de France from 1945-52, both in terms of the political programme developed from the lessons of the defeat of the October Revolution and the fraction conception of function in the counter revolutionary period as opposed to that of a party function. Bilan’s vision was opposed to that of Trotsky when he formed the 4th International in 1938 on the eve of the 2nd World War. The GCF strongly criticised the foundation of the Internationalist Communist Party in 1943.

Closely linked to this distinction between the role of fraction and party that the ICC reprised from Bilan and the GCF is the insistence of the ICC at the time of its formation in 1975 that it wasn’t, and couldn’t be, a party in the prevailing conditions, but was a current which had to help prepare the future party, and therefore its tasks were in a sense ‘fraction like’:

“The end of the period of counter-revolution has modified the conditions of existence of revolutionary groups. A new period has opened up, favourable to the development of the regroupment of revolutionaries. However, this new period is still an in-between period where the necessary conditions for the emergence of the party have not been transformed - through a real qualitative leap - into sufficient conditions”[6].

The text ‘ICC as a fraction’ is in continuity with previous ICC texts on the subject. Here are some of them: ‘The Italian Left 1922-37’, International Review 59; ‘The Italian Left 1937-52’ IR 61; ‘The Fraction-Party Marx to Lenin 1848-1917’ IR 64; ‘The Bolsheviks and the fraction’ IR 65; ‘Fraction or new party?’ IR 85; ‘The Italian Fraction and the French Communist Left’ IR 90[7].

The first four articles in this (non-exhaustive) list are in the form of a polemic with the International Communist Tendency (formerly known as the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party) whose main components are the PCInt - Internationalist Communist Party in Italy (Battaglia Comunista)  - and the Communist Workers Organisation of Britain. The Italian wing of this trend (The CWO joined it in 1984) parted ways with the Bordigist wing of the party in 1952, with both claiming to be the continuators of 1943.

This series of polemics in the International Review brings out - for the ICC at least - the importance of the role of the fractions of the past for the consistent and coherent formation of the revolutionary programme today, and the necessary function and the type of functioning that the revolutionary organisation must adopt in the present historical epoch, the ‘in-between’ period before a party is possible.

We haven’t room to elaborate here on all the political consequences of this distinction between fraction and party. We will only briefly mention two by way of illustrating that the historical justifications of the role of the revolutionary organisation are fundamental. To try and create and fulfil the role of a party in a period of counter-revolution, that is to try and be the recognised vanguard of a defeated working class, is fraught with the danger of opportunism. The Italian party softened its opposition to anti-fascism when it allowed Vercesi, and the minority of Bilan, which had gone off to fight in the anti-fascist militias in Spain, into its ranks and adopted an ambiguous position toward the anti-fascist partisans in occupied Italy during the Second World War[8].

Secondly in May 1980 at the Third Conference of groups of the Communist Left, the PCInt and the CWO announced that their further participation in the Conferences was dependent on the closing of the debate on the revolutionary party. The ICC could not accept this new criterion for participation. It was as though for the PCInt the differences between the surviving and dispersed strands of the Communist Left could be decided in advance – the Party after all was already supposedly in existence since 1943 - and there was no longer any need for a forum of debate with other communist left trends, (nor, by the way, was there supposedly any need for a common statement proposed by the ICC on an internationalist denunciation of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan that began at the end of the previous year). For the ICC however the failure of the conferences was a major setback on the road to the formation of the future party which will depend in large part on the greater clarification of outstanding differences through debate and polemic between the disparate elements of the communist left.[9]

Link doesn’t express himself on these questions that have a direct bearing on the article ICC as a fraction; yet, as we have tried to show, they are extremely relevant for the role of revolutionaries today. It would be interesting to know his opinion.

The defeat of the working class?

Link seems to think that talk about the fraction necessarily implies that the working class is now defeated. It’s true that Bilan emerged from the degeneration of the Communist International and the failure of the revolutionary wave that began in 1917. Bilan intended to draw the lessons of this defeat and the resulting counter-revolution, and to develop a new ‘system of principles’ for the party of the future. It had a direct and organic link with the left within the Italian Communist Party from which it was excluded. 

The reemergence of revolutionary organisations after 1968 did so however in very different conditions. The immense wave of international class struggle that began with the May-June 1968 general strike in France marked a decisive break with the counter revolution; emerging revolutionary groups had no organic link with the parties of the past; and the work of the formation of new class principles was in large part completed.

However there were circumstances of the post-68 era that gave ‘fraction-like’ tasks to the revolutionary organisation despite the undefeated nature of the proletariat. The upsurge in class struggle came from the re-emergence of the world economic crisis which would be necessarily long and drawn out. The working class struggles were mainly of an economic, defensive kind – the proletarian revolution was still a distant perspective. The revolutionary political milieu was minuscule and immature, and unrecognised by the working class, despite the continuing claims of the Bordigist currents to already be the Party. In other words the conditions for both the possibility and necessity for the formation of the party had not yet revealed themselves.  The revolutionary organisations no longer had an organic link with the parties of the past as Bilan did. However they still had to provide a bridge to the future party. And in that sense their work had to be fraction–like, a work of preparation for the future party and not the party itself. 

The conditions since 1989, a period of the decomposition of world capitalism, has created still more difficulties for the advance of the class struggle beyond a defensive posture, indeed the last few decades have witnessed a decline in the extent of its combativity and consciousness, reversing an upward trend that reached its limits in the 1980s (the Polish mass strike, the British miners’ strike, etc). The ascendancy of right wing populism in the major capitalist countries at the present conjuncture will probably reinforce this decline. However these circumstances do not allow us to conclude that the working class is defeated in the way it was in the 1930s, when its revolutionary attempts in Russia, Germany and elsewhere had been crushed physically and when the bourgeoisie had its hands free to terrorise the entire population and mobilise it for world war.

The onset of the period of decomposition in the late 80s, in our view, was the product, on the one hand, of the changed historic course after 1968, in which the bourgeoisie was unable to mobilise the main battalions of the working class for war; at the same time the working class, despite intense struggles in the period 68-89, had been unable to offer a revolutionary alternative to the crisis of the system. Social decomposition is the result of this impasse in society. In time, it could lead to the overwhelming of the working class and an irreversible slide into barbarism, but we do not think we have reached this point of no return. In that sense, the potential for major class confrontations we announced in the 1970s still remains, despite all the difficulties facing the proletariat; by the same token, the task of preparing the ground for the future party has not been abandoned.

It is not entirely clear what Link’s view of the historic course is, whether he agrees or not with the concept itself or with the ICC’s assessment of it at the present time. It’s worth noting that for the ICC the analysis of the balance of class forces on a historical scale is indispensable to be able to judge from a materialist rather than a voluntarist standpoint whether the formation of the party is possible or not.

The more difficult context of today compared with the 70s and 80s particularly obliges us to recall the long term, historical vision of the role of revolutionaries, and to fight the tendency to see the latter only in the short or immediate term, and neglect important aspects of its ‘fraction-like’ role. Indeed the article on the balance sheet of the ICC’s 21st Congress underlines the danger of immediatism as a major risk factor in the forgetting of principles (opportunism) which the revolutionary organisation must preserve and transmit to the future party.

Revolutionary activity today

Examining the role of the fraction in assessing the role of revolutionaries does not mean, as Link fears, abandoning the tasks of intervention - the press, public meetings, leaflets, manifestos etc - nor the regroupment of revolutionaries and the strengthening of organisation, nor turning theoretical research into an academic, contemplative pursuit. The fractions of the past were by no means shy and retiring but intervened to the limit of their capacities even in the darkest days of the counter-revolution, i.e., in periods of dangerous illegality.

Marxism is in essence a militant theory devoted to changing the world and not merely interpreting it as the philosophers have done - but without the activist, immediatist and anti-theoretical spin that is often given to this famous slogan from the Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach.

Without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary organisation.

Revolutionary intervention thus has a historical framework, each element of revolutionary activity measured within a long term time frame.

The ICC has certainly, like other revolutionary groups, had to reduce the regularity of its printed press and other forms of intervention as a result of a number of factors – the reduction in number of outlets for selling the printed press, the escalating cost of printing and postage, dwindling resources, etc. At the same time we have recognised the growing importance of the internet and of our website as our principal, and most widely read publication. So all this is part of a necessary realism, related to current conditions, and doesn’t amount to abandoning the task of intervention. And despite the general unpopularity of marxism today, there remain individuals who want to join the revolutionary organisation: the regroupment and formation of such militants remains an axis of ‘fraction-like’ activity as does the greater discussion and confrontation of differences within the revolutionary milieu.

We look forward to hearing Link’s response both to this reply and the previous one.

WR 16.2.17

In the face of the decline of the US, and also of growing class, racial, religious and ethnic divisions, Trump wants to unite the capitalist nation behind its ruling class in the name of a new Americanism. The United States, according to Trump, has become the main victim of the rest of the world. He claims that, while the US has been exhausting itself and its resources maintaining world order, all the rest have been profiting from this order at the expense of “God’s own country”. The Trumpistas are thinking here not only of the Europeans or the East Asians who have been flooding the American market with their products. One of the main “exploiters” of the United States, according to Trump, is Mexico, which he accuses of exporting its surplus population into the American social welfare system, while at the same time developing its own industry to such an extent that its automobile production is overtaking that of its northern neighbour.

This amounts to a new and virulent form of nationalism, reminiscent of “underdog” German nationalism after World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. The orientation of this form of nationalism is no longer to justify the imposing of a world order by America. Its orientation is to itself put in question the existing world order ...

Date: Saturday 15 April 2017, 2pm-6pm
Place: Lucas Arms, 245A Grays Inn Rd, Kings Cross, London WC1X 8QY

The ICC will begin the meeting with a presentation based on two recent articles:

• a more general one on the question of populism [8]
• the article analysing [25] the Trump election 

After that – plenty of time to discuss. All welcome!

After the push from the extreme right in Austria and Holland, the Brexit vote in the Uk and the victory of Donald Trump in the USA, France could be the next big power to see a populist movement at the gates of power, or at least to seriously shake up the electoral machine. While the more lucid factions of the bourgeoisie, both right and left, are not at all just folding their arms faced with this objective threat to the state and the ruling class, the scenario of a victory by marine Le pen at the next presidential election is taken sufficiently seriously to mobilise the European governments and send shivers through the financial markets. Such an event, at the heart of the European motor, would pose a major danger to the EU, much greater than Brexit. It would be a disaster for Germany and all the pro-European governments, potentially menacing the imperialist balance of power at the historic centre of capitalism.

The electoral game is off-balance

As we have previously underlined in previous articles, the roots of populism in Europe and the USA are in the first instance a result of the historical weakening of the traditional government parties, which have been discredited by decades of attacks against living and working conditions, by unbearable levels of chronic mass unemployment, by the cynicism, hypocrisy and corruption of numerous political and economic spheres, and by their incapacity to offer the masses the illusion of a better future. Faced with a working class which for the moment is unable to put forward a revolutionary perspective and pose a tangible threat to capitalist society, we are seeing a mounting tide of indiscipline, of every man for himself, both at the international level and in the relations between the different bourgeois cliques. The examples of this latter phenomenon in France are legion, such as the battle between Villepin and Sarkozy, who, in 2004 around the “Clearstream” affair , threatened to hang his opponent on a butcher’s hook, or, in 2012, the merciless rivalry between Copé and Fillon to get to the top of the party of the right, are good illustrations of the dangers such a process poses to the political life of the ruling class.

The other essential factor for understanding the surge of populism is the current political weaknesses of the working class, in particular its huge difficulty in identifying itself as the only social class capable of overturning the capitalist order. Faced with the incessant attacks of the bourgeoisie, there are real feelings of revolt within the proletariat and strata of the petty bourgeoisie. But given the lack of a real proletarian political perspective, this discontent can’t express itself on the terrain of the class struggle. For those who are deeply fed up with what’s going on, the only apparent answer is either to withdraw from any political involvement, or to support parties which are fraudulently presented as being against the “system”, who are marginalised and attacked by the mainstream media, and who are prepared to purge society of “elites” and “foreigners”. In sum, a whole mish-mash of demagogy based on social frustration, despair, and the hunt for scapegoats.

All these elements lie behind the growing difficulty of the state apparatus to put forward strategies based on parties best suited to the needs of capital. This is how a person as irresponsible and incompetent as Donald Trump has been able to get into the White House against the will of virtually the whole American political establishment, the more rational parts of the media and show business.

Not one populist force really stands against the system, every one of them are ready, in their own way, to defend the interests of capital. But the upsurge of these movements still represents a serious problem for the bourgeoisie. The defence of the national capital in the period of decadence opened up in 1914 has up till now demanded a strict subservience of the various political factions around the state power, around common capitalist interests which overrule the particular interests of this or that clique or party. Since 1945, the artifice of democratic pluralism has been assured by the alternating game of the more responsible parties of left and right. But the current populist movements have a totally irrational and obscurantist approach. Lacking a clear vision of the objective interests of their class, bereft of any real competence, they threaten at any moment to create havoc at the summit of the state and to block its proper management, as every day in the catastrophic presidency of Trump seems to demonstrate.

The extreme right in France: stronger than ever

In France, the Front National (FN) is for many the embodiment of those who have been “left behind” by the most recent phase in the globalisation of capitalism. Its incoherent programme is not even taken that seriously by many of its own electors. But it is presented as a kind of final resort for “getting things moving”.  This image is greatly helped by the fact that it has never been associated with managing the state. Since the 1980s, when President Mitterand was able to present a rather insignificant assemblage if ancient Petainists, Poujadist shopkeepers , old partisans of colonial Algeria and desperate young skinheads as a major fascist danger, the FN has made considerable progress on the electoral level. The tactic of inflating the FN as a bug-bear escaped the control of the tacticians, so much so that, although it’s still pointed to as a basis for anti-fascist campaigns aimed at reviving the image of the bourgeois republic and its democratic values, the rest of the bourgeoisie is now much more interested in actively weakening the FN.

Part of the French right, headed by Nicolas Sarkozy, has thus taken up the language and themes of the extreme right. In 2007 it managed in 2007 to reduce the electoral base of Jean-Marie Le Pen to a more respectable proportion (10.44% of votes at the first round of the presidential election). But the rapid wearing out of the ‘rational’ right after its spell in power, and above all with the deepening decomposition of the social and political tissue (particularly the rallying of many who had previously voted for the Stalinist party, having being seduced by the rabid patriotism of the FN) allowed Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the old leader, to obtain a historic score at the following presidential lection (17.90%).  

But it was the regional elections of 2015 which really made the French bourgeoisie aware of the scale of the danger represented by the FN, which had become the “first party of France”, with more than 27% of the vote. It has again responded, albeit with much greater difficulties than before, in reviving the tactic of the “Republican front”: the Socialist party withdrew its candidates in favour of the right in two important regions in danger of falling into the hands of the FN. But the victry of the “Republican front” was just a hasty parade faced with the inexorable growth of populism. Despite all the legal and media weapons being used against it by the established factions of the bourgeoisie, Marine Le Pen knows that there is a real possibility of her party entering the Élysée.

The government parties organise in response to populism

The danger represented by the FN to the objective needs of the ruling class is increasing the difficulties of a bourgeoisie which already has a lot on its plate with the economic crisis. The militancy of the working class up to the mid 80s, the archaic nature of the Gaullist right and the role played by Stalinism in the state apparatus still weigh on the French bourgeoisie, which has inherited an enoros bureaucracy and and has always had a hard time modernising its economic structures, in carrying out the reforms needed for the national capital, unlike its immediate competitors, germany and Britain.

The accession of François Hoolande in 2012 clearly corresponded to this necessity of French capital: as in many other countries, the Socialist party represents the most intelligent faction of the bourgeoisie and thus the best placed to carry out the required attacks both at the economic and ideological level. But the beacon measure of Hollande’s presidency, the reform of the Labour Code with the adoption of the “El Khomri” law ended up weakening it and increasing the resistance of certain sectors of the bourgeoisie who are very attached to state intervention and Keynesianism. Although the SP, especially its social democratic wing, has long been in the forefront of the combat against the extreme right, the impossibility of keeping Hollande in power and the weakening of prime minister Valls have made its strategies obsolete.

The right wing has tended to base itself on relatively consensual personalities who have a statesman-like air. But Juppé’s candidature failed at the primaries and against all expectations, Fillon, the incarnation of the more stupid conservative right, came through on the basis of another kind of ‘electoral revolt’ while also playing the card of someone who is badly thought of by the mainstream media. But right from the start the new candidate handled his victory very badly, getting rid of the Sarkozyites from the top of the party, making no compromise on the virulence of his programme (for example, promising to get rid of hundreds of thousands of state employees…) which his own camp described as “radical”, and showing a worrying sympathy for Putin, in flagrant contradiction with the imperialist orientations of the French state. There was a big risk that Marine Le Pen could get the better of him in the second round of the presidential election. But the sabotaging of his candidature, thanks to the revelations about “Penelopegate” (the fake jobs given to his wife and family members) seems to have allowed the bourgeoisie to block his path to the Élysée.

The difficulties on the established right, Hollande’s withdrawal of his candidature and the victory of the ‘radical left wing candidate’ Benoit Hamon in the SP primary, have opened the door to the ‘independent’ candidate, Emmanuel Macron, who is presented as a new face, not mixed up with politicians’ intrigues. Having left the Socialist government in 2016, Macron can put himself forward as a credible alternative for the most lucid elements of the bourgeoisie, as a barrier against populism. What’s looking more and more like a coalition between left, centre and right, a bit like in Germany in 2013 with the third Merkel cabinet, the Hollande clan, a significant sector of the centre right and even of the right, like the MEDEF, and a number of personalities from economic and intellectual milieus like Martin Bouygues, Alain Minc and Jacques Attali seem to be counting on this former banker to block the route of the FN. And this despite the fact that a win for a man without any real anchoring in the state apparatus, and dependent on political spheres with very differing outlooks, could pose real problems for the management of state affairs and end up further accelerating the dynamic towards every man for himself.

Without predicting the result of the next election, especially since the situation is so unstable, it seems that the bourgeoisie is fully aware that the old electoral circus, arranged around the alternation between the traditional parties, is worn out and being rejected. So it is trying to come up with new faces, with people who claim to be doing things ‘differently’ and to be uninvolved in the old wheeling and dealing. But this approach, even if it works for a while, is also likely to be used up and thus to give ground to the most irrational tendencies in society.

EG, 28.2.17

This article, written by a close contact of the ICC in the US, is a contribution to our effort to follow the evolution of the situation in the US following the election of Trump. Events are moving very fast – since this article was written we have had the official announcement by the FBI that it will investigate links between Trump and the Russian state in the election campaign, and the highly significant defeat of Trump’s healthcare proposals in Congress. We will certainly continue to write about such events, but our aim is not “reporting” on a day-by-day basis but rather to develop a Marxist analysis of the underlying meaning of these developments.  

As this article is written, the Donald J. Trump Presidency is barely a month old, but it is already engrossed in massive controversy as its very legitimacy hangs in the balance. So far, Trump’s advisors have struck a chilling tone, threatening the media and using Orwellian language about “alternative facts.” Trump himself has not shifted from his confrontational campaign persona, continuing his disconcerting and apparently compulsive habit of Tweeting out random thoughts and taunts of his critics at any hour of the night. He has even picked a fight with the venerable National Park Service over photographs of his inauguration depicting a crowd size much smaller than the throngs that appeared for Obama’s historic moment in 2008. With the democratic legitimacy of his Presidency in question from the start—having won the Presidency through the Electoral College, while losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton (the second time in the past decade and a half that a Republican has won the Presidency, while losing the popular vote)—Trump continues to push the factless claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Clinton, costing him the popular vote—a claim that will almost certainly be used by Republican operatives to step up their campaign to purge the voter rolls of certain demographics.

At the end of his first week in office, Trump signed an Executive Order, apparently in an effort to keep one of his most controversial campaign promises to ban Muslims from entering the United States, that restricts entry of nationals of seven Muslim majority countries—including Iraq and Syria. The resulting chaos at US airports, which saw even legal Permanent Residents from these countries prohibited from returning to their homes, has led to the first major confrontation between the Trump administration and the judiciary as several federal judges issued orders temporarily blocking some of the more egregious elements of the executive’s unilateral action—apparently taken without any consultation with the customs and immigration agencies who would have to implement it.[1]

After a month, one could be forgiven for concluding that the United State’s federal government has been hijacked by a right-wing conspiracy website, because this may be in part exactly what has happened. Trump has elevated the shadowy figure of Steven Bannon, previously editor of the right-wing “Bretibart News” website, to a prominent advisory role in the White House—including a seat on the National Security Council. Bannon—an important figure of the so-called “alt-right,” who has a reputation as a “white nationalist” and anti-Semite—has become the Rasputin figure of the new administration, a mysterious, behind the scenes operative, who many suspect is now the real locus of power in the Trump White House. Couple this suspicion with the media firestorm—pushed hard by the defeated Democratic Party—that Trump was helped to power by the intervention of the Putin regime in the election and the widespread sense that the United States is now under some kind of strange occupation by hostile forces becomes understandable.

Clearly, the condition of the American state has fallen quite some distance from the heights of triumphant optimism that accompanied the election of the first African-American President in 2008. Today, a dark sense of foreboding disaster grips society and even important factions of the American state appear to have succumbed to confusion and despair. Quite frankly, very few analysts know what to expect in the period ahead. As Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren remarked during an appearance at one of the many semi-spontaneous protests that developed at airports across the country in the wake of Trump’s immigration orders, “I expected Trump to be bad, but not this bad and not this quick.”

While many elements in society appear prepared to fight back against the Trump administration—a fact that has already manifested itself in massive protests on his first weekend in office (the so-called “Women’s March”), it is also clear that the Trump administration—to the extent that is has a guiding philosophy—wants to govern through something resembling the “Shock Doctrine”: massive assaults on existing societal norms and institutions in an effort to provoke confusion, fear, anxiety and a constant sense of not knowing what is coming next. If one of the side effects of such a policy is to make the administration look somewhat incompetent, that appears to be of a secondary concern in the implementation of Bannon’s long-term policy to wreck the establishment institutions. In such conditions, it is no wonder that many good intentioned people have raised the question of “fascism” and openly wonder if the basic liberal freedoms that we have taken for granted are in real danger under the current administration.

Obviously, there is much material here to keep the analysts busy trying to make sense of what is happening to the American state in the age of Trump. This is no less true for revolutionaries, who themselves need to make a concerted effort to understand these developments and the challenges they pose for the workers’ movement. While we cannot pretend to give an exhaustive analysis of all of the myriad issues Trump’s election poses, we will attempt to commence this process here by examining several important concerns that have emerged in the wake of the election that relate to the workers’ movement. First, we will examine the issue of responsibility for Trump’s election victory—which many have attempted to blame on the “working class.” Second, we will address the question of how to fight back against the acceleration of chaos and attacks that Trump’s victory represents in the context of the already emerging protest movements opposing him.

Trump’s victory: who is to blame?

The first thing to say about Trump’s victory in the November election is that it was never supposed to happen. The main factions of the US bourgeoisie in both the Democratic and Republican parties were against him becoming President from the start. He wasn’t even supposed to win the Republican Party nomination.[2] From the perspective of the main factions of the US bourgeoisie, Donald Trump is a radical outsider—a rogue real estate mogul who in the past has demonstrated no firm commitment to any particular policy orientation or political trajectory. He has been both a Democrat and a Republican in the past and has stated his support for both social democratic and extreme right wing positions at various times. More recently however, Trump emerged as a proponent of a kind of right-wing populist politics. Vociferously anti-immigrant and an anti-Obama birther conspiracist, he nevertheless talked a “pro-worker” economic populism, slamming neo-liberal trade policies and vowing to protect social security and Medicare from the budget hawks in both parties itching to cut them. On foreign policy, Trump has criticized the Iraq War and attacked the George W. Bush administration’s policies, while at the same time threatening to bomb ISIS into oblivion and permit Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia to obtain nuclear weapons; he has even put NATO into question. Most curiously however, he has pushed a reconciliationist approach to Putin’s Russia, raising concerns among sectors of the bourgeoisie and the population at large that Trump may be modeling his Presidency in the image of his idol’s “authoritarianism,” or worse— that he is actually taking orders from Moscow.

While there are elements in Trump’s policy hodge-podge for members of various factions of the bourgeoisie to get behind (some Republicans might support his immigration stance for example, while the Democrats could get behind his infrastructure proposals), the overall package represents a grave threat for the main factions of the bourgeoisie, whose commitment to a neo-liberal policy core has been central across the partisan divide for several decades. However, the threat represented by Trump is not limited to the policy arena alone—his erratic personality, child-like temper and narcissistic drive have led many to question the President’s sanity itself. A core theme of the campaign against Trump during both the Republican primary and the general election was that you just can’t trust such a dangerous person with the nukes.

Nevertheless, despite the almost universal revulsion to Trump among the main factions of the US bourgeoisie, they were in the end unable to keep him out of office. Over the course of the 2016 campaign, nearly every institution of the American state tasked with getting the main factions of the bourgeoisie’s preferred candidate (Clinton) through the machinery of the electoral process failed. Firstly, a great deal of the blame for the Trump Presidency can be laid at the feet of the media. While most of the mainstream media were against Trump, they nevertheless—in the pursuit of their own profit-making sectoral interests—gave him massive coverage. Time and time again, while the hired professional pundits and talking head analysts ran him into the ground, the corporate bosses at CNN and even Democrat-leaning MSNBC covered his rallies, giving him massive free media exposure.

Even at the height of the Sanders insurgency in the Democratic primary, the media seemed focused on Trump and the salaciousness of his campaign, as they sought out viewers and Internet clicks. A major contradiction emerged during the campaign between the political preferences of the members of the mainstream media, and the interests of their corporate bosses to remain competitive in a highly fractured media environment driven by the Internet and social media, in which extreme partisanship, conspiracy theory and even “fake news” are growing in importance at the expense of professional journalism that seeks to build a common “news narrative.” With so many voters secluded in their respective partisan media bubbles, the mainstream media is severely handicapped in its function of building the kind of political narrative that assists the main factions of the bourgeoisie’s preferred candidate win office. The news media are themselves driven more and more towards becoming a form of entertainment—a situation Trump as a media-constructed entertainer himself was able to exploit.

The next institution that can be blamed for Trump’s victory is the Republican Party. While Trump was clearly not the choice of the Republican Party establishment, his candidacy and eventual victory were nevertheless built upon years of the GOP pandering to the kind of anti-immigrant, racist, misogynist and populist politics that Trump used to dramatic effect to take over the party. In a sense, Trump’s victory in the Republican primary was just the hoisting of that party on its own petard. For the eight years of the Obama Presidency, the Republicans exploited the Tea Party insurgency within its ranks to obstruct Obama’s agenda, win off-year elections and gerrymander voting districts in their favor. Over the course of the Obama Presidency, the rhetoric emanating from the Republican Party grew more and more radical, confrontational and delegitimizing of the Obama Presidency and even the institutions of the American state itself. From flirting with the birther conspiracists to effectively denying the President the right to appoint a Supreme Court justice, the Republican Party has tended towards an ideological degradation that pits short term partisan interests over the longer term interests of the national capital and the state itself. This has increasingly rendered it incapable of serving as the party of national governance, in the viewpoint of the main factions of the bourgeoisie.

Even if the central figures of the Republican Party were just pandering to the populist sentiments emerging from the back-benchers within its ranks for immediate political and electoral gain and did not subscribe to these ideas themselves, they nevertheless enabled them and allowed them to fester within their ranks. It should not come as a great surprise then that the populist virus at work within the Republican Party for the last eight years has now risen to consume the party establishment itself. Nevertheless, it is also clear that even if the Republican establishment opposed Trump from the beginning, now that he has won they will attempt to exploit his Presidency for their own policy purposes and impose their extreme austerity and repression agenda on the country. The post-election euphoria within the Republican leadership about a united Republican government —an idea that before Election Day seemed like an impossibility in the expectation of what most believed would be Trump’s imminent overwhelming defeat—should serve to illustrate the extreme opportunism and utter hypocrisy of a party that opposed Trump when it thought it was not in its political interests, but that welcomes him into its ranks when it sees the opportunity to exploit him for their partisan goals. Of course, President Trump—who so far appears to be willing to go along with the Republican Party’s agenda (at least domestically) as evidenced by his hard right cabinet picks—may yet have different ideas, a situation that should it emerge will add another round of uncertainty and chaos at the heart of the American state. [3]

However, even if the Republican Party was the political soup in which a President Trump evolved, this in no way absolves the Democratic Party from its own responsibility in his victory. This is true on several levels. First, the Democratic Party—like establishment governing parties in many other advanced countries—completely misread the political dynamic of the rise of populism, nominating perhaps the worst possible candidate to defeat a right-wing populist demagogue. Although Clinton was the clear choice of the main factions of the bourgeoisie, having proved herself a loyal servant of the neoliberal policy consensus —in essence a continuation of the Obama administration[4]—she was nevertheless nothing short of a political disaster in the making.

Faced with the Sanders insurgency, the Clinton campaign ran to the right denouncing core Democratic Party commitments to the New Deal. This alienated the left and millenials in the Party, some percentage of whom simply refused to vote for her in the general election. Faced with Trumpian economic populism, she denounced Trump’s blue-collar supporters as a “Basket of Deplorables,” severely harming her electoral prospects in critical Rust Belt states she would need to win to become President. But beyond these glaring political mistakes, Clinton was marred by deep ethical and legal problems—including having made numerous paid speeches to Wall Street banks and facing an active FBI investigation over her private email server while she was Secretary of State. These fed suspicions that she was an ethically compromised individual, who simply could not be trusted to keep her campaign promises—such as her newfound commitment to oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact.

Clinton’s legal problem’s exploded just a week an a half before Election Day, when FBI Director James Comey—having initially cleared her of criminal wrongdoing in her email scandal—announced that he was reopening the investigation after another cache of emails were found on her trusted aide Huma Abedin’s computer. This was confirmation of the sheer arrogance and hubris of the Democratic Party establishment that had assured everyone, including itself, that Clinton’s email problems were not a real issue. The mentality in the Democratic Party establishment appeared to be that it was Hillary’s turn to be President and any challengers—even one who consistently polled better against Republicans than she did, like Sanders—would be stopped, even if it meant using the institutional power of the Democratic Party itself to ensure her victory in the primary.

Even with all the uncertainty surrounding her legal and ethical problems, the Democratic Party stubbornly refused to consider nominating another candidate. Even if they didn’t want Sanders in power—there appears to have been no serious effort made to recruit someone like Vice President Joe Biden to enter the race[5]. In a sense, what the Democratic Party did was at a level of debasement even lower than the Republicans. While the Republicans have put short-term partisan gain in front of the interests of the national capital as a whole, in 2016 the Democrats put the ambitions of the Clinton dynasty itself front and center, even with President Donald Trump the penalty for making a bad bet that she couldn’t lose. In doing so, the Democrats paved the way for Trump, discredited their own party and have put the very ideological division of labor in the American two party system into serious jeopardy.

While it is clear that had Clinton won the election she would have mostly continued the policy preferences of the main factions of the bourgeoisie and for this reason she was their preferred candidate, it is also now clear that her candidacy came with very clear political risks that the main factions of the bourgeoisie either failed to see or willfully ignored. Sometimes in the political life of the bourgeoisie, it is necessary for it to fall behind candidates that, while they may be on the fringes of the policy mainstream, nevertheless give the system as a whole a level of political cover that allows it to continue. The fact that the US bourgeoisie, through the institutions of the Democratic Party, failed to recognize the political necessities of the moment marks a major milestone in the worsening effects of decomposition on the political apparatus of the bourgeois state.[6]

The fact that the Democratic Party’s delusions about the political moment were only ratified by its extensive (and expensive) “scientific” polling, consulting and voter micro- targeting apparatus only highlights the extent to which, like the Republican Party before it, it has succumbed to a kind of degeneration. For the Democrats, this took the form of a self-congratulatory group-think narrative about its own invincibility, based on favorable demographic trends within the electorate, that led it to convince itself there was no way Hillary could ever lose to Trump. With this fact seemingly assured, the Democrats thought they could take Sanders voters for granted, ignore the Rust Belt, busy themselves with courting moderate Republicans and ensure the donors were happy. This, of course, was all a dangerous illusion that exploded in dramatic fashion on Election Day when Hillary lost, putting Trump in power and leaving an increasingly ideologically driven Republican Party on the cusp of controlling nearly the entire federal government apparatus.

The role of the working class: is the proletariat to blame for Trump?

When the election results began to role in on the night of November 8th, the reality slowly set in as it became clear that Hillary was losing just about every swing state in the election: Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan and even Pennsylvania. These were all states that went for Obama at least once, but now each one went into Trump’s Electoral College column. Needing a clean sweep of all these swing states to win the Presidency, Trump got it. Needing to win just one or two—Hillary was completely shut out. By the end of the night, the media was in complete shock about what had just occurred. By the next morning, the shock had spread to the pundits, columnists, editorialists and politicians of all stripes, as well as to the population itself.

A man who had run a campaign based on promising to deport millions of immigrants, ban Muslims from entering the country, and send troops into the nation’s cities—a man who was caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women—would now be President? In the days that followed, shock and confusion turned into fear and anxiety. What would American society look like in the age of President Trump? Would there be gangs of empowered white supremacists roaming the streets looking to assault minorities? Would millions of families soon be torn apart by deportation? Many white liberals took to wearing safety pins on their clothes as a symbol to minorities that they were “safe whites” who wouldn’t assault them or denounce them to the immigration authorities. While much of this wellspring of solidarity was animated by a genuine concern for the safety of one’s neighbors, others wondered where such sentiment was under Obama when he set a record for deportations?

In any event, once the shock began to alleviate, the media and the pundits turned their attention to the very question we have been examining here: who was to blame for the electoral catastrophe? The Democratic Party, and their allies in the mainstream media, found many villains to blame: chief among them FBI Director Comey and Russian President Putin—who supposedly “intervened” in the election by hacking the Democratic National Committee’s email servers and turning the damning contents revealing the DNC actively conspiring to defeat Sanders over to Wikileaks who released them to the public. While it is indeed possible that this “intervention” cost Hillary electoral votes by alienating Sanders voters who might have otherwise voted for her against Trump, it’s not clear how this “offends democratic values” or undermines the US’s “democratic system” in that all it did was reveal to the public the rampant corruption within the Democratic Party that many already suspected was there.

Nevertheless, whatever effect the interventions of Comey and Putin may have had on the outcome of the election, neither of these figures put a gun to the head of voters and made them pull the lever for Trump. Therefore, the defeated Democrats—who represent the viewpoint of the main factions of the bourgeoisie as a whole—need another villain in their narrative of explaining how Hillary lost this election to the supposedly hapless Trump. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that they have decided that it is mostly the “working class” that is that villain.

First, it should be understood that in American bourgeois political discourse, the concept of the “working class” generally refers to only one particular cultural/sociological component of the proletariat: white blue collar workers without a college degree. Rarely do bourgeois commentators include minority workers in this concept (who are thought to have no other identity than their race or ethnicity), nor do they generally include more educated workers, who are generally considered to be part of a different “professional managerial class” (even if their incomes are lower than some of the members of the “working class”). Moreover, to the extent to which the concept of “working class” is increasingly defined in bourgeois discourse as a cultural identity rather than an economic relationship to the production process, even many white small business owners (petty bourgeoisie) are lumped in with actual blue-collar proletarians in the media construction of the “working class.” It would therefore be a grave mistake to conclude that the majority of Trump’s voters were proletarians or that most of the working class supported Trump. This is simply not empirically accurate.

However, it may indeed be true that among white blue-collar workers (otherwise known in bourgeois political discourse as “downscale whites”) there was a certain level of enthusiasm for Trump’s candidacy to the extent to which he promised to reverse trade deals that many in this demographic blame for declining wages, attacks on their living and working conditions and community disintegration. He framed this promise by calling for certain economic protectionist policies that sound as if they might help the national economy and improve the conditions of the working class. If many in the so-called “white working-class” believed these campaign promises, they have been misled, but it is not entirely surprising that they would be open to them after nearly three decades of a neo-liberal political consensus, which told the working class they had no other place to go outside the establishment parties.

Still, since the election many figures in the defeated Democratic Party have been loudly shouting their belief that the “working class” did not support Trump so-much for his economic policies but out of their racist and xenophobic sentiments, which Trump did so much to pander to during the campaign. For the Democrats, Trump won over members of this demographic not because of his opposition to trade deals or his promises to punish corporations who ship jobs overseas (Sanders made all of those promises too), but because of his desire to deport millions of immigrants and ban Muslims from entering the United States. For the Democratic Party—the party that since FDR has supposed to have been the party of “working America”—the working class has become something akin to an inherently racist mob, whose deep-seated hatred threatens the United States’ very democratic institutions in that it is so easily manipulated by a dangerous demagogue like Trump. The irony in this reversal of ideological roles between the Democrats and Republicans is remarkable in highlighting the severe crisis of political legitimacy that the US two-party system now finds itself in, but to what extend are these accusations of the Democrats actually true?

First, it is necessary to point out that in the November election, there were many counties in the so-called Rust Belt states that went for Obama in either 2008 or 2012 (or both), but that voted for Trump in 2016. It simply would not be possible for this to occur without some percentage of white blue-collar workers who previously voted for an African-American for President at least once, changing their votes to Trump this time. It is thus rather difficult to write such a switch off to pure racism and xenophobia.[7] A better explanation for this phenomenon is that among this demographic there has been a growing disillusionment with the Democratic Party after eight years of neo-liberal governance and policy under Obama—dressed up in the flowery campaign language of “Hope and Change.” With nowhere else to go, with no real alternative offered by the Democratic Party after Sanders was dispatched in the primary, it is not surprising that many white workers were willing to take a chance on the radical outsider Trump, who at least—many must have reasoned—would “shake things up.”[8]

Nevertheless, on the issue of immigration today, it is necessary for us to acknowledge that there is a divide within the working class in its reaction to the phenomenon. For some drawn in by Trump’s rhetoric, immigration is seen as a major factor in the decline of their living standards, while many of those who supported Sanders in the Democratic primary, in particular the younger generations of educated workers, do not go in for such conclusions and support openness to others—even as they look in disgust at the “white working class” as racists and xenophobes. It is clear that this divide in the working class is a major problem at this historical juncture, limiting the proletariat’s ability to deepen its own struggles as a unified class against the decline in its living and working conditions outside of the bourgeois electoral arena.

We will not pretend that we have easy answers for how this problem can be overcome in the immediate period ahead. It is likely these differences are the reflection of profound sociological realties resulting from the breakdown of the old Fordist order that dominated the post-World War Two era and the emergence of new social formations within the working class as a result of the new neo-liberal modes of managing the capitalist crisis. Nevertheless, this does not change the underlying fact that neither of these groups have any long term interest in the continuation of capitalism. If the working class is to fulfill its role as the revolutionary gravedigger of the capitalist system these division will have to be overcome in a common struggle against the universal effects of the crisis, regardless of their particular manifestations for different sociological cohorts within the proletariat.

In this regard, the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton proved themselves to be just as apt in the politics of racial, ethnic and linguistic division as Trump and the Republicans. Clinton’s description of Trump’s followers as a “basket of deplorables,” while perhaps not as openly racist as many of Trump’s statements, is nevertheless racialized code designed to marginalize and disparage the white working class—in particular by continuing to sow distrust between it and the millennial generation of educated workers. While we recognize the cultural differences between these two groups may be profound, there is nevertheless a community of interest between the two in figuring out how to effectively respond to capital’s attacks against their standard of living. Whether it is the collapse of the old Fordist certainties (for older white workers) or the sense of no real future of stable employment (for educated millenials), these problems cannot be overcome by succumbing to the politics of fear, suspicion and division. It is precisely these obstacles to consciousness that that political campaigns of both political parties seek to sow.

At the end of the day, whatever the problems affecting proletarian class-consciousness at this juncture of history, we think it is simply wrong headed to lay the blame for Trump at the feet of the working class of whatever racial identity. On the contrary, as we have endeavored to show above, the blame for Trump lies squarely on the institutions of the American state itself—institutions that it is not even controversial anymore to say have undergone a major degradation. We think this degradation is a result of the reciprocal effects of capitalist decomposition on the state itself. At the end of the day, the rot within the US state, which has now produced President Donald J. Trump, is an effect of the now decades long crisis of capitalist accumulation, a crisis that the ruling class has no solution for.

How to fight back?

Understandably, Trump’s Presidency has provoked a major backlash from civil society. After all, most of the electorate did not vote for him; he won the Presidency solely on the strength of the Electoral College, meaning his legitimacy has been suspect from the start. In the days after the election, there were massive and regular protests in many American cities, particularly in New York City where tens of thousands surrounded Trump Tower in Manhattan night after night to express their utter disgust with the election results. On Inauguration Day, there were sometimes violent protests in the nation’s capital, followed the next day by the massive Women’s March, which saw millions of people flow into the streets of cities across the country large and small. When Trump announced his Executive Order banning citizens of seven Muslim majority countries from entering the US, a series of spontaneous protests broke out at the nation’s airports—seemingly forcing the administration to back down on some of the more extreme aspects of the order, such as banning US Permanent Residents from returning from abroad. More protests are planned, including an Immigrants’ March and a Scientists’ March. There has even been talk of a General Strike and a Women’s Strike.

 From our perspective, the outpouring of solidarity that has often accompanied these protests is a very positive reaction to the deepening crisis of capitalist society that Trump’s election represents. We will not attempt to pour cold water over these actions, which at some level represent a healthy response from society to the cancer of capitalist decomposition eating it from the inside. However, we also need to be frank that such actions in and of themselves are unlikely to constitute an effective resistance to the root causes of the continuing social rot, which is what in the end is responsible for giving us a President Trump. In our view, President Trump—as horrible and grating as those two words still sound to the ear—is more an effect than a cause itself, even if it’s clear that his administration will certainly accelerate the very historical tendencies that have produced his Presidency in the first place.

We will not rehash a list of all the ways that Trump’s policies are really just a continuation of Obama’s (although many of them are); we won’t try to tell you that Hillary Clinton would be as much of a disaster as Trump is shaping up to be (although it is clear that had she won she would have continued to be haunted by major controversies surrounding her legal problems and ties to Wall Street while President). However, it is nevertheless true that Obama, Hillary and Trump all grow out of the same slop of capitalist decomposition and the neo-liberal policies that the bourgeoisie has adopted across the advanced capitalist world in order to manage the economic crisis over the last three decades. It may be true that Trump is uniquely garish, erratic and personally revolting; but it is also true that the kind of politics he espouses is not a sui generis phenomenon in the capitalist world system today: Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, Kevin O’Leary, Kellie Leitch, etc. are all faces of what must be described as a global phenomenon across the old industrial core countries today: right-wing populism.

This populism is not a uniquely American problem driven by a particularly racist working class, nor is it merely a function of Trump’s warped personality (even if one does not need to be a practicing psychiatrist to strongly suspect the many personality disorders he suffers from). On the contrary, it is a result of a global capitalist system that has no solution for its underlying economic crisis and the social decomposition that results from it. Still, Trump’s victory is nevertheless a very important moment in the evolution of this crisis in that up until November, the bourgeois state had been more or less successful in keeping any populist politicians from actually seizing the reigns of the state.[9] The fact that today one governs the most powerful bourgeois state—still the world’s last super power—is only a dramatic illustration of the threat the continued existence of global capitalism poses to humanity itself.

Under the conditions marked by social decomposition today, it is increasingly difficult for much of the population to believe the lies and false promises the neoliberal politicians spew. While some within the American population turned to Sanders in the Democratic primary, with his promise of a revitalized social democracy, to vent their anger and disgust, others turned to Trump and his ideology of “nation-state populism.” In any event, both phenomena were made possible by the same underlying force: the increasing discredit of both establishment political parties and the development of a real crisis of political legitimacy.

Nevertheless, whatever their discredit today, it is almost inevitable that the neo-liberal politicians will try to take full advantage of Trump’s Presidency to revitalize their image in the eyes of the population. The Democrats will organize and lead protests[10]; they will attempt to appear to obstruct and delegitimize Trump at every turn. The main factions of the bourgeoisie will exploit their electoral screw-up to try to enact a “left in opposition” policy to build up the Democratic Party as the vehicle for the population’s revulsion at Trump and his polices. This is why it is of utmost importance that whatever resistance movement develops in the period ahead avoids becoming subsumed under the auspices of the newly combative Democrats—the same Democrats whose elected officials will almost certainly “make deals” with Trump when they think the national capital’s interests are at stake.[11]

Of course, given their own political failings it is possible that the Democrats will botch this attempt to become a party of “left opposition.” Already, there are signs that the Democratic establishment might just try to wait for Trump to self-implode and not make too many concessions to the Sanders faction before they return to power. In such a case, it is likely that Sanders—or whoever claims the mantle as the social democratic insurgent—will be there to attempt to capture the population’s anger. If this happens, it will be even more important that those genuinely interested in fighting the systemic roots of the current mess maintain their independence from all the political parties and formations.

Moreover, it is of utmost importance that the emerging social movements do not succumb to the rabid Russophobia that has currently overtaken the Democratic Party. The attempts to brand Trump as a “traitor” on the pay roll of Putin sound odd coming from the Democrats, but this is nevertheless powerful evidence that when it thinks it is in its political interests, the Democrats will adopt the same language of McCarthyite innuendo and suspicion as the Republicans have in the past.[12] Disappointingly, it has not been uncommon to see this Russophobia on display at the many protests against Trump, with many signs telling the President to move to Moscow, labeling his daughter Ivanka a “Tsarina,” or even implying that there is a sultry homosexual relationship between Trump and Putin. The irony of such homophobic denigration emanating from Democrats is rich, but is also an illustration of how quickly the ideological shoe can move to the other foot in bourgeois politics.

However, this campaign of Russophobic McCarthyism (itself a form of the xenophobia the Democrats denounce in the “white working class”) is doubly dangerous in that it has already been turned from a way to delegitimize Trump to a weapon to wield against “the left.” Anyone who questions the narrative about Russian interference in the election or who rejects the McCarythite tactics being deployed against Trump can themselves be the object of McCarthyism through the tried and true tactic of “guilt by association.” Some commentators are already talking about a “red-brown” convergence going in the world, wherein certain “left-wing” forces are seen to be giving succor to the rising scourge of global fascism represented by Trump, Putin and company.[13] While for the moment this is directed mostly against factions of the bourgeois left (like the Green Party), it is highly likely it would also be used against real revolutionary forces should they become seen as a genuine threat to the system. The combination of an ominous McCarthyism with rampant allegations of treason being leveled at the President and his inner circle creates an extremely dangerous environment that, even if it is not primarily directed at us today, would not be difficult to turn into a campaign against genuine revolutionary forces in the future.

Nevertheless, it is also true that while those who seek to genuinely oppose Trump should avoid the kind of McCarthyite hysteria gripping the Democratic Party, it is also important that they have no illusions in the Putin regime being some kind of benevolent anti-imperialist force in the world, because it opposes US imperialism or because it gives voice to certain oppositional forces inside Western democracies through its propaganda media channel Russia Today (RT).[14] Quite on the contrary, the Putin regime is in fact a brutal capitalist state with its own imperialist ambitions in the world. The fact that the Russian state may judge that it is in its interests to promote forces (on both the left and the right) within Western “democratic” states that put the established political order in these countries into question should blind no one to the Kremlin’s ruthless imperialist nature.

In order to effectively resist President Trump, it is necessary to understand the deep historical forces that have given birth to him. While it is true that in some ways, Trump’s Presidency is an “accident” (in the sense that the bourgeoisie bungled the election and he is only in office on the strength of the antiquated Electoral College machinery), we should have no illusion that the bourgeoisie is in control of the situation or that Trump is some kind of aberration that will give way to a restoration of a healthy democratic politics. No, on the contrary Trump is a symptom of a wider disease, the historic crisis of capitalism that has brought on a generalized social rot, which now infects the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie itself. Even if Hillary would have won the election as she was supposed to, this would have not squelched the social forces of anger and disgust with the establishment status quo bubbling to the surface in capitalist society that are empowering populist politicians around the world.

We do not know what will happen in the immediate future with American politics. The rest of the bourgeoisie may resist Trump so fervently that he is either impeached over his real or imagined ties to Russia or some other legal breech he is bound to commit, or his Presidency may fizzle out in defeat in four years time. Certainly, the controversy over his former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s contacts with the Russian Ambassador and the near constant harangue coming from Democrats over his supposed ties to Putin and the Russian state do not bode well for the future of his Presidency. [15]

It is also possible that Trump will be able to coerce a few corporations to delay or cancel various outsourcing plans long enough and he will deport just enough migrants to please his base, establishing something approaching a stable “populist” locus of legitimacy within the bosom of the American state. We can’t say exactly how it will all play out. However, what its clear is that Trump’s Presidency represents a qualitative step into the abyss for humanity, driven by a capitalist system that can no longer offer any real perspective for our species. In order to resist this drive it is necessary to rediscover the path of struggle outside the political apparatus of the bourgeois state—whatever its particular partisan form. While the shear odiousness of Trump gives rise to an understandable desire to whatever is possible to just make this vulgar man go away, we need to comprehend that while the Democrats may sound more competent and professional (although their current descent into Russophobic nationalism, puts that contention into serious question), while they may offer up a more welcoming and progressive surrounding rhetoric than Trump and the Republicans, as a vital part of the state apparatus, they are fully complicit in the systemic decline of capitalist society that has made President Trump a reality. The only road forward for humanity is the path of the independent struggle of the proletariat to defend its living and working conditions against the effects of the ongoing capitalist crisis outside the control of all bourgeois political formations, left or right.

Henk

2/16/2017

On Wednesday March 22, a 52-year old man born in Kent, Khalid Masood, launched an attack on Westminster Bridge using a rented SUV and a kitchen knife. As a result 6 people died including a police officer and the assailant himself; dozens more were injured. The propaganda machine of the bourgeoisie went into overdrive, powered by the incessant and breathless news reporting of its media. With the attack's proximity to the British parliament and the details of the assailant, this propaganda drive has not been anti-Muslim as such but has rather taken the "Jo Cox"[i] line which is that of the "unity of all" behind the interests of British imperialism.

The phrases are predictable and could be written by almost anyone: the attack was "evil" and "evil will not win"; "British values will be maintained" as will "British resolve" which means that "Britain will not be beaten" ("broken" or any one of a dozen such descriptions). You would think that Britain had been attacked by a fleet of war-planes and that this wasn't a murderous assault by a lone individual who shouted before the attack that "This is for Syria".

There's been plenty of "why did this happen" throughout the media with a multiplicity of motives put forward for what lies behind such an attack. There have been various analyses of backgrounds and the like to this and very similar cases that are too complicated to go into here - let alone the interpretation of religious fundamentalism adhered to by groups or individuals and its relationship to violent jihad. The attacker had spent some time in Saudi Arabia and on his return to this country came to Luton where there was a known fundamentalist milieu. Despite the real shock of relatives and friends of attackers in these cases it is rarely a case of a "lone wolf"[ii] attack - somebody usually knows something about its direction even if only through the internet. But the words of the attacker are no mystery: "This is for Syria". First and formost it's an example of the decomposition of capitalism and the asymmetric warfare of the "War on Terror" led and fed by the major powers. It's testimony to the growing weakness of Isis, particularly its international reach, that increasingly it has to rely on individual criminal or unstable types armed with vehicles and kitchen accessories; and despite the best attempts of the British bourgeoisie to uncover a complex international plot or conspiracy around the killer, nothing has been found so far. Indeed, as is increasingly usual in these cases, all of those arrested in police "swoops" have now been released, including those which the police called "significant arrests".

Though the phenomenon is by no means finished, the populists haven't had a look-in here: the racist Nigel Farage (another 52-year-old from Kent) and his mates were spreading their anti-migrant poison on Fox for a few dollars more and were roundly mocked here for their "analysis" of the situation. Ex-leader of the English Defence League, Tommy Robinson, who was in the vicinity at the time of the attack and tried to get a public meeting together, was ridiculed and ignored by all (and had to be collected by his Mum when his car broke down).  The "inclusive", multi-cultural classical bourgeoisie swung into action here talking about how "we won't be divided" and Muslim victims of the killer were pushed forward while the "multi-faith" druids performed their religious rituals for strengthening the national interest. This whole campaign has the right and left wings of the state on one side and working class unity and solidarity on the other.  While in the Daily Mail Katie Hopkins shat out her anti-migrant opinion to some derision, its editorial was talking about "shared values" and the defence of "liberty", as did most of the right wing press.

The whole spectrum of capitalist interests is engaged in this campaign for democracy, including "British fighters for the YPG"[iii], ardent supporters of Kurdish nationalism and British imperialism.  Through this process, no less racist than the populists but more insidious, Muslims in Britain have to demonstrate their "Britishness" and show themselves worthy to be represented by the "Mother of Parliaments"- a tumbledown building full of self-seekers, crooks, windbags and individuals with much more blood of innocents on their hands than anyone else.

In the face of this "pure evil", British imperialism won't be deterred from defending its imperialist interests. In fact it is perfectly willing to use it as a mask for the continuation of these murderous interests. Over a few days around the same week as the London attack, hundreds of civilians in Mosul, Iraq, were killed and many more injured in US coalition air-strikes that have included British Tornado jets with British military personnel on the ground, and with any building with a roof on it a legitimate target for an air strike. It's a similar situation for Raqqa in Syria. In Yemen the slaughter and starvation of civilians continues with defenceless refugees shot to death while fleeing war on the seas. British interests, weaponry and military personnel are involved here also, mainly through the medium of “our ally”, the fundamentalist regime of Saudi. The hypocrisy and phoney "outrage" over this event can also be measured against the historical and current role of British imperialism in the endless war and its consequences around South Sudan.

The whole narrative around this attack in London is that the working class doesn't exist and as individuals we have to rally behind the defence of the state and its forces of repression, which is also strengthened in this process, a state that is one of the leading lights in devastating wars across the Middle East and Africa. Isis and its adherents are just a bunch of amateurs compared to these killers. The bourgeoisie's response in this case was able to take advantage of the fact that the more rabid forms of populist ideology are not very strong in London. It cynically used genuine expressions of solidarity and sympathy towards the innocent, random victims, and hijacked them in defence of the sanctity of Parliament and democracy. And for them, that's where the reflection over this event should begin and end.

Baboon, 9.4.17 (This article was contributed by a sympathiser of the ICC)

The bombing of an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena with a device packed with nuts and bolts was bound to kill or injure many young people. A statement by “Islamic state” said that “one of the soldiers of the caliphate was able to place an explosive device within a gathering of the crusaders”, as they claimed responsibility for the “endeavour to terrorise” infidels at a “shameless concert arena” as a response “to their transgressions against the lands of the Muslims”. These ‘crusaders’ were typically, teenagers of 14 or 16. One of the victims was a girl of 8. So far, the death toll is 22 (including ten under 20), with 116 injured.

Like the November 2015 mass shooting in Paris at the Bataclan theatre (where 89 were killed) it was deliberately aimed at young people, except even younger in Manchester. Today, it is increasingly clear that it is not just adults but also children who are caught up in the imperialist conflicts, not just in Syria, Libya, and Yemen but also in Manchester, Paris and Nice. Revolutionaries condemn unequivocally all acts of terror, whether by the biggest military forces in the world, or by a lone truck driver or suicide bomber.

Moreover, we can expect even more expressions of terrorism in Europe as military forces (such as ISIS), facing substantial military setbacks in Syria, unleash further attacks. This is part of the logic of imperialism today, as terror and terrorism are integral parts of all imperialisms’ weaponry.

While the Security Service of MI5 say they will examine their processes because the Manchester bomber had been ‘on their radar’, it was an opportunity for the state to up the security status and put armed troops on the streets alongside increased policing. Politicians, who had been in the middle of a general election campaign, united to declare their intentions to ‘protect’ the British people, to defend ‘democratic values’, and assert that they would never give in to terrorism. Tories have tried to make out that Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, was suspect on the questions of security and terrorism. Corbyn retaliated by blaming the Tories for cuts of 37,000 personnel in the police and security services. He said he would spend millions of pounds expanding the security services and hiring more police and border guards, thereby showing himself in continuity with Labour leaders over more than a hundred years of militarism and state repression.

The hypocrisy of the international bourgeoisie

Across the world figures from Trump to Putin to the Pope have added their voice to the anti-terrorist avalanche. All have condemned the killing of children as an expression of barbarism. The hypocrisy of these imperialist gangsters knows no limits. How many children were killed in the invasion of Iraq in 2003? A campaign based on the use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force killed an unknown number of people since the US and Britain had no interest in counting them. There the US and its Allies could terror bomb with devices much more sophisticated and deadly than that of a solitary suicide bomber.

Today, vast areas have been laid waste by imperialist warfare in places such as Syria where the protégées of imperialist powers, including the US, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia among others, show no evidence of shame in the killing and maiming of thousands, either in support of Assad’s Syria or the multiplicity of militia in the many oppositions.

We should not forget the hypocrisy of the British state here, after its military intervention in Libya, alongside France, leaving the country in a state of civil war and chaos – this is the very country the family of the Manchester suicide bomber came from. It appears his father worked in Gaddafi's security apparatus, and later in an al Qaeda affiliate – the latter both used and abused by British intelligence.

To give one further example of our rulers’ hypocrisy, we need only look at the recent US arms sales to Saudi Arabia, ($110 billions worth immediately, $350 billion over 10 years). This was signed off by Trump as the Saudi bombing of Houthi rebels in Yemen continued and where it is particularly targeting hospitals, and using cluster bombs against civilians.

How to understand what's happening

As elsewhere in the face of attacks or disasters, the humanity of Manchester residents shone through. Hotels opened up their premises for victims, taxi drivers gave free lifts, hospitals pulled out all the stops, people opened opening their homes, cups of tea and coffee, people off the street just came to see what they could do. However, in conversations, in TV interviews, many people were completely confused as to where society is going. Is this going to last forever? Can some sort of solution be found?  Saying ‘Manchester will not be defeated’ or ‘we’ll never be divided by terrorism’ are not answers to such questions.

We can see war and terrorism across the face of the globe. But the role of the big capitalist nations in this barbarism is often well hidden. The ‘peace’ after the Second World War was in reality a time of local and proxy wars as the Western and Russian imperialist blocs vied for position. Yet the rule of these blocs in the Cold War, with its doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, created a sort of, relative, stability in international relations. After the fall of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 the world was turned upside down. The relative stability which was held in place by the two-bloc system disintegrated and we began to see crises and war multiply and become more chaotic. This period is the period of decomposition of the capitalist system.

The present day ‘war on terror’ and the proliferation of terrorist groups have their roots in the very bloody conflict between US and Russian imperialism that took place in Afghanistan. After the Russian invasion of December 1979 the USA and its allies supplied and supported the Mujahideen as their proxy fighters. The Taliban and al Qaeda developed out of this. So present day terrorist groups are not some bizarre anachronism from the past, even if they do claim to represent religious fundamentalism, but an intrinsic part of present day capitalism and its chaotic imperialist conflicts.

There was a new step in these imperialist conflicts after 11 September 2001 with the invasion of first Afghanistan and then Iraq destabilised whole areas of the globe in particular in the Middle East and giving rise to forces like the self styled Islamic State. Terrorist groups have proliferated, born out of war and kept going by the sordid alliances, and manipulation of the big powers.

All these wars have set in motion waves of refugees who risk their lives fleeing to the relative safety of Europe, the USA and other richer countries. Their numbers have been added to by those fleeing repression following the failure of the ‘Arab Spring’ and particularly the war in Syria, and also by economic necessity. These people, victims of capitalism, are used by politicians as scapegoats for terrorist outrages, as well as for falls in living standards over the last 10 years. The latter is due to the world economic crisis of 2007/8 which saw the enormous instability of the world economy with stock exchange crashes and bank failures. It ruined millions of savers and shattered confidence in money (which under capitalism holds the social links of society together). This created a huge fear and mistrust between people as well as uncertainty in the future.

“Facing this barbarism in a whole swathe of countries, from Mali to Afghanistan, passing through Somalia and up to the southern tip of Turkey, millions of human beings, month after month, have been forced to flee just to keep alive. They have become ‘refugees’ who are either stuck in camps or turned away at borders. They arrive at the same time as the economic crisis worsens and as terrorism is on the rise, all of which has greatly exacerbated xenophobia;

And above all, as capitalism advances into its decomposition and social ties disintegrate, the working class for the moment is unable to offer humanity another perspective. Incapable of developing its consciousness and its fighting spirit, its sense of international solidarity and fraternity, it is absent as a class from the world situation.” (‘Terrorist attacks in France, Germany, America: Capitalism carries terror within itself, like the cloud carries the storm’, ICC online, 15 August 2016[1])

The danger of this putrefaction should not be underestimated: if it is allowed to follow its logic to the end, it will push the whole of humanity towards destruction. The only answer is the development of the struggles of the working class, and with it the solidarity that is an important part of those struggles. This starts with the questioning of society as it now exists as well as struggling to defend ourselves against capitalism, and its state, and not calling on the state to defend us against the worst products of its decaying system.

MX, 29 May 2017

We’re publishing here the presentation and some of the issues and contributions at the meeting which was called by the ICC and attended by some of its members and sympathisers (one of whom has produced this report), two members of the Communist Workers Organisation (ICT)[1]; a former member of the group Kronstadt Kids[2]; and several other individuals who evidently considered discussing proletarian politics a worthwhile Easter project. There were also written and Skype contributions by ICC comrades from the US and France[3].

Presentation:

1.       The world order is crumbling. Disorder is increasing: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, North Korea…

After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Eastern Bloc in 1989, when the ruling class announced the end of history and a ‘new world order’, the ICC insisted that disorder, chaos and an attitude of ‘every man for himself’ by the major imperialisms would be the real result, with the Western bloc unravelling as well as the Russian empire. The US acted to stop its own bloc falling apart by obliging members to back it in the first Gulf War of 1991. But soon after came events in Yugoslavia, with Germany and Britain already acting against the US. 2001 saw 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq... But the intervention of the US superpower only further fanned chaos...

The rise of China, the revival of Russia, regional powers like Turkey and Iran vying for influence... US ‘full spectrum dominance’ lies in disarray. Obama’s ‘foreign’ policies represented a US retreat on the world stage. Trump wants to make the US ‘great again’ – merely underlining the fact it’s in decline! However Trump embodies the weakening of any strategy, even in the short term. In the face of internal pressure from other factions of his class, he’s had to engage, contrary to election pledges, in volte face manoeuvres in domestic policy and to involve his administration abroad in “other people’s wars”; to prove “I’m not Putin’s puppet” (attack on Syria), “I’m tougher than Obama” (confront North Korea) … Such rapid switches in policy hardly testify to increasing stability or coherence.

2.       Imperialist chaos and the populist politics of Trump have common root: a lack of perspective for capitalism. The economic crisis is unresolved, deepening, despite apparent ‘growth’ which brings with it a vast destruction of nature and the dislocation of millions of people. Lacking the mobilisation of the masses, world war is not at present possible and not in any case a ‘solution’ for capital. At same time the working class, despite emerging from defeat in the (1917-1928) revolutionary wave in late ‘60s - with world-wide strikes, struggles and protests against war - was not thereafter able to politicise sufficiently and offer an alternative vision of life for the future. Capitalism rots on its feet and its continuation is a threat to humanity, a threat to the material and subjective basis of a communist alternative.

3.       Populism expresses this impasse. Brexit, Trump, both show the established parties can’t convince that they can improve things except for a tiny, privileged minority, especially after 2008. Neo-liberalism - the most recent stage in the evolution of state capitalism – reveals its limits. There’s a loss of political control by the ruling class: witness the Brexit fiasco and the election of Trump as president despite opposition from his own party, and from key parts of state apparatus like elements in the secret services.

4.       Populist parties are bourgeois but they don’t correspond to most ‘rational’ needs of the bourgeoisie, they threaten further disorder in the management of bourgeois society, cf Brexit and Trump’s unpredictability. This is not a total loss of control: traditional parties ‘co-opt’ populist policies in order to maintain their continuity: the Tories in GB[4] (5) and, strikingly, Trump in the White House who, faced with the needs of the state, have already modified policies (Obama care, immigrants, and vis-a-vis Russia). However the origins of populism in the depths of a disintegrating society means that it’s not something that can easily be controlled or manipulated by the ruling class.

5.       Part of the working class, especially that most affected by globalisation, ‘revolt’ but without perspective and not on their own class terrain. Some vote for populists as a possible ‘alternative’. Without an understanding of the root causes and evolution of the economic and social crisis – reinforced after 2008 because it affected people more as individual savers or householders (or evicted home-owners) at the mercy of the mysteries of finance – there tends to develop a search for scapegoats: the ‘urban elite’, ‘the bankers’, and above all the migrants and refugees. Here the imperialist situation aggravates populism: waves of refugees – including a veritable EU refugee crisis - as well as terrorist attacks in Europe, express the ‘blow-back of war’ and stimulate populist upsurge. This manifests itself in, amongst other aspects, a ‘bunker mentality’: the thirst for revenge and the violence of those who feel powerless and robbed; the shadow of the pogrom... In economic terms, grab what you can and to hell with solidarity.

6.       Populism doesn’t at all infest the whole working class. ‘Urban’, technological, more diverse sectors, often misrepresented as part of the elite, but really proletarian, may be repelled by populism. But they are vulnerable to democratic ‘resistance’ which is also on a nationalist terrain: ‘we are the real America’ as marchers of 1 million and more chanted in Washington after Trump’s victory. Populists also refer to the democratic will, so this central plank of bourgeois ideology is reinforced on all sides. Certain comparisons with the 1930s are valid – key themes of fascism do reappear. But even if ‘building walls’ and vainly attempting to isolate this or that country from global events is on the agenda, the out-and-out concentration camp state is not at present. And this is because the proletariat may be weakened but it is not en masse dragooned behind capitalist policies.

7.       Our perspective: the potential for communism remains even if the decomposition of capitalist social and material relations threaten to undermine it. The continued expansion of capitalism is also the growth of contradictions: use value/exchange value, capitalism and nature, world-wide association and private appropriation; the centralisation of capital and centrifugal tendencies within and between the world’s ruling cliques and countries.... etc

8.       On the subjective level: in 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ICC predicted a profound retreat in class consciousness within the proletariat. (6) Anti-communist campaigns and the effects of decomposition, coupled with the effects of ‘globalisation’ have ensured that class identity has weakened, along with a loss of confidence in itself and its project of constructing a new society.

And yet still important movements, especially among younger generation have emerged: in 2006 (the anti-CPE protests in France) and 2011. Also ‘classic’ economic movements, Spain, Egypt, China, UK…The problem is that economic struggles don’t automatically raise political issues and more ‘political’ ones like Indignados movement in Spain show how a loss of class identity makes workers’ movements vulnerable to ‘citizen’ ideology (Podemos, Syriza, Corbyn, Sanders etc). Both parts of the jig-saw need to be put together.

9.       Revolutionaries, weakened by difficulties within the class, are today very isolated. But it’s more necessary than ever:

• To make a profound analysis of period
• To denounce false alternatives
• To put forward a communist perspective for the new society and prepare the ground for the party of future.

Discussion:

To a certain extent it was a debate between the ICC and the CWO, but as these are rare enough, this was positive in itself. The main points of contention were a) the underlying nature of populism, b) the constitution (class composition) of the working class and its present perspectives for struggle and c) the role of revolutionary minorities.

Why the rise of populism and what are its origins?

The CWO comrade had a slightly different emphasis: what lies behind these phenomena are the effects of the crisis of 2007/8 which the bourgeoisie has been unable to solve. There is certainly a loss of confidence in the ruling class about its ability to control the situation. Trump talked of ‘unfair trade’, of debt and these grievances, also felt by the populace, are diverted by the bourgeoisie into populism. For the CWO comrade, populism doesn’t have a future. It has no solutions. It’s a short-term phenomenon. It proposes trade barriers, and nationalism, against all the developments of the last 30 years. It represents the view of the petty bourgeoisie, and as such it’s not correct to look to or compare the situation with the 1930s because the strength of petty bourgeois groups in society is no longer the same. This section of the populace has been decimated.

Various ICC comrades and sympathisers responded to this analysis, expanding on the idea made in the presentation that populism was not something manufactured or even particularly desired by the bourgeoisie: the main factions of the ruling class wanted neither Brexit nor Trump but got both! And as the CWO comrade himself said, it represents an attempt on the political and juridical levels to reverse recent capital developments such as trade blocs, globalisation – expressing something equally real in today’s situation - a disruptive, centrifugal, each for himself tendency: the growing fetter of social relations on the tendency of capital to globalise. No: populism arises out of the depths of a degrading society which offers no perspective for the populace in general and the working class in particular. A close ICC sympathiser in the US put it thus:

“One of the primary --perhaps the overriding feature--of the current epoch is uncertainty. This, of course, reflects one of the main features of decomposition--it is very hard to say what exactly will happen in the future these days even on the scale of weeks. Already with Trump's Presidency, we have seen a series of shifts and back slides that make one wonder about the nature of his campaign and Presidency...

“...But this raises more questions about the nature of populism. Populism is not new. There were features of populism in the right-wing fascist movements of the 1930s, but also in Roosevelt's New Deal, but what we seem to be saying now is that populism is emerging is a defining feature of the current period--we are in a sense entering an epoch of populism, perhaps as something of a sub period of decomposition.”

“..beyond all this I think what we are seeing today is not just declining faith in the bourgeoisie to manage society, but a collapse of legitimacy in institutions of all kinds: political parties are chief among these, but it seems to go even deeper--there seems to be even an increasing rejection of or questioning of politics itself--which seems another manifestation of decomposition.”

Other comrades addressed comparisons with the 1930s; these existed and should be further explored, particularly the loss of confidence of whole populations in their rulers to govern; the hunt for scapegoats, the persecution of minorities, and also the solidarity expressed by some workers towards immigrants and other hounded, herded sectors. However, unlike the 30s, the aim isn’t to mobilise an ideologically and physically crushed class for immediate war; and populism today hasn’t invaded the entirety of the state apparatus as in Nazi Germany, Italy, or even Roosevelt’s US ‘New Deal’.

The example of The New Deal dovetailed with further elements to the discussion around populism which remain to be addressed. For example, is it correct to see populism as only a ‘right-wing’ phenomenon? Is there a ‘left-wing’ populism? The original ICC discussion document on populism[5] suggests there is not. Other comrades have questions: The US comrade again:

“I’m concerned we continue to use "populism" only to refer to the right-wing variant, when it seems like that is only part of the story of this period. But what all of these variants have in common is that they attempt to portray themselves as somehow outside the system, anti-establishment, different, etc. The problem with this is that if they win they have to govern and it isn't long before they are part of the establishment themselves, which furthers the political crisis. In another sense then, the populism can be seen as something that flows from society itself, as much as it is a political phenomenon of the bourgeoisie. Trump wouldn't be President and Brexit wouldn't have passed unless millions of workers voted for them (millions also voted for Sanders--he received more votes in the Dem primary than Eugene Debs ever got) against the overwhelming consensus of the media/ideological establishment. In a sense there is a kind of "distorted" class rebellion here--even if it is expressed in very dangerous and counterproductive way.”

One comrade said this: “Right and left populists portray themselves as against mainstream. We need to understand what is similar in them and what is different....Scape-goating is a developing phenomenon. Obama deported millions but this was ‘hidden’ rather than the openly declared programme of Trump’s populism. Right-populism rejects the bourgeois ideology of universalism. It had no realistic policy to forward in US election but was pressurised once in office to act in the national interests. On the left (eg Syriza – Greece, or Sanders, US) had a more realistic policy for national capital. Similarities between different populisms but also distinctions at time of great weakening of working class support for traditional parties as in France.”

However an ICC sympathiser questioned the notion that the left wing of capital had a more coherent economic/social programme than the right. “Trump put himself forward as an outsider – it is part of his image. This leads us to a general view of where the bourgeoisie is at – and it is true they do not have a perspective for society. But the bourgeoisie does think about the future. Trump represents where the world is going – there are going to be unprecedented numbers of immigrants attempting to enter the main centres of capital, for instance. The US bourgeoisie is getting ready to deal with this. Populism is seeing things from the point of view of the ‘citizen’ in society – both right and left populism. The idea that (in the US) Sanders had a more realistic program than Trump – I am not sure of that. The left live in denial of reality – their dreams of massive state spending on social welfare, equality, support for local industry, are simply that: dreams and propaganda. Trump’s wall is more realistic and redolent of the future.”

Concluding this section of the debate, ICC comrades insisted that populism is not a temporary phenomenon but expresses something profound. The bourgeoisie is unable to fully impose order in its own house. There’s a certain loss of political control - not complete - but a crisis in confidence in itself and a loss of confidence by the population in general in their ability to go on as before. However, on issues like refugees, immigration … as long as there is no explicit working class alternative, populism appears as ‘common sense’. The ICC Theses on Decomposition[6] refers to the effect on the petty bourgeoisie of the impasse in society. We’re today seeing a disintegration of bourgeois ideology. But this process also weighs heavily on the proletariat’s consciousness. One way of looking at world embodied in populism – conspiracy theory – has a deep hold on the younger generation; populism nurtures itself on this. Populism may morph into new forms but the dangerous tendencies in it will not disappear until there is an overt proletarian movement to confront it.

Are we turning our backs on the class struggle?

Immediately after the main presentation, a comrade, formerly a member of the proletarian group Kronstat Kids, said the ‘downbeat’ assessment on the difficult state of the class struggle made it “sound as if the proletarian milieu is turning its back on the working class.”

This intervention to a certain extent coloured the rest of the discussion not directly concerned with populism (though, of course, populism is intimately entwined with the historic balance of class forces, as far as the ICC is concerned).

Be that as it may, this gave rise to different strands regarding the class struggle: a) the objective existence of class antagonism and current manifestations of working class struggle; b) the difficulties of combativity and coming to consciousness plus the changing composition of the working class and the importance of Europe and the US; finally, c) the past and present role of revolutionary minorities.

The basics

First and foremost: no-one had turned their backs on the working class. In the present historical situation, in the relative absence of class identity and the perspective of a struggle for a classless society, revolutionary potential lies, for the moment, in the objective conditions: the persistence of the class antagonisms; the irreconcilable nature of class interests; the world wide-collaboration of the proletarians in the production and reproduction of social life. Only the proletariat has an objective interest in and capacity to resolve the contradiction between world-wide production and private and nation-state appropriation of wealth. On this objective basis, the subjective conditions for revolution can still recover, in particular through the return of the economic struggle of the proletariat on an important scale, and through the development of a new generation of revolutionary political minorities. The presentation had highlighted important moments of struggle over the past 10 years and these continued today: uncountable movements in China where, according to the CWO comrade, the past 25 years has seen the creation of some 70 million new proletarians; massive struggles at present in South Africa; a recent anti-union (though also ‘anti-political’) strike of bus crews in Poland, etc etc.

However revolutionaries had a duty to make a sober assessment not only of immediate events but their historical evolution. Historical materialism recognises no automatic road to revolution: the struggle between classes can result in a ‘higher’, more compatible method of social reproduction (in our epoch, that would be communism) or it can lead to the “mutual ruin of the contending classes.” It wasn’t the ICT or ICC which invented the mutually exclusive alternatives of “socialism or barbarism.” The struggles of the recent period largely failed to have a major impact on the world situation: none (with few exceptions) had acted as focal points for the world proletariat, nor manifested a palpable level of proletarian class consciousness or, crucially, enriched the ranks of revolutionaries. Some of the most major events of the past period – like the collapse of the Eastern bloc – had, seemingly, taken place without the active intervention of the working class, reinforcing its non-active role in forging future social life as well as giving rise to all the damaging campaigns about the death of communism and the victory of democracy.

Comrades of the ICC who had been involved through their organisational commitment in the class struggle for over 40 years recalled the ‘bombshell’ that was May ‘68, the re-entry on the world scene of the proletariat after years of counter-revolution, accompanied and followed by at least a decade’s-worth of world-wide and massive strike movements, culminating in the mass strike in Poland in 1980 and a corresponding rediscovery of proletarian traditions, texts and the reconstitution of new organisations such as the ICC. There were reasons to be cheerful... But “It’s taken us long time to recognise it’s not as optimistic as we thought. When we started out, many of us felt the revolution was quite close. Yes, because we were young, but also because there were struggles breaking out everywhere.” Despite the insistence that history was the struggle between two major classes, that the ruling class consciously acted in its own interests and against those of the proletariat, and that the proletariat’s struggle followed a jagged course, “We assumed a steady development of struggles and a continued evolution of political currents towards the formation of the Party. However, we had overlooked the difficulties and deficiencies in the development of class consciousness: economic crisis and combativity did not automatically give rise to deeper and more widespread clarity within the class as a whole. So the most important judgement we can make is that there is problem...”

One of these problems is that the ruling class is able to use the reality of different living standards around the world and the chaos of wars outside the proletarian heartlands to create divisions within the working class. There has been a loss of class identity and even revolutionaries felt the weight of of Stalinist and unionist ideology in ‘60s in their conception of who and what the working class actually is - a tendency to fixate only on blue-collar industries (which were in many cases prone to corporatist mentalities). The working class has not disappeared in the West – though it may be doing different work under changed conditions – but there are real obstacles to its seeing itself as the producer, revolutionary class at present.

The weekend of the meeting coincided with the arrival of Lenin at the Finland Station 100 years before. Neither he nor the Bolsheviks had anticipated the proletarian nature of the subsequent revolution in Russia which ‘seemed’ to come out of nowhere but which had in fact been brewing in the bowels of society. Today, it’s not possible to predict with any certainty, nor should we try, when the current regression in class consciousness and in combativity might end. The class often surprises its revolutionary minorities. But any concrete manifestation of a ‘subterranean maturation’ or a ‘qualitative leap’ in the level of struggles will not spring out of thin air: it will have been prepared by a whole series of movements, strikes and protests – including those against war, the degradation of living standards and of the environment on which humanity depends and which the ruling class is destroying. It’s hard to clearly see in today’s movements such developments. It also depends on the presence of revolutionary minorities – like the Bolsheviks – formed by the class itself, and today we can say the number of these remaining from the events before and after May 68 is absolutely tiny in relation to the tasks involved.

The Importance of Europe and the US

Within this process of coming to consciousness, not all parts of the proletariat are equal, even if they form an international whole. The CWO comrade felt that the focus of the class struggle had shifted from Europe and the US (which had witnessed record year-on-year reductions in strikes and struggles) to Africa, Asia and in particular China. This is not the first time that this organisation has placed emphasis on the “struggle in the peripheries” and the ICC disagreed then as now[7].

Reality is that In many parts of the world – in the Middle East, in large swathes of Africa – the proletariat and the dispossessed, landless population is being decimated by war and famine: Syria, Libya (which has witnessed the return of slave markets!), Somalia and Sudan were examples So essentially we’re talking here of countries like China which have seen a real industrial development.

The creation of new battalions of the class in China should, of course be welcomed – it will make any future generalisation of struggles throughout the world easier. But the new Chinese proletariat – and many millions of them are ejected back to the ruined ‘natural economy’ of the countryside once projects like the Beijing Olympic builds are completed or others collapse due to falling world demand and rising labour costs – is politically inexperienced and unexposed to traps long endured by workers in the West: trade unions; multi-party democracies, etc,  institutions that the rest of the world bourgeoisie has (so far) unsuccessfully tried to foist on the rigid Chinese bureaucracy in order to preserve social control and supply chains. The Chinese proletariat’s struggles require the politicization already achieved in the past in the West and which will again have to be manifested and surpassed there in future.

It’s no accident that despite the growth of the Chinese proletariat over the past quarter of a century - a growth in significant part corresponding to a loss of jobs and the creation of ‘rust belts’ in the West  - no politicised minorities have emerged to our knowledge. If the workers’ history of the past 40 years – if the histories of organisations like the ICT and ICC – is examined, the difficulty in coming to consciousness within the proletariat and the secretion of revolutionary minorities is notable for its feebleness.

The massive and varied struggles of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ – including workers’ strikes in Egypt, Bangladesh, the US as well as the formation of street assemblies and manifestations like Tahir Square and the Occupy movements – has given rise to very little ‘political decantation’. The most politically advanced movement appeared in the Europe, in Spain, in the Indignados movement. And while this has seen some small residue in the form of newly politicised comrades, it’s a pitifully small and painfully slow process.

The CWO comrade acknowledged the “huge difficulties” of struggles today in South Africa: despite large-scale mobilisations and the exposure of the ANC as a capitalist prop, the class hadn’t drawn the lessons and was to some extent repeating the same experiences as in Europe - the formation of new, often ‘base’, unions which were diverting struggles into a dead end. Revolutionary intervention was necessary, a sharing of experiences with struggles in Europe, but how was this to be achieved? In all events, at least there is an open combat as opposed to the low-levels of strikes in Europe.

The role of revolutionaries

The final strand of the discussion concerned the familiar theme of the role of revolutionaries and how to make contact with the working class and its struggles. Again, there’s a whole history of debate between the CWO/ICT and the ICC, particularly on the former’s conception of ‘Factory Groups’ as transmission belts between party, or revolutionary organisation and the class as a whole. For the ICC, the argument has never been whether intervention is necessary or not: communists are ‘leaders on the spot’ taking an active role wherever and whenever possible in strikes, assemblies, discussions, etc. The ICC devoted many resources to intervening, for example, in the Indignados movement, speaking in assemblies, etc. However, for the ICC, there are no ‘organisational panaceas’, no recipes to create the conditions either for struggle, or the favourable reception in that struggle of revolutionary ideas. When workers move, when minorities of them begin to coalesce, to discuss, then revolutionary intervention is vital, not to freeze this process but to help accelerate and politicise it. The dominant illusion in today’s proletarian milieu is they can create an immediate and lasting link between themselves and the class but this whole approach has been an activist failure. The reality is that nearly 50 years on from the end of the counter-revolution, organised revolutionaries are a tiny minority without influence in the class struggle and while they will in no way operate in some academic vacuum, the task of today, under the pressure of the dominant ideology, given the weakness of the working class, is ‘not to betray’ the principles and class lessons of the workers’ movement and to prepare for the transmission of these understandings for the revolutionary generation of tomorrow.

KT 21.04.2017

In the week just after mid-May, there were three particular events in the Middle East: the first was an incident involving an attack by US fighter jets on an Iranian-backed militia in south-eastern Syria fighting for Assad; a general election in Iran; and President Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia. The context for these events, which mean a deepening of tensions and greater military dangers for the world, is the tendency for centrifugal forces to increasingly dominate over relatively stable blocs and alliances, and how this takes place in a world where American power is increasingly resented and weakening. A couple of weeks after Trump’s visit, this dangerous dynamic was emphasised and reinforced by the sudden and coordinated isolation of Qatar by land, sea and air, led by Saudi Arabia, with apparent US backing. This amounts to a call for Qatari regime change and is virtually a declaration of war. There is no doubt that the Saudi action, in line with its increasingly reckless behaviour, marks a rise in tensions and a more and more aggressive approach towards Iran. At a wider level, and again in line with already developing tendencies, clear differences are shown within Nato between the US and Germany. On June 7, the German Foreign Minister, Sigmar Gabriel, responding to the Qatar crisis, stated that the "Trumpification of relations (within the Middle East) is particularly dangerous". There is more on this development below.

The weakening of the US and the war of each against all

The historical weakening of the US as a superpower has been a developing expression since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. It's not weakening militarily, on the contrary, and it is still a very powerful economy; but at the level of its global domination, both militarily and political, its influence has eroded. This weakening gives further strength to the innate capitalist tendency of "dog eat dog", each for themselves, which in turn, further acts on US weakening and creates the downward spiral that is typical of this phase of capitalism’s decline which we refer to as the phase of decomposition.  After the collapse of Russia, instead of enjoying a great "victory", the US found its hold on its allies beginning to unravel. The first (1990/91) Gulf War was an attempt by the US to pull its allies back into line but it only briefly succeeded, with centrifugal tendencies dominating more than ever once it was over, most obviously in the war in ex-Yugoslavia which saw Germany, France and even Britain backing their own pawns against those of the US. The second Gulf War against Saddam saw a greater distancing by Germany in particular. The re-emergence of Russia onto the imperialist scene has caused the US problems that it's found difficult to deal with, and US and European relations are at very low ebb, as shown by the recent G7 meeting. And even some of its oldest "friends", Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Israel (who all have tensions with each other) are trying to take advantage of the weaknesses of the US. Along with Turkey and Bahrain they are rather unstable allies.

The US hasn't won a war since it invaded Granada in 1983, a country with no standing army. There have been ongoing military debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya which have been costly in terms of lives and material, laying the ground for more problems in relation to those areas along with those posed by China and North Korea. "Make America Great Again" is a re-launch of the 1990's NeoCon thinking which admits the basic premise of a weakened US and, like the present situation, wants to strike out. Though a token effort militarily, the bombing of the Syrian Shayrat air-base by Tomahawk missiles in early April and dropping the US's biggest non-nuclear bomb, the "Massive Ordnance Air Blast" (MOAB) on the Nangerhar region of Afghanistan a week later, was supposed to send out a powerful message that the US was back and fighting. But, along with the increasing numbers of civilians killed by US and Coalition air-strikes in Syria and Iraq and by drone strikes in Pakistan, these sorts of actions simply make more enemies for the US and the west. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, initiated under Obama, is now being put into question; on the other hand, the "Pivot" to Asia, with the principal aim of containing Chinese expansion, was already being set up under Obama and is likely to be intensified under Trump, who has already engaged in some verbal sabre-rattling by claiming that he was dispatching an “armada” towards North Korea in response to the regime’s nuclear posturing (in fact this turned out to be something of a bluff by Trump[1]). In Africa the US is also reinforcing its presence and any ideas about the US under Trump "withdrawing" from the world stage have been flatly contradicted.

Developing tensions around Qatar

In a sudden turn of events that took the Qatari regime, and many others, by surprise, Saudi Arabia, its proxies in Bahrain and the UAE, along with the support of Egypt and some smaller states, completely cut off this small country from the rest of the world. It was an act of war. The reason for the move according to the Saudi's, was that Qatar was "Supporting terrorism" and "supplying Iranian-backed terrorist groups" which includes its support for Hamas in Gaza[2]. The Saudi move was endorsed by Trump who said that his visit was "paying off" and, in an open disagreement with Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, said that the move was "necessary"[3]. The Saudi move would have been quietly egged-on by Israel. That Qatar, like Saudi and the rest of imperialism, supports factions of terrorism is beyond dispute; the Qatari jihadists fighting in the 2011 war in Libya, who were backed by the British and French, were particularly indiscriminate and horrific in their slaughter. Qatar, like Saudi, has backed the al-Qaida affiliate al-Nusra Front in Syria. The Qatari regime has also backed the Muslim Brotherhood, including its rise to government in Egypt during 2011/12, which explains Saudi’s enthusiasm for the "secular" Egyptian despot, El Sissi, who overturned Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government.

The original excuse for the Saudi move was an insipid statement on Qatari state TV that Iran should not be isolated. That was the pretext for the already planned move to be put into effect. Its aim is to distance Doha from Tehran and make it more compliant to the Saudis. There have been tensions within the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council for decades now but this is of a different order of magnitude in a situation of deepening instability and recklessness which brings further dangers to the Middle East. Kuwait, Oman and Pakistan have refused to join in while the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt have all increased internal repression against any dissent.

Qatar holds the largest US base in the Middle East, housing its Central Command which directs its regional wars. Rex Tillerson, again contradicting his president, said that the capacities of the base had been "hindered" by the move. Turkey has a small, token military presence in the country but has recently signed an agreement to send in more troops. Qatar has cooperated with Iran over exploiting the largest gas reserves in the world that lie in their off-shore waters, but this move by Saudi is not dominated by any sort of immediate economic motives but by increases in imperialist rivalries against Iran pushed by the Trump administration.

The "incident" around al-Tanf

On May 17 US fighter jets destroyed an Iranian-backed convoy of around a couple of dozen militia and their equipment as it headed towards the Jordanian border, killing six of them. Some 25km away on the border is a camp set up by the CIA and manned by British and French intelligence agents and special forces, with Saudi and Bahraini assistance. Its job is to train an anti-Assad, anti-Iranian army which includes some fundamentalist Islamists of the so-called "New Syrian Army". The placing of the camp is important because it is close to the Baghdad-Damascus highway and is part of an important Iranian supply-line which meanders from Tehran all the way to Latakia on Syria's Mediterranean coast. In the near future the camp could be an element in the partition of Syria and represents an increase in western involvement in the war, but in the meantime it is certainly a threat to Iranian-backed elements. Three days prior to the attack there were media reports of very direct Russian warnings to the Assad regime to reign in its Iranian units and stop their advance to the Jordanian border. They were ignored by the regime but they indicate a number of possible developments: high-level Russian-US communications; the fact that the US doesn't want to confront Russia in Syria; possible Russian ambiguities towards Iran; and the fact that Iran is very much in US sights – Trump’s bombastic words about Iran were, in this case, translated into action. The incident also points to latent tensions between Russia and the Assad clique. But more than this, this attack sends a clear message of US intentions towards Iran. It's one of the contradictions of this war-torn region that in Iraq US and Coalition air power are protecting Iranian-backed Shia units on the ground, but the Tanf incident points to the possibilities of a serious Coalition and Iranian confrontation further down the road[4].

The Iranian election

In the same week as Trump's visit there was a general election in Iran in which the re-elected "moderate", Hassan Rouhani, won overwhelmingly. In bourgeois terms this is probably one of the "cleanest" elections in the whole region (no such elections for Saudi) and it has been virtually ignored by the US, the proponent of democracy everywhere. The administration was less welcoming to Rouhani's election than it was to the earlier election of the hard-line Ahmadinejad. Rouhani delivered the 2015 nuclear deal with Europe, Russia and the US, a deal which Trump called "The worse deal ever negotiated". The "pivot" to Saudi Arabia by the US under Trump is a clear move away from the Obama administration's attempt to use Iran as a counter to the growing uncertainties of Saudi Arabian influence in the region[5].

There are still US sanctions on Iran and the next few weeks will see if they are lifted in line with the nuclear agreement or intensified. The development of the economy is crucial for the survival of the Iranian "moderates" as youth unemployment, for example, officially stands at 26%; and while there has been some German and French (and Chinese) investment in Iran[6], putting these countries at odds with the US, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) hardliners have their own business empire to protect. It is extremely unlikely that there will be any US investment, or US "encouragement" to invest in Iran, under the present US regime. This puts the latter at odds with Europe, Germany particularly, over the economy and the nuclear deal. The Iranian hardliners under Ebrahim Raisa, who could well be endorsed by the "Supreme Leader", Al Khamanei, got a significant vote and these deeply irrational forces can only be strengthened by present and developing US policy.  

"Trump of Arabia"[7]

It's hard to not to point out the sickening hypocrisy of "anti-terrorist" Trump going to the snake pit of fundamentalist jihadism which the Saudi state, through its state-run Muslim World League, has exported near and wide. But the "dealmaker" has got a great deal here: $350 billion worth of sales including $110 billion worth of assorted weaponry. This aspect has ruffled some Israeli feathers but it has the advantage for the US of upping the ante on future arms sales to Israel. At any rate the new weapons are unlikely to do the Saudi regime much good when the previous batch (around $40 billion) has not been that effective for Saudi intervention in Syria. For all its military fire power, Saudi Arabia has been unable to subdue Houti regulars in Yemen. Trump met with the de facto Saudi ruler, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom the German intelligence report eighteen months ago (see end note), described as a dangerous sectarian interventionist and naive political gambler. Who does that remind you of? Bin Salman has pursued the devastating war in Yemen (along with its "allies", including Britain) and has backed the jihadist "Army of Conquest", al-Qaida, the al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham as well as promising to "take the war to Iran".

The anti-Iranian message was crystal clear in Trump's first foreign outing: he spoke to the assembled leaders in Riyadh in NeoCon terms of "Good versus Evil" and evoked "God" in one speech nine times in Israel. Here the aim to isolate and confront Iran was further emphasised when Trump said that "There is a growing recognition among your Arab neighbours that they have common cause with you in the threat posed by Iran"[8]. The US turn to a Sunni Saudi, UAE and the other Gulf states along with Israel and Egypt against Iran has one notable absentee: President Erdogan's Turkey. There are no doubt remaining tensions between Turkey and the US over the former's 2016 "coup" but there are other, deeper divisions emerging between the countries. The main one being the support from the US to the Kurdish YPG units which are a really useful force for US imperialism in the region against Isis. These forces have come into close proximity to Erdogan's Turkish proxies (and the Turkish army) but in general the latter dare not attack the Kurdish units who fly the Stars and Stripes. This army, and the potential for a Kurdish buffer zone, is a major source of Turkish/US tension. On the anarchist forum libcom, the Kurdish "supporters of Rojava" have expressed their unease about the YPG/US relationship[9] but these anarcho-nationalists can only imply that things might have been better with Russia as their main backer. It doesn't look as if the US is going to abandon the YPG any time soon and is in fact building up its presence around Kobane in northern Syria, including an airport designed to take the massive C-17 transporters. But the Kurdish nationalists are right to be worried because, historically, the Kurds are at their most vulnerable when they are up there playing with the big boys.

A dangerous US turn from a position of weakness that can only cause more problems

The anti-Iran turn is by no means restricted to Trump and his immediate clique; there were many in the US military that were dubious about or hostile to the nuclear or any agreement at all with Iran. Trump's move here represents an imperative for US imperialism to impose itself more fully on the world stage. This new "strategy" of the US, from a position of weakness, thus increases the temptation to use its military superiority. A number of generals that are very influential in the Trump administration were in Iraq and, because of US setbacks and casualties caused by the Shia militias and Iranian dominance in the country, have an abiding enmity towards Iran[10] . For them, Isis is not the main issue and the memory of Iranian-backed devastating attacks on US forces in Lebanon in the 1980's is still raw. At the same time, judging from the Jordanian border build-up and their support for a Kurdish army, they seem to be reconciled to a future carve-up of Syria.

The US turn is in line with other developments in the Trump regime and its foreign policy. Trump recently rubber-stamped the new Pentagon strategy to "annihilate Isis", which gives the military carte-blanche. Rules of engagement have been relaxed, more decisions "diluted" and delegated to the Pentagon with Trump's Defence Secretary, General James Mattis saying that the President had delegated "the ability to authorise military operations to him"[11] . These events tend to show the Pentagon more in control of Trump, whatever his eventual fate, than the other way round.

It may seem tenuous to link Trump's Middle East warmongering with the Manchester bombing and the most recent London attacks but the connection is already well established. By stirring up war, militarism and ethnic hatreds, the US, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and their dubious allies, have used and fuelled terrorism for a quarter of a century now. In that process many, many thousands in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya and central Africa have been slaughtered, getting scant attention from the British media unless there's a particular campaign furthering their war efforts. Trump's visit and policies are the latest contributions to ensuring more Middle East instability and more terrorist atrocities in Europe for many years to come.

Boxer, 10.6.17. (This article was contributed by a close sympathiser of the ICC)

According to a substantial number of politicians and media outlets, one of the most positive outcomes of the recent British election was the fact that Labour’s surprising revival was largely based on a kind of upsurge of young people, breaking with habits of apathy or cynicism towards “politics” and seeing the Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn as offering a real alternative, hope for a more equal and fairer society.

As revolutionaries, we beg to differ. The engagement of discontented youth with bourgeois electoral politics is founded on the recuperation of real discontent, on diverting it towards false solutions that lie inside the horizon of capitalist society. The discontent is the positive element, its diversion is the negative. We have seen a similar process in Spain and Greece, where massive movements of a new generation of proletarians, organised in street assemblies, were deflected onto the electoral terrain by new left-wing parties like Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, who promise to combine the social struggle on the street with the struggle for power in parliament, when the two paths head in different and opposed directions. Neither is this a new trick played by the left wing of capital. In the German revolution of 1918 the workers and soldiers organised in councils were cajoled by the Social Democratic Party into subordinating the councils to the new “democratic” parliamentary regime – a profound error which could only mean the death of the councils.    

But surely we should vote for the lesser evil?

The left and the extreme left are differentiated from the right and the extreme right particularly by their language, which seems to be much more humane. Solidarity, welcoming and sharing are among the values that are attributed to them. This image is all the more tenacious since it is anchored in the memories of the glorious past of these parties. In France, for example, the figure of Jean Jaures, murdered for his opposition to the 1914-18 war, still draws a great deal of sympathy today. So, despite the experience of the left in power which everywhere has been responsible for imposing austerity and reduction in workers’ living standards, workers in their millions (in work, unemployed, pensioners, students and precarious workers) regularly go to vote, without much enthusiasm, without believing their programmes, simply to prevent something worse, the arrogant, and often sexist and racist, right, and hateful extreme right. This is what lies behind the idea of tactical voting to “keep the Tories out”. It also lies behind the way austerity measures by the Blair government were consistently described as “Tory policies” when they were patently the policies and actions of the Labour Party in office. Similarly, in France the wish for “anyone but Sarkozy” gave socialist Francois Hollande his victory in 2007, just as many former supporters of the left voted for Macron to keep out Le Pen . However, this illusion of preventing something worse cannot stand up to historical facts. To take a few examples: not only did the Labour home secretary in the Blair government, Jack Straw, play the immigration card, talking of “bogus” asylum seekers among other insults, but the supposedly dangerous radical Jeremy Corbyn said he wants immigration “... based on the needs of our society”[1], meaning based on the needs of British national capital. Obama may not have campaigned on deporting illegal immigrants the way Trump did, but he still became known as “deporter-in-chief” because of the millions expelled under his presidency. Although portrayed as a lesser evil, Obama has never claimed to be a socialist. Bernie Sanders has, and he voted against the immigration reform bill in 2007, supporting the AFL-CIO unions in claiming this was to prevent American workers having their wages undercut. Not a million miles from Trump’s reasoning.  The French politician who stated “I think there are too many arrivals, immigration that should not be there... We teach them to speak French and then another group arrives and we have to start over again. This never stops... So, there comes a time when it has to stop” was not Le Pen but Hollande![2] And always actions follow the words: deportations, frontiers reinforced (Corbyn wants 500 more immigration officers), no matter how tragic it is for the refugees, including unaccompanied children as in the Jungle at Calais. All these parties and politicians have supported the very imperialist policies that cause the wars and instability – in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere – that only increase the number of refugees risking their lives to reach relative safety.[3]

Voting to defend democracy?

From the extreme right to the extreme left, for a century, different governments all over the world have many times demonstrated the inhumanity of their policies. Yet there is still an idea fixed in the body and mind of each ‘citizen’ that to vote is to defend democracy and keep it alive. Your vote is your voice. If you don’t vote, what right do you have to complain about what the government does? This message is omnipresent. But what is the reality of the power of this little bit of ballot paper?

Democracy is a mystification for it presupposes humanity is unified, something which has never been the case, whether in the last 5,000 years of class society or before that when humanity was divided into tribes and clans. Throughout the history of class society social cohesion has been maintained by the power of the ruling class and its state machine, to the detriment of the powerless mass of the exploited and oppressed. In one of its first expressions, state power took the sophisticated form of democracy, as in ancient Greece, where the word originated. The Athenian city state was able to adopt this form of government thanks to the growth in wealth brought by a flow of slaves, linked to the pillage of its neighbours. The demos, that is to say the people, of Greek democracy was not the whole population, but only the citizens in the polis. The mass of slaves, the majority of society, as well as women and foreigners, had no rights of citizenship. Democracy in ancient Greece was an arm of the state for the benefit of the slave owners.

Bourgeois democracy is, in essence, no different. The bourgeois parliamentary regimes of the 19th Century openly excluded the working class from the right to vote through the rules of eligibility (it was necessary to own property to be able to vote). And when universal suffrage was granted to society as a whole, the bourgeoisie still had many means to exclude the working class from its political affairs: the many links which united the political parties to the bourgeoisie and to the state; the system of direct suffrage which atomises the classes into isolated and supposedly equal individuals; the control of the media, and so the electoral campaigns, through the state, etc. This is why no election organised by a democratic state has ever given a majority to parties of the exploited class. Quite the contrary! During the Paris Commune, for example, the National Assembly elected in 1871 was nicknamed “la Chambre introuvable” (the unobtainable Chamber), in reference to the Royalist Chamber of 1815, so the bourgeoisie couldn’t dream of a better result for its interests, even when Paris and part of France was caught up in a revolutionary tidal wave.

Democracy, in whichever historic period it has arisen, has always been a method of government ensuring the violent rule of the minority over the majority, and not the reverse as we are led to believe. It has never been, and never could be, a means of self-regulation and control by society as a whole. Democracy is the most sophisticated system of political organisation allowing one class to rule society:

• It is the most effective and durable way to allow the resolution of differences within the ruling class and to attenuate their power struggles.
• It gives the exploited masses the illusion that the exploiters and the state rule in the interests of the whole population.
• It also gives the exploited the illusion that they can, at least theoretically, use the existing state as the means to realise their interests, without needing to overthrow it.
• Lastly, concerning the future, faced with the threat of the revolutionary proletariat, democracy responds to the bourgeoisie’s need to propose an ideal and mythical future which does not need the overthrow of the established order. If “true” democracy has never existed at all, the bourgeoisie tell us, this is because Man – this abstract philosophical conception, outside of history – has not tried hard enough to put it into practice.

It is no accident that the great democracies are the oldest capitalist countries, where both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat have a long experience of struggles. The stronger the working class, the more its consciousness and its organisation have developed, the more the bourgeoisie needs its most effective political weapon. Hitler was able to come to power democratically and supported by all the large German industrialists, in the elections of 1933, precisely because the working class had already been crushed physically and ideologically by German Social Democracy during the revolutionary wave of 1918-1919. It was not the abandonment of the ballot boxes by the ‘citizens’ which led Nazism to power, but the bloody defeat of the working class, militarily and politically vanquished by the very democratic Social Democracy!

The bourgeoisie makes believe that the most important battle has always been “democracy against dictatorship”. So, the main justification for Allied imperialism during the Second World War against fascism was the struggle for democracy against dictatorship. Millions of human beings were massacred in the name of democracy. After 1945, democracy was the main theme mobilising for the Cold War against the Stalinist imperialist bloc by the bloc led by the United States. Whole countries have been ravaged in the name of the struggle against totalitarianism. After1989, the collapse of the USSR bloc marked the start of a whole series of colossal military adventures by the United States to maintain its world hegemony, under the banner of democracy and human rights, against the mad dictators (Gulf war, intervention in Yugoslavia) or against evil terrorists (war in Afghanistan). So, during the imperialist conflicts which have ravaged the planet for more than a century, the strength of the “liberal democracies” has always been to persuade the proletarians used as cannon fodder that they were fighting for democracy, and not defending the interests of a capitalist faction. And these same democracies have shamelessly, cynically used or even put in place this or that dictator when it corresponded to their strategic interests. There is no lack of examples: the USA in Latin America, France in the majority of its African ex-colonies, the UK in ex-colonies when needed. This eternal battle of democracy against dictatorship is an ideological myth. Capitalism as a whole, whatever its mask and political organisation, is a dictatorship, a system of a privileged exploiting minority crushing the majority of humanity.

Voting in the name of past struggles?

There could be one remaining reason, despite everything, to go and vote: universal suffrage was won with great and often bloody struggles of the working class in the 19th Century: with the Chartist movement in Britain, in Germany between 1848-49, in Belgium with the immense strikes of 1893, 1902 and 1913... In France, it was only after the Paris Commune was drowned in blood that workers definitively obtained universal suffrage. This demand is even found in the Communist Manifesto written in 1848 by Marx and Engels. But this poses a question: why does this same bourgeoisie which, in the previous century violently repressed workers who demanded universal suffrage, make such efforts today for the maximum number of them to vote? Why the publicity paid for by the state hammering out the message: “Vote, vote, vote!” on all the TV channels, in the press and in schoolbooks? Why in all these media are the “abstentionists” condemned as irresponsible citizens putting our democracy in danger? Why this flagrant difference between the 19th Century and the 20th and 21st Centuries?

To answer this question it is necessary to distinguish two epochs of capitalism: ascendance and decadence. In the 19th Century capitalism was at its height. Capitalist production developed by giant steps. In this period of prosperity the bourgeoisie achieved it political domination and eliminated the power of the old ruling class: the nobility. Universal suffrage and parliament were one of the most important means in the struggle of the radical fraction of the bourgeoisie against the nobility and against its own retrograde fractions. As such the democratic bourgeoisie and its liberal ideology represented a prodigious advance historically in relation to the religious obscurantism of feudal society. The struggle of the proletariat in this period was directly conditioned by this situation of capitalism. In the absence of capitalism’s historic crisis, the socialist revolution was not yet on the agenda. For the proletariat it was a question of strengthening its unity and its consciousness in fighting for lasting reforms, to try to permanently ameliorate its living conditions. The unions and the parliamentary parties allowed it to regroup independently of the bourgeois and democratic parties and to put pressure on the existing order, and even when needed to make tactical alliances with the radical fractions of the bourgeoisie; these were the means it gave itself to obtain reforms. Parliament was the place where the different fractions of the bourgeoisie united or confronted each other to govern society. The proletariat had to participate in this arena, to try to obtain laws and decisions that corresponded to the defence of its interests.

With the 20th Century capitalism entered a new phase, that of its historic decline. The division of the world between the great powers was completed. Each one of them could only appropriate new markets to the detriment of the others. As the Communist International said, the agony of capitalism opened “the epoch of wars and revolutions”. On the one hand the First World War broke out. On the other, in Russia (1905 and 1917), in Germany (1918-23), in Hungary (1919) and in Italy (1920), the proletariat shook the old world with an international revolutionary wave. To face up to these growing difficulties capital was constrained to constantly reinforce the power of its state. More and more the state tended to take control of the whole of social life, in the first place in the economic domain. This evolution in the role of the state was accompanied by a weakening in the role of the legislature in favour of the executive. More concretely, as the second congress of the Communist International said: “The focal point of political life has shifted fully and finally beyond the boundaries of parliament”. Today, in Britain as elsewhere, parliament has become more of a rubber stamp for legislation, almost all of which is proposed by the government. In France it is evident that the National Assembly no longer has any power: 80% of the laws it votes are presented by the government; once voted this law must be put into effect by the President of the Republic and, to take effect, must wait for the signing of the presidential decree. Besides, the President can bypass parliament to legislate by recourse to edict or even, in France, with the aid of Article 16 of the constitution which gives him full powers. In Britain the prime minister has taken on the powers of ‘Royal Prerogative’ in matters such as foreign affairs, defence and security. This insignificant role for parliament is expressed in a ridiculous participation by MPs in its sessions: most of the time there are very few who follow the debates, when in the 19th Century, it was the place for fierce and impassioned debates and sometimes brilliant discourse, like those of Jean Jaures in France or Karl Liebknecht in Germany.

At the same time as parliament’s effective political function diminished, it mystificatory function grew and the bourgeoisie was not mistaken when, in 1917 in Russia and in 1919 in Germany, it brandished the constituent assembly against the proletarian revolution and its workers’ councils. From then on, parliamentary democracy would be the best means to tame the proletariat.

The future of humanity will be decided through the class struggle

The bourgeoisie does not exercise power as a whole but by delegating it to a minority fraction of itself, regrouped in political parties. This is equally true in democracies (competition between several parties) as in totalitarian fascist or Stalinist (one party) states. This power held by a minority of political specialists does not only reflect the minority position of the bourgeoisie within society; it is also necessary to preserve the general interests of the national capital faced with the divergent and competing interests of the different fractions of this bourgeoisie. This mode of power by delegation is thus inherent in bourgeois society; it is reflected in each of its institutions and above all in universal suffrage. The latter is even the privileged means by which ‘the population’, in fact the bourgeoisie, ‘entrusts’ power to one or several political parties. For the revolutionary action of the proletariat it is the whole of the class that acts to take power, and not the delegation of a minority. This is the condition for the success of all proletarian movements. So universal suffrage cannot, in any shape or form, provide the framework for the revolutionary mobilisation of the proletariat against the existing order.

Far from encouraging the initiative and self-organisation of the masses, it tends on the contrary to maintain their illusions and their passivity. May 1968, the largest strike since the Second World War, was followed a month later by the greatest ever electoral victory for the right in France. The reason for this discrepancy resides in the fact that the election of a deputy exists in a totally different sphere from that of the class struggle. The latter is a collective action of solidarity, where the worker is alongside other workers, where the hesitations of one are swept up by the resolution of the others, where the interests in question are not particular, but those of a class. In contrast, the vote calls on a totally abstract notion, quite outside of the reality of a permanent relation of force between two social classes with diametrically opposed interests: the notion of the “citizen”, who finds himself alone in the voting booth faced with a choice for something outside his daily life. It is the ideal terrain for the bourgeoisie, where the worker’s militancy has no possibility to really show itself. It is no accident that the bourgeoisie makes such efforts to get us to vote. The electoral results are precisely the terrain where the combativity of the mass of workers cannot be expressed at all. On the contrary, in Britain the question of Brexit, or in France the proposition by certain candidates of a VI Republic and a new Constitution, encourage the individual-citizen to limit their reasoning to the narrow framework of national frontiers and the mortifying social relations of capitalist competition and exploitation.

The response to the contradictions of this system and to the growing suffering that it engenders can only come through the international dimension of the proletarian struggle and its global solidarity. In order to liberate society form the destructive consequences of capitalist production, communism must abolish classes and private property, which means the withering away of the state and of democracy: “... it is constantly forgotten that the abolition of the state means also the abolition of democracy; that the withering away of the state means the withering away of democracy.

At first sight this assertion seems exceedingly strange and incomprehensible; indeed, someone may even begin to fear that we are expecting the advent of an order of society in which the principle of the subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed – for democracy means the recognition of just this principle.

No, democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democracy is a state which recognises the subordination of the minority to the majority, ie, an organisation for the systematic use of violence by one class against the other, by one section of the population against another.

We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, ie, all organised and systematic violence, all use of violence against man in general. We do not expect the advent of an order of society in which the principle of the subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed. But in striving for socialism we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, hence, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed  to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination.” (Lenin, State and Revolution). Democracy will no longer have any meaning in a communist society which will replace the government of men and capitalist management with “the administration of things”, in a world which, contrary to capitalism, draws its strength from the diversity of needs and the real capacities of the associated individuals. 

Sandrine

Adapted from an article on our French web page, https://fr.internationalism.org/revolution-internationale/201703/9528/el... [46]

The survivors of the Grenfell fire, those who live in its shadow, those who live in similar towers elsewhere, those who came to manifest their solidarity, whose anger drove them to occupy Kensington town hall and march to Downing Street, were perfectly clear that this horror was no abstract “tragedy”, still less an Act of God, but as one makeshift banner put it, “a crime on the poor”, an issue of class made even more obvious by the fact that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea typifies the obscene contrasts in wealth that mark this social order, summarising them in the very visible and tangible form of the “housing question”.

Long before the outbreak of the fire, a residents’ action group had warned of the dangerous state of the Grenfell building, but these warnings were repeatedly ignored by the local council and its agent, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation. There is also a strong suspicion that the cladding which is being pinpointed as the main cause of the rapid spread of the fire was installed not for the residents of the tower but to improve the look of the building for the richer residents of the borough. Again, it is well known that this borough is infested by that new breed of absentee landlord who, encouraged by the British bourgeoisie’s mania to encourage foreign investment, buys up extremely expensive housing stock and in many cases doesn’t even bother to rent it out, but leaves it empty purely for the purposes of speculation. And indeed speculation in housing – fully supported by the state - was a central element in the crash of 2008, an economic disaster whose net effect has been to further widen the huge gulf between those with wealth and those without it. And yet keeping house prices high, especially in London, remains a central plank of today’s debt-driven casino economy.

The depth and extent of the indignation provoked by such policies was such that the media owned and controlled by those at the higher rungs of the wealth ladder had little choice but to go along with the tide of rage. Some of the pro-Brexit tabloids started off by trying to blame the fire on EU regulations[1], but had to backtrack quickly in the face of the popular mood (but also when it was made apparent that the type of cladding used to “regenerate” Grenfell is banned in a country like Germany). A paper not famed for its radicalism, the London Metro, carried the headline “Arrest the Killers”, presented not as a quote but more like a demand, even if based on the rhetoric of Tottenham MP David Lammy who was one of the first to describe the fire as “corporate manslaughter”. And all but a minority of racist internet trolls avoided any disparaging words about the fact that the majority of the victims are not only poor but come from a migrant and even refugee background. The many expressions of solidarity we saw in the wake of the fire – the donation of food, clothes, blankets, offers of accommodation and labour in the emergency centres – came from local people of all ethnic and religious backgrounds, who didn’t ask about the personal history of the victims as a precondition for giving their aid and support.

The demonstrators are right to demand answers about the cause of this fire, to pressure the state into providing emergency assistance and into re-housing them in the same area – some of them have referred to the dismal experience of those displaced by Hurricane Katrina, which was seized upon to carry out a kind of class and ethnic cleansing of “desirable” areas of New Orleans. Those who live in other tower blocks quite understandably want safety checks and improvements to be implemented as soon as possible. But it is also necessary to examine the deeper causes behind this catastrophe, to understand that the inequality which has been so widely cited as a key element is rooted in the very structure of present day society. This is particularly important because so much of the current anger is directed against particular individuals or institutions - Theresa May for shying away from direct contact with Grenfell residents, the local council or the KCTMO – rather than against a mode of production which engenders such disasters from its very entrails. Unless this point is grasped, the door remains open to illusions in alternative capitalist solutions, particularly those proposed by the left wing of capital. We have already seen Corbyn again racing ahead of May in the popularity stakes because of his more “down to earth” and sensitive response to the Grenfell residents, and his advocacy of apparently radical solutions such as the “requisitioning” of empty housing stock to provide homes to those who have been displaced[2]. 

Capitalism at the root of the housing crisis

This is how Marx defined the problem, focusing specifically on the ruthless hunt for profit in the production process:

“Since the labourer passes the greater portion of his life in the process of production, the conditions of the production process are largely the conditions of his active living process, or his living conditions, and economy in these living conditions is a method of raising the rate of profit; just as we saw earlier that overwork, the transformation of the labourer into a work horse, is a means of increasing capital, or speeding up the production of surplus-value. Such economy extends to overcrowding close and unsanitary premises with labourers, or, as capitalists put it, to space saving; to crowding dangerous machinery into close quarters without using safety devices; to neglecting safety rules in production processes pernicious to health, or, as in mining, bound up with danger, etc. Not to mention the absence of all provisions to render the production process human, agreeable, or at least bearable. From the capitalist point of view this would be quite a useless and senseless waste” (Capital, vol III, chapter 5).

But this drive to save space, to neglect safety rules and cut production costs in order to raise the rate of profit applies no less to the provision of housing to the exploited class. Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) described in great detail the overcrowding, dirt, pollution, and dilapidation of the housing and streets hastily erected to accommodate the factory workers of Manchester and other cities; in The Housing Question (1872) he emphasised that  these conditions inevitably gave rise to epidemic diseases:

“Cholera, typhus, typhoid fever, smallpox and other ravaging diseases spread their germs in the pestilential air and poisoned water of these working class districts”. But he also went on to say that “In these districts, the germs hardly ever die out completely, and as soon as circumstances permit it they develop into epidemics and then spread beyond their breeding places also into the more airy and healthy parts of the town inhabited by the capitalists. Capitalist rule cannot allow itself the pressure of generating epidemic diseases with impunity; the consequences fall back on it and the angel of death rages in the ranks of the capitalists as ruthlessly as in the ranks of the workers”.

It is well known that the construction of the London sewer system in the 19th century, a titanic work of engineering which greatly reduced the impact of cholera, and which still functions today, was given a significant boost after the “Great Stink” of 1858 coming from the polluted Thames assailed the nostrils of the politicians in Westminster. Workers’ struggles and demands for better housing were also of course a factor in the bourgeoisie’s decisions to demolish slum areas and provide safer and more salubrious accommodation to the wage slaves. To protect themselves from disease, and to avoid the decimation of the work force, capital was obliged to introduce these improvements – besides, substantial profits could be made from investing in construction and property. But as Engels also noted, even in those days of substantial reforms, made possible by an ascendant mode of production, capitalism’s tendency was simply to shift the slums from one area to another. In The Housing Question he shows how this took place inside the boundaries of Manchester. In the present epoch, marked by the spiralling decay of the capitalist system on a world scale, the shift has most obviously taken place from the more “advanced” capitalist countries to the immense slums that surround so many of the cities of what used to be called the “Third World”[3].

Communism and the housing of humanity

This was why, rejecting Proudhon’s utopia (subsequently revived in the Thatcherite project of buying your own council house, which has considerably intensified the housing problem) where every worker owns their own little house, Engels insisted that “As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labour by the working class itself” (The Housing Question).

The proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917 gave us a glimpse of what, in its initial stages, this “appropriation” might mean: the palaces and mansions of the rich were expropriated in order to house the poorest families. In today’s London, alongside actual mansions and palaces, the dizzying increase in speculative building over the past few decades has left us with a huge stock of prestige towers, some parts of which are inhabited by a few wealthy residents, some parts of which are used for all kinds of parasitic commercial activities, and many parts of which remain unsold and unused. But they certainly have better fire safety systems than Grenfell. These types of buildings are a primary argument for expropriation as an immediate solution to the scandal of sub-standard housing and homelessness.

But Engels, like Marx, stood for a much more radical programme than simply taking over existing buildings. Again, rejecting the Proudhonist fantasy of a return to cottage industry, Engels stressed the progressive role played by the big cities in bringing together a mass of proletarians capable of acting together and thus challenging the capitalist order. And yet he also insisted that the communist future would have gone beyond the brutal separation of town and country and that this involved the dismantling of the great cities - a project even more grandiose in today’s epoch of swollen megacities which make the great cities of Engels’ day look like minor market towns.

“On its own admission, therefore, the bourgeois solution of the housing question has come to grief-it has come to grief owing to the antithesis of town and country. And with this we have arrived at the kernel of the problem. The housing question can only be solved when society has been sufficiently transformed for a start to be made towards abolishing the antithesis between town and country, which has been brought to an extreme point by present-day capitalist society. Far from being able to abolish this antithesis, capitalist society on the contrary is compelled to intensify it day by day. On the other hand the first modern utopian socialists, Owen and Fourier, already correctly recognized this. In their model plans the antithesis between town and country no longer exists. Consequently there takes place exactly the contrary of that which Herr Sax contends; it is not the solution of the housing question which simultaneously solves the social question, but only by the solution of the social question, that is, by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, is the solution of the housing question made possible. To want to solve the housing question while at the same time desiring to maintain the modern big cities is an absurdity. The modern big cities, however, will be abolished only by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, and when this is once on the way then there will be quite other thing to do than supplying each worker with a little house for his own possession” (The Housing Question).

Continuing this radical tradition, the Italian left communist Amadeo Bordiga wrote a text in response to the post-second world war fashion for tower blocks and skyscrapers, a fashion which has returned in force in recent years despite a series of disasters and despite all the evidence that living in tower blocks intensifies the atomisation of urban living and generates all kinds of social and psychological difficulties. For Bordiga, the tower block was a potent symbol of capitalism’s tendency to cram as many human beings as possible into as limited a space as possible, and he had harsh words for the “brutalist” architects who sang its praises. “Verticalism, that is the name for this misshapen doctrine; capitalism is verticalist.”[4]

Communism, by contrast would be “horizontalist”. Later in the same article, he explains what is meant by this:

 “When, after the forcible crushing of this ever-more obscene dictatorship, it will be possible to subordinate every solution and every plan to the amelioration of the conditions of living labour , to fashion with this aim everything that has come from dead labour, from constant capital, from the infrastructure that the human species has built up over the centuries and continues to build up on the earth’s crust, then the brutal verticalism of the cement monsters will be made ridiculous and will be suppressed, and in the immense expanses of horizontal space, once the giant cities have been deflated, the strength and intelligence of the human animal will progressively tend to render uniform the density of life and labour over the habitable parts of the earth; and these forces will henceforth be in harmony, and no longer ferocious enemies as they are in the deformed civilisation of today, where they are only brought together by the spectre of servitude and hunger”. 

Amos, 18/6/17

The 9.6% improvement in the Labour vote between the general elections of 2015 and 2017 was the biggest increase for the party since the Labour landslide of 1945. The Socialist Workers Party said that millions had voted for “real change” and it was “a great boost” to “all who campaigned against austerity and racism”. A young apprentice put it simply to the Guardian “I want a country that’s fair to everyone, where everyone’s happy, with poverty eradicated. Something similar to what Corbyn wants. Corbyn’s on our side, not like May.” Other young people were reported as seeing Corbyn as “compassionate” and representing a “new type of politics”.

Real discontent, but Labour only offer capitalist answers

There are many reasons for people to be discontented in Britain, mostly rooted in the state of the economy. Talk of the value of the pound being at its lowest level for 30 years, or GDP growth being sluggish can seem very abstract, but low wages, precarious employment, cuts in services, difficulties in finding decent affordable accommodation, they are all tangible manifestations of the impact of the economic crisis on people’s lives. But it’s not just these ‘bread and butter’ questions: people are also concerned with the global state of the environment, with the proliferation of military conflicts, with the possibility of terrorist attacks.

This is the context of the increased vote for Labour. The Conservative manifesto claimed “We do not believe in untrammelled free markets. We reject the cult of selfish individualism. We abhor social division, injustice, unfairness and inequality.” They offered increased state intervention in certain areas of the economy. They wanted to improve “workers’ rights” and be the party of “ordinary working people”. After the last 7 years of Conservative government it was clear that some workers might be inclined to look elsewhere.

Labour offered more money for the NHS, the abolition of university fees, an increased minimum wage, increased taxes for high earners, as well as the renationalisation of the railways, post office, electricity and water companies. Although they were criticised for encouraging belief in a Magic Money Tree, many Tory promises were also uncosted.

It was not as though Labour didn’t take the financial situation seriously. They intended to eliminate the deficit within five years and balance spending with the amount raised in taxes. Without resorting to debt this would definitely mean cuts as a Labour government tried to live within its means. They couldn’t promise not to freeze benefits because, as Emily Thornberry put it “We shouldn’t be promising things we can’t afford.”

Some areas would not be subject to cuts. They promised to maintain defence spending at 2% of GDP, including the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system, and increase the resources available to the police and security services. The approach to war is one of opposition to “unilateral aggressive wars of intervention”, which means they will support any wars that are supported by NATO or the United Nations. Use of nuclear weapons is not ruled out, although Labour do say they will be “extremely cautious” in their use.  As for immigration Labour say that “freedom of movement will end when we leave the European Union” and therefore proposed a new system of immigration controls which would involve “employer sponsorship, work permits, visa regulations or a tailored mix of all these.”

Rule for the few

People don’t generally read manifestos, they’re like the small print in contracts. But if you look at the programme of the Labour Party it’s in continuity with the rest of modern social democracy. Corbyn used the Blair slogan from 1997 when he said Labour would “rule for the many, not the few”. It wasn’t true then and it’s not true twenty years later. The Labour programme is for state capitalism, which has been the dominant trend over capitalism’s last century internationally. Labour’s call for an increased role for the state means an increased role for a capitalist state, a state that can only act on behalf of the capitalist ruling class. In the present system of production founded on wage labour, workers exchange their labour power for wages, and any surplus value created goes to the capitalist class whether in the shape of individual entrepreneurs, big corporations, or state bureaucracies.

The Labour Party does not propose disturbing this central relationship in capitalist society. The exploitation of the working class will continue. In opposition, they will criticise government policy, but once they take their turn in government they will ensure the management of the economy, the defence of British capitalism and the advancement of British imperialism. In government or opposition, they have consistently upheld the needs of capitalist exploitation. This is true not only for the past hundred years of the Labour party in Britain - it’s no less the case for the last century of social democracy internationally. All these parties have shown that they support imperialist wars, carry out repression against workers’ struggles, and spin a web of lies about offering an alternative to capitalism.

The dangerous appeal of the left

Overall, we are in a period where the bourgeoisie, particularly in Britain, is having great difficulties in the deployment of its political apparatus. One element that has experienced a recent revival is the Labour Party. It offers illusions of social change through parliament and democracy, where the reality is the continuation of capitalist rule. Social change for the working class doesn’t come from trooping through polling stations to vote for left wing capitalist parties. Workers, from small struggles and an initial questioning of capitalism to the point where they can establish themselves as a conscious independent force against capitalism and its state, need to lose all illusions in state capitalism and its proponents. Labour is just another face of the bourgeoisie, but, where the parties of the right are readily rejected by thoughtful workers, illusions in the left are widespread and insidious.

Car 11/6/17

Introduction

In a previous article about a discussion on libcom[1] we commented on the fact that some comrades appear to reject the concept of decadence even though they agree that capitalism is a historically transitory system. An example of this line of argument is a 1993 text by the UK-based journal Aufheben which claims that: “The theory of the decline of capitalism is an interpretation of the meaning of Marx's insight that capitalism is a transitory system, an interpretation that turns the notion of a particular dynamic of development into a mechanistic and determinist theory of inevitable collapse”.[2]

For us, this seems contradictory to say the least. Surely the decadence of capitalism flows logically and inevitably from the materialist conception that all class societies are transitory, each going through an ascendant and decadent stage? Rejecting decadence implies that capitalism, unlike all previous class societies, is somehow able to avoid the consequences of its fatal contradictions and if that is the case, in what way is it a transitory system?

This article explores in more depth where exactly the concept of capitalism as a historically transitory system comes from and how it relates to the Marxist theory of decadence, with particular reference to the writings of Marx and Engels on this subject, drawing out some of the political implications of denying the intimate connection between these key concepts of historical materialism and showing that they have nothing to do with “mechanistic and determinist theories of inevitable collapse”; on the contrary, the active revolutionary role of human beings lies at their heart.

The discoveries and best insights of the revolutionary bourgeoisie

“The highest maturity or stage which any Something can reach is that in which it begins to perish.” (Hegel)[3]

Marxism is sometimes criticised for taking the whole idea of a succession of modes of production going through ascendant and decadent stages from bourgeois political economy. This rather misses the point; from the beginning, scientific socialism, as the highest theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, consciously based itself on the discoveries and best insights of the bourgeoisie’s historians and philosophers. These included the existence of a series of historical epochs marking the economic development of society.

In the early stage of its ideological struggle against feudalism the revolutionary bourgeoisie’s main focus was on the need to empirically grasp the natural world in order to develop the forces of production. Its most important expression was a form of materialism influenced by discoveries especially in physics, which represented a huge advance for humanity over the theological and metaphysical thought of the Middle Ages.

Bourgeois materialism essentially conceived the entire universe as a machine in motion according to fixed natural laws; human beings were simply more complex and delicate machines whose thoughts and actions were the product of the motion of atoms. If the bourgeoisie could ignore the active role of human beings in history it is because its economic system appeared to operate according to laws as impersonal as those of astronomy in the general interest of human progress. But to consolidate its victory it needed to develop a scientific understanding of the workings of history in order justify its system as the final, perfect form of society.

The first open class struggles of the proletariat sounded the death knell of this attempt by the bourgeoisie to become critically self-conscious of the world and from now on its most important theoretical developments – in particular the development of political economy from Adam Smith to Ricardo and idealist philosophy from Kant to Hegel – could not help but reveal the contradictions of its position as the new ruling class. Above all the bourgeoisie was unable to recognise in the proletariat’s growing struggles the historically transitory nature of its own system.

The science of political economy begins as part of the bourgeoisie’s effort to comprehend empirically the new society it is attempting to establish. But with the first appearance of economic crises and workers’ struggles it retreats to become a justification for bourgeois class rule; a scientific investigation of the basic premises of capitalism can only be undertaken in the form of a critique of its workings from the standpoint of the new revolutionary class.

The development of idealist philosophy by Hegel is the last great attempt by the revolutionary bourgeoisie to grasp the entire movement of history. Hegel’s contribution to human knowledge is immense, fully acknowledged later by the founders of scientific socialism: “not only a creative genius but also a man of encyclopaedic erudition, he played an epoch-making role in every sphere” (Engels).[4] Hegel’s philosophical idealism is an advance over bourgeois materialism because it begins from the recognition of human society, including ideas, thoughts and beliefs, as a subject for scientific, empirical research equal to the natural world; it partially recognises the active role of human beings in history, and, drawing on the findings of political economy, it affirms the crucial role of human labour in the development of society. Above all, it systematically develops a dialectical method with which to comprehend the evolution of human history.

Dialectics, with its long history in the civilisations of Asia and the Middle East as well as Ancient Greece, is intrinsically a critical, revolutionary method because it affirms the transient nature of the existing state of things; everything in the world is in a state of motion, constantly coming into being, changing and passing away. The source of this motion is the struggle between the contradictory tendencies inherent in all phenomena and processes: “Contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality, and it is only insofar as it contains a contradiction that anything moves and has impulse and activity” (Hegel).[5] Only by analysing things in the context of this motion rooted in contradictions can we begin to understand the whole picture of the world, including its reflection in the minds of human beings.

Hegel’s lasting achievement is to use this dialectical method to represent the entire sweep of human history as a process of change, transformation and development, and to attempt to identify the laws that underlie this process. He was unable to do this, however, due not only to the limits of his own knowledge and of bourgeois society at the time but also to the flaws and contradictions in his method: having shown that all historical forms were transitory, for political reasons he tried to limit the concept of dialectical change to previous societies, and having proposed an empirical approach to analysing human thoughts, ideas and beliefs as abstract pictures of real things and real historical processes, he fell back into an idealist view that these were the products of an “Absolute Idea” that existed somewhere outside of history and the world; in other words he turned the relationship between ideas and reality completely upside down.

Understanding the real movement of history

Significantly, after Hegel bourgeois philosophers and historians progressively abandoned the dialectical vision of history and the search for the laws of the evolution of human society. Under the influence of the class struggle a new generation of radical thinkers was able to identify the flaws and contradictions in Hegel’s idealism and restore the dialectical vision of history but was ultimately unsuccessful in using a materialist approach to identify the laws of historical change.

It was the development of the proletarian movement itself that both demanded and made possible a clarification of the laws of historical change. Adhering to this movement, Marx and Engels were finally able to draw on the lessons of its struggles and the gains of its first theorists to identify the motor force of history as the antagonism between the classes, which are themselves the products of material conditions in a given historical period.

Turning Hegel’s method ‘back on its feet’, they were able to show that the thoughts, beliefs and ideas of human beings are determined by the material conditions of their social existence. Dialectics, rather than the workings of some “Absolute Idea” outside of the world, is a reflection in the human brain of real historical processes, and therefore the starting point for a scientific, empirical investigation of bourgeois society. For the first time it was possible to understand the historical conditions that had given rise to capitalist exploitation and therefore to discover the conditions for its ending.

Accepting the research of the bourgeoisie’s own theorists and historians as a “broad outline”, Marx and Engels identified a series of modes of production as historical epochs marking the progressive development of society, showing that, by developing the productive forces of humanity and creating the conditions for a classless society, capitalism was simply the final stage in the class struggle, its revolutionary overthrow concluding the ‘prehistory’ of human society.[6]

The historically transitory nature of capitalist society is thus the foundation stone of this new proletarian scientific method, which assimilates the most advanced methods and conclusions of the revolutionary bourgeoisie and, by extension, the accumulated wisdom not only of bourgeois but all previous societies.

A dialectical vision of historical progress

At the core of this method is a dialectical vision of historical progress driven by the growing social productivity of labour; the increasing power of human beings to satisfy the social needs of their existence. These needs are first and foremost physical, because “The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals” (German Ideology).[7] But the satisfaction of these immediately creates new needs – emotional, intellectual, sexual – through which human beings express their life. The way human beings define their needs is determined in the final analysis by the way in which they reproduce their social existence in a given historical period and the way they satisfy their needs is through their labour, consciously transforming nature for this purpose.

As the productivity of labour increases, human beings are able to produce an ever greater surplus over and above the needs of the individual and the community; and as the productive forces available to humanity grow, an increasingly specialised division of labour develops, which is expressed in the development of ever more complex forms of ownership of the means of production leading to the evolution of private property. The growth of the social productivity of labour is therefore also expressed in the growing separation of human beings from the products of their labour, which increasingly appear as something alien to them, and from nature, which Marx in an early text describes as “man’s inorganic body”.[8]

This process of increasing alienation reaches its extreme form in capitalism. But at the same time, by rendering the great mass of humanity ‘propertyless’ and by making possible the unlimited development of the productive forces, capitalism creates the practical conditions for its abolition. Historical progress is thus a dialectical process; a working out, through a succession of different modes of production, of the contradictions between the growth of the social productivity of labour and the social relations which increasingly separate human beings from the products of their labour. For historical materialism, ‘progress’ is the extent to which the real movement of history makes possible the liberation of humanity; not economic growth or the development of technology in itself.

The critique of political economy: discovering the conditions for capitalism’s downfall

Having shown that capitalist exploitation was the product of specific historical conditions, it was necessary for the proletarian movement to discover the precise mechanisms that would create the conditions for its ending.

The Communist Manifesto locates capitalism’s contradictions in its inherent tendency towards the overproduction of commodities and the periodic crises that result. The response of capital to these only creates the conditions for even greater crises and further undermines its ability to prevent them; having conjured up a gigantic growth of the productive forces, the bourgeoisie finds its own relations of production threatening to destroy it. But these same relations also create its grave-digger, the proletariat, whose organisation as a class is the inevitable product of the development of capital itself; this is the fatal contradiction that determines its historically transitory nature.

The Manifesto triumphantly proclaims the fall of capitalism and the victory of the proletariat to be equally inevitable. But as we know, the defeat of the 1848 revolutions and the subsequent spectacular expansion of capitalism led Marx to develop a more sober, longer term view of the opportunities for capitalism’s overthrow – and also a more precise analysis of the mechanisms through which capitalism would eventually reveal its fatal contradictions and create the conditions for its overthrow. To do this it was necessary to expose the basic premises of capitalism hidden beneath the science of the bourgeoisie.

If Marx’s critique of political economy appears to be explaining history as an objective process, this is because bourgeois society is a particular form of the social life of human beings in which the relations between human beings in the social reproduction of their lives appear as relations between things. By generalising the production and exchange of commodities, capitalism both separates the producers from the products of their labour and tears asunder all hitherto existing social ties, leaving “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment””. Instead of exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions it substitutes “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation” (Manifesto). But this exploitation is now hidden behind the apparently impersonal workings of ‘the market’ or ‘the necessities of production’, so that capitalism appears to be based on relations between ‘things’ that are completely outside of human control.

For Marx, these ‘things’ – like ‘money’ or ‘commodities’ or ‘wage labour’ – are summoned into existence by the objective laws of capitalism and have their own material reality: “They are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production” (Capital).[9] For political economy, of course, they are ‘natural’, eternal forms. But the critique of this bourgeois science reveals its most fundamental ideas and principles to be mere fetishes, distorted visions of underlying relations between human beings within a specific historical epoch: “The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour on the basis of commodity production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other forms of production” (Capital).[10] The objective laws of capitalism themselves are historically specific forms taken by the class struggle at a certain stage in its development, which can only be destroyed in practice through the proletarian revolution.

The precise mechanisms that reveal capitalism’s historically transitory nature

In Capital Marx more exactly locates the tendency of capitalism towards overproduction in the specific character of capitalism as the first mode of production to have generalised commodity production, and specifically in the wage labour relation. Significantly he begins his investigation with the commodity, the basic unit of the capitalist mode of production, because it is in the commodity that we find the germ of all the contradictions contained in bourgeois society. It is these contradictions beneath the surface appearance of ‘things’ that provide its motion; the same contradiction that is experienced by the worker as “the accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation”[11] also drives capital to the point where it eventually becomes a definitive fetter on the productive forces.

Marx’s analysis of the precise mechanisms that determine capitalism’s historically transitory nature has been dealt with many times.[12] To summarise:

1. The first is in the process of producing surplus value itself. For capital only living labour can create value, but at the same time the capitalists are driven by the whip of competition to improve productivity; that is, to increase the ratio between the dead labour of machines and the living labour of human beings, thus reducing the rate of profit and increasing the mass of commodities produced. The more accumulation accelerates, the more the rate of profit falls, threatening the continuation of the production process. For Marx:

“this characteristic barrier in fact testifies to the restrictiveness and the solely historical and  transitory character of the capitalist mode of production; it bears witness that this is not an absolute mode of production for the production of wealth but actually comes into conflict at a certain stage with the latter’s further development”.[13]

2. The production of surplus value is only what Marx calls the ‘first act’ of the capitalist production process. The increasing mass of commodities produced must be sold if the capitalist is to realise the surplus value extracted, but the conditions for this are again determined by the wage labour relation itself, which dictates that the workers can never consume the full value of what they produce: by definition they must always be overproducers, while at the same time capitalism is driven to produce an increasing of commodities without regard to the capacity of the working class to consume. This is why “The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses, in the face of the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute consumption capacity of society set a limit to them”.[14]

In order to try to resolve this inherent contradiction, capital must continually expand the market but this can never keep up with the expansion of production; the more productiveness develops, the more capital finds itself confronting the limits to consumption due to its own social relations.

We can see clearly here that capitalist production describes not a cycle but an ever-increasing circle or spiral and the continual attempts of capitalism to overcome its contradictions, which present themselves as imminent barriers to its own further development, can only create even more formidable barriers in its way, because:

“The true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-valorization appear as the starting and finishing point, as the motive and purpose of production; production is production only for capital, and not the reverse. i.e. the means of production are not simply means for a steadily expanding pattern of life for the society of the producers.” [15]

For Marx, what distinguishes capitalism from previous modes of production above all is that it is driven towards the unlimited development of the productive forces but, since it is based on class antagonisms, this is in contradiction with the definite limits of its own relations of production and therefore drives it towards “dissolution” (Grundrisse)[16].

In a nutshell; capitalism is doomed because it must grow without limit – yet it is itself its own limit. This is the fundamental contradiction, the specific reason why capitalism, like all previous class societies, is transitory: it’s only purpose is the self-expansion of capital, but in pursuit of this it confronts the barrier of its own relations of production, eventually reaching the point where these relations become a definitive fetter on the further development of the productive forces, or, to put it another way, the further development of the productive forces itself becomes a fetter on capital: “When it has reached this point, capital, i.e. wage labour, enters into the same relation towards the development of social wealth and of the forces of production as the guild system, serfdom, slavery, and is necessarily stripped off as a fetter.”[17]

Decadence: the growth of capital’s destructive forces

“To exploit living labour, capital must destroy dead labour which is still useful. Loving to suck warm young blood, it kills corpses.” (Bordiga)[18]

In an abstract, a-historical sense, of course, capitalist social relations are always a fetter on the productive forces of humanity because wage labour and capital place artificial restrictions on their potential growth from the very start. But the real question is whether the material conditions for a new mode of production exist, since in the materialist conception of history, “new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society” (Preface). Only when these conditions exist does capitalism’s continued survival become a definitive fetter on the development of all the productive forces available to humanity.

What are the productive forces? Far from defining these merely in terms of technological development or economic growth, for historical materialism the productive forces cannot be separated from the social relations of production in which they develop and operate, because: “a certain mode of production … is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a “productive force” (German Ideology). Both must be considered as a totality.

The productive forces of humanity in the widest sense are the means available to human beings to reproduce their material life and meet their needs in a given historical epoch. These comprise not only physical means like machines but also scientific knowledge, technical skills and, most important of all, human labour and creativity. In capitalism the most important productive force is the working class itself; not just as the class engaged in social labour, the source of value in society, but as the class that is the bearer of communism, because for Marxism, “Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself”(Poverty of Philosophy).[19]

Decadence is therefore the fettering of the growth of all the means available to human beings to reproduce their social existence compared to what would be possible without the constraint of the existing social relations. This includes not only economic growth and technological development in the broadest terms but also relations between human beings and the ability of individuals to develop their potential knowledge, skills and creativity to the maximum possible given the material conditions.

Once a mode of production has entered into its decadent stage, development does not come to a halt; the dialectical movement of society continues, driven by contradictions that are now sharpened and increasingly come to the surface, while the barriers imposed by the outmoded property relations are pushed to their furthest limits in order to prolong the mode of production’s survival, giving every appearance of growth but in fact heralding its decay.

As the first mode of production to be driven by the continual need for the expansion or accumulation of profit, capitalism’s decadence is characterised not by long-term stagnation or a collapse of production like previous class societies but “bitter contradictions, crises, spasms”, together with “the violent destruction of capital” which for Marx is “the most striking form in which advice is given it to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production”.[20]

Starved of sufficient outlets for its expansion, capital must increasingly destroy the productive forces, above all through wars which no longer serve a rational purpose in consolidating national units or extending the field of accumulation but rather express the competitive struggle of the most advanced capitals for a share of the already-existing world market. The world wars of the 20th century, with their destruction of millions of proletarians, in the most developed centres of bourgeois society, along with the accumulated productive forces of humanity, are the clearest proof that the system has entered its epoch of decadence.

With the continued survival of the system, the productive forces themselves are progressively transformed into forces of destruction, in which we see a qualitative development of all the destructive tendencies that are inherent in capital’s mode of operation, including the expulsion of living labour from the production process, the severing of the connection between human beings and nature and the long term despoiling of nature itself in the drive for profit.[21]

The spiralling of this destructive dynamic ultimately poses the alternative for humanity of an advance to socialism or a descent into full-scale barbarism.

But if the entry of capitalism into its epoch of decadence is inevitable from the moment of its birth, its revolutionary overthrow is not. In the Communist Manifesto, despite describing the decline of previous class societies as resulting either in a “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large”, or the “common ruin of the contending classes”, Marx and Engels consistently refer to the downfall of capitalism and the victory of the proletariat as inevitable. But to be consistent with their scientific method we must indeed affirm that in the absence of the conscious overthrow of capitalism by the proletariat, the outcome of capitalism’s decline will be “the common ruin of the contending classes” – and quite possibly the destruction of human civilisation along with it.

Conclusions

At the heart of historical materialism is a dialectical vision of the evolution of human society unfolding through a succession of modes of production, each going through a stage of ascent and decline. There is no ‘theory of decadence’ separate from the materialist conception, based on the study of history, of historically transitory class societies.

The denial of the theory of decadence at the same time as defending the position that capitalism is a historically transitory system is at best contradictory and confused. At worst it is a deliberate piece of misdirection by those who want to pretend that ‘decadence theory’ is an invention of the ICC or of left communism.

Logically the denial of decadence must also lead to the rejection of the idea that each mode of production goes through a period of ascent in the first place. And since both ascendance and decadence describe the movement of a class society as the result of its inbuilt contradictions, this is also in effect a denial of the dialectical vision of history, or at the very least its taming and dilution.

We have shown that the decadence of capitalism is inherent in the wage labour relationship that is capital’s central contradiction. The same contradiction that is experienced by the worker as exploitation and oppression drives capitalism to the point where it becomes the biggest barrier to the further development of the social productivity of labour. This is why from the moment of its birth capitalist production describes not a cycle but an ever-increasing circle or spiral. But if this point is not reached, it implies that capitalism can somehow overcome its contradictions, or at least avoid their fatal consequences. According to this view, capitalist production thus describes not a spiral but a repetitive cycle.

Despite paying lip service to the concept of capitalism’s transitory nature, the denial of decadence, if taken to its logical conclusion, leaves us with a vision of capitalism as an enclosed, self-perpetuating system that cannot be undermined by its own internal contradictions.

As for the criticism that decadence is a mechanistic and determinist theory that ignores the subjective dimension of the class struggle, we have seen that historical materialism is founded on the recognition of the active, revolutionary role of human beings in history. By developing the productive forces and bringing into existence the proletariat, capitalism creates the material conditions for its own supersession. But human thoughts, ideas and beliefs are also a material factor, and the maturation of all the conditions for capitalism's overthrow depends on the ability of the proletariat to fully develop its class consciousness and understand its historic tasks.

This is the one point where our views appear to coincide with those of the deniers; unless capitalism is destroyed by the proletariat it will persist, albeit in a state of advanced decomposition; there is no ‘third way’. The problem with the denial of decadence is that it underestimates the implications of this for the future of humanity because, as we have seen, it is precisely the fettering of the productive forces by capitalist social relations that provokes a qualitative change in the destructive tendencies of capital, with potentially dire consequences for human civilisation and life on the planet. The alternative facing humanity today is socialism or barbarism; not socialism or simply the continuation of capitalist exploitation.

In fact, far from ignoring the subjective dimension, the ICC has written at some length about the immense difficulties the proletariat faces in taking on its historic tasks, due to both objective and subjective factors.[22] There are undoubtedly objective reasons why the proletariat has so far been unable to overthrow capitalism: for example, the slow rhythm of the development of the open economic crisis since the 1960s has allowed the bourgeoisie to spread out its attacks on the working class over a whole period and to use the apparatus of state capitalism to take measures to ‘manage’ the crisis. But even this has a subjective dimension in that it is also a result of the ruling class’ ability to learn the lessons of dealing with the proletarian threat to prevent the development of class consciousness. As a result we must recognise that, in the ICC’s phrase, the proletariat has so far missed its ‘appointments with history’, above all in the revolutionary wave that put an end to WW1.

Revolutionaries have undoubtedly underestimated the capacities of the bourgeoisie to manage its open crisis for so long. But this should not lead us to underestimate the importance of subjective factors in the survival of capitalism. The final irony of accusing the ‘theory of decadence’ of ignoring the subjective dimension is that it is largely because of this factor, in the negative sense, that we are forced to have this discussion today, a full 100 years after capitalism entered its epoch of decadence and announced its historically transitory nature.

“But the time is coming when “the conditions themselves [will] cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!”.[23] If it remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie, human society will never reach the next century, other than in shreds, nothing human any longer left in it. As long as this extreme has not been reached, as long as a capitalist system survives, there will necessarily be its exploited class, the proletariat. And there will therefore remain the possibility that the proletariat, spurred on by capitalism's total economic bankruptcy, will at last overcome its hesitations and take on the enormous task that history has confided to it: the communist revolution.”[24]     

MH

The new president of the Republic has finally been elected, this “new man” who is “not part of the system”, Emmanuel Macron.

Macron is promising to “change France” and “reunite the French” in a new national, fraternal concord. He promises to re-launch the French economy and claims to be for European renewal, partisan of a more democratic and economically dynamic euro zone. These of course are all entirely bourgeois concerns. Only the bourgeois class and its representatives can win elections. Democracy is the ideology which hides the dictatorship of capitalism and the totalitarian domination of its state. For more than a century, the electoral terrain has been a trap for the working class. Bourgeois elections are one of the key moments for the ruling class to ensure it gets a government which is in line with its interests, while at the same time intensifying its democratic ideology, through which it tries to make us believe that it’s the majority of the population which governs and makes the decisions. This is the exact opposite of reality. Democracy enables the minority to rule over the majority and the proletariat in particular. It covers up class antagonisms which in reality can’t be reconciled. It turns the revolutionary working class into a sum of individuals, of isolated, atomised, powerless “citizens” and “voters”.

Elections marked by the danger of populism

It’s obvious that the most responsible sectors of the bourgeoisie were very uneasy about the possibility of the Front National coming to power. This is a party which also defends the national interest but at the same time is totally irresponsible and irrational. In this these sectors of the French bourgeoisie were not alone. The German chancellor Angela Merkel and her minister of the economy, Herr Schlaube, didn’t hide their very active support for Macron. Between the two rounds of the presidential election, Merkel declared “I have no doubt that if Emmanuel Macron is elected he will be a strong president”. Not forgetting ex-president of the USA Obama and the European Commission who also made their support for Macron perfectly clear. At the beginning of the campaign, the French bourgeoisie had been counting on two candidates which it saw as being best placed to manage the national capital while keeping out the FN: messieurs Juppé and Macron. However, Juppé’s candidature had from the start been severely compromised. A former prime minister, a member of a party which has been rejected by the majority (the Républicains), a man of the apparatus, he carried a strong risk of failure. This was amply confirmed by the first round of the right wing primaries which saw the surprise victory of François Fillon. In fact, growing sectors of the bourgeoisie were already working more and more openly for the victory of the “new man”, Macron. The active support of the outgoing president, François Hollande, soon became an open secret. The same went for a certain number of key figures in the Socialist Party, which finds itself in a real mess. The same also went for the right wing parties who were equally in crisis. Supported by numerous business men, financiers and industrialists, backed up by a large part of the media, in particular the BFM news channel, the campaign was extremely effective. Macron had to be promoted at any cost!

Why such determination on the part of these sectors of the French and western bourgeoisie? Certainly not in order to defend the interests of the working class! The truth is that these sectors of the ruling class were deeply concerned about the possibility of an FN victory and at the same time they needed to give the illusion that some kind of “renewal” was taking place.  

The bourgeoisie is the most Machiavellian class in history

The bourgeoisie is without doubt the most intelligent ruling class in history. It can never completely lose sight of its class interests and of how to defend them. The history of capitalism shows this, whether the bourgeoisie is up against the revolutionary working class or defending its economic and imperialist interests. This is why the rise of populism in most of the western countries is so alarming for it. This anxiety became a priority concern after the victory of Brexit in the UK and Trump in the USA. These are not events which took place in minor countries. Two of the most powerful bourgeoisies in the world were incapable of preventing the electoral victory of populism. The alarm-bells are now ringing on a permanent basis, especially now that populism is threatening to tear the European Union apart. This couldn’t be allowed in France, where there is a powerful populist formation, the FN, which is sapping the bases of the ideological mystifications which the bourgeoisie uses to maintain a certain level of social cohesion (the “Rights of Man”, universal progress, etc).  The irrational, backward-looking FN is incapable of providing an adequate ideological stratitjacket since it openly preaches a form of exclusion, declaring that the world is about to go under and that the only thing you can do is to save “our nation”, our “own kind” at the expense of the rest of the planet.

What most worries the more lucid factions of the bourgeoisie is the fact that the populist parties are so ill-adapted for defending the general interests of the national capital. Marine Le Pen’s call for a referendum about leaving the EU or quitting the euro is a very clear example. The populist parties are incapable of understanding what policies need to be pursued. They propose something one day and its opposite the next, and this is true both at the economic and imperialist levels. To prevent the FN coming to power in France became a priority, just as it was to show that the Brexit and Trump victories were not an irreversible phenomenon. The result of the elections in France has brought considerable relief to a large number of major governments. This is why, despite the historical fragility of the bourgeoisie, this election had been a success not only for the ruling class in France but also on the international level, above all in Europe.

The underlying causes of this response by the bourgeoisie

The necessity to react to the rise of populism has its roots in the historic weakening of the ruling class, which includes the main western countries. Underneath this irreversible historic process is the decomposition of the capitalist system. This expresses itself in particular in a growing difficulty to develop a long-term policy, to ensure sufficient cohesion to make it possible to defend the national interest above those of cliques, coteries and personal rivalries. This dynamic has particularly affected the traditional parties which have been at the head of bourgeois states since the end of Second World War. In France, it’s the parties of the traditional right and the Socialist Party which have been most strongly affected, to the point where they have become increasingly marginalised. A large majority of the population no longer wants anything from these parties. Having been running France for decades, they have, each in their turn, done nothing but impose austerity and precarious employment without being able to offer any kind of credible perspective for the future. Gangrened by scandals, clan battles and ego-wars, they have earned disgust and rejection. They made a bed for a form of populism that is particularly strong. This weakening of the most responsible and experienced bourgeois parties is a reality facing the ruling class and it has had the most serious consequences, as we see today in the USA. At the same time there is a need to make new attacks on the working class as soon as possible. Given the urgency of this situation, the discredited traditional parties could no longer do their job. They had become an added factor in the historic weakening of the bourgeoisie. Even if there is no guarantee that the legislative elections in June will give Macron a solid majority, the immense pro-Macron campaign will certainly be continued by the main factions of the French and German bourgeoisies, whatever their genuine economic and imperialist divergences.

Enormous attacks on living standards on the horizon

The bourgeoisie is getting things in place for unprecedented attacks on living and working conditions. This is what Macron has just repeated to the whole of Europe at a recent press conference in Berlin: “I am here to profoundly reform France. I will keep my campaign promises”. The working class has been warned. Macron is going to act in a full-on manner, with no going back. He is proposing to take a series of measures for which workers will pay the cost – some of them to come into effect this summer when many workers will not be at the workplace alongside their class brothers and sisters.

The key word here is generalised flexibility, with the aim of going much further than the El Khomri law. At each workplace, wage levels will be imposed, along with real working hours and conditions for hiring and firing, all in the name of being more competitive. This means a ferocious increase in exploitation. But even that will not be enough. There will also be blows against unemployment insurance. The increase in the CSG (social security contributions) and the intensified policing of the unemployed is part of the programme. As for pensioners, “the sums contributed individually will determine everyone’s pension level”. This is very clear: you will have to work longer for even more miserable pensions, with the guarantees that still remain disappearing rapidly. And Macron also plans to get rid of special regimes. This is his way of “reducing the social fracture” as he put it, paraphrasing former president Chirac. Precarious employment and impoverishment for the employed, the unemployed, for young people and the retired. The whole working class is about to be violently attacked by the French capitalist state.

There is no solution except the class struggle

It’s clear that elections can only be a weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Yesterday Hollande and Sarkozy, today Macron…but for the working class, there is no other perspective but increased exploitation and the degradation of living standards. The bourgeoisie accords no dignity to the lives of the proletarians, or to human life in general. The only things that count are profit and its continued domination. In this Macron can count on other factions of the national bourgeoisie. Mélanchon and his movement have already actively participated in strengthening republican and democratic ideology. In the future they will probably have an even more important role in countering the class struggle. Mélanchon, this old hand of the bourgeois state apparatus, knows this quite well. As do the leftists and the trade unions, especially the CGT and FO, since they are already calling for a “third social round”, which means fully playing their role of boxing in struggles and sabotaging them from within.

For part of the working class, it’s a grave error to think that you can challenge the existing order and hold off the impending attacks by getting pulled into a reactionary populist revolt, which sets worker against worker. Equally dangerous is supporting the “democratic” anti-populist forces. A small number of young people in demos at the end of the first round of the election raised the slogan “Neither Marine nor Macron, neither Fatherland nor Boss”. Whatever confusions might go along with it, and whatever difficulties face the proletariat today at the level of its consciousness and its fighting spirit, this slogan carries the seeds of the class struggle and the necessity to affirm the perspective of another kind of society. The communist revolution remains the only realistic way to construct a truly human society, without classes and without exploitation. And this means consciously confronting the bourgeoisie, its democracy, and all its different factions.

Philippe, 19.5.17

In September 1867, a group of Fenians, members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, blew a hole in the wall of Clerkenwell prison in London in an attempt to free another member of the organisation. The resulting explosion, while failing to free the prisoner, caused the collapse of a row of nearby working class houses, killing 12 and injuring over a hundred residents.

This was a time when Karl Marx and other revolutionaries supported the cause of Irish independence, particularly because they saw it as an essential precondition for breaking the ties between the working class in the mainland and their own ruling class, who used their domination of Ireland to create an illusion of privilege among the English workers and separate them from their Irish class brothers and sisters.

Nevertheless, Marx reacted angrily to the Fenians’ action. In a letter to Engels he wrote

“The last exploit of the Fenians in Clerkenwell was a very stupid thing. The London masses, who have shown great sympathy for Ireland, will be made wild by it and be driven into the arms of the of the government party. One cannot expect the London proletarians to allow themselves to be blown up in honour of the Fenian emissaries. There is always a kind of fatality about such a secret, melodramatic sort of conspiracy” [1]

Marx’s anger was intensified by the fact that, not long before the Clerkenwell explosion, large numbers of English workers had joined demonstrations in solidarity with five Fenians executed by the British government in Ireland.

In this brief passage from Marx, there is a neat summary of two of the main reasons why communists have always rejected individual terrorism: that it replaces the massive, self-organised action of the working class with conspiracies by small elites; and that, whatever the intentions of those who carry out such acts, their net result is to drive the working class away from an independent stance and into the hands of the government and the ruling class.

Terrorism yesterday and today

A great deal has changed since Marx wrote these words. The call for national independence, which made sense in an epoch when capitalism had not yet exhausted its progressive role, became inextricably linked, from the First World War onwards, with support for one imperialist camp against another. For Marx, terrorism was an erroneous method used by a national movement that deserved support. In our epoch, the epoch in which only proletarian revolution can offer a way forward for humanity, national movements have themselves become reactionary. Bound up with the endless imperialist conflicts that plague humanity, terrorist tactics have increasingly mirrored the brutal degradation which marks warfare in this period. Where once terrorist groups mainly targeted symbols and figureheads of the ruling class (as in the case of the Russian ‘People’s Will’ group who assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881), most of today’s terrorists translate the logic of the states who wage imperialist war – such as the indiscriminate aerial bombing of entire populations – into their own indiscriminate bombings and murders, aimed at a population which is blamed for the crimes of the governments which rule them.

According to today’s pseudo-revolutionaries on the left[2], behind the religious slogans of al-Qaida or Isis terrorists, we are witnessing the same old struggle against national oppression that the Fenians were engaged in, and today’s marxists should therefore offer support for such movements, even if they distance themselves from their religious ideology and from their terrorist methods. But as Lenin said in response to those social democrats who used the writings of Marx to justify participation in the first imperialist world war: “Anyone who today refers to Marx’s attitude towards the wars of the epoch of the progressive bourgeoisie, and forgets Marx’s statement that the ‘workingmen have no country’ – a statement that applies precisely to the period of the reactionary and outmoded bourgeoisie, to the epoch of the socialist revolution, is shamelessly distorting Marx, and is substituting the bourgeois point of view for the socialist.” (Lenin, Socialism and War, 1915). The murderous means used by groups like Isis and their sympathisers are entirely consistent with their aims – which is not to overturn oppression but to substitute one form of oppression for another, and to ‘win’ at any cost in the gruesome battle between the one set of imperialist powers and another set (such as Saudi Arabia or Qatar, for example) which backs them up. And their ‘ultimate’ ideal – the global Caliphate – even if it is as unrealisable as Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich, is no less an imperialist venture, demanding well-tried imperialist measures of slaughter and conquest.

Real divisions and false unity

Marx pointed out that the Fenians’ action in London would drive a wedge between the working class movement on the mainland and the struggle for Irish independence. It would create divisions between English and Irish workers which could only benefit the ruling class. Today, the Islamist terrorists make no secret of the fact that their aim is precisely to create divisions through the atrocities they carry out: most of the initial actions of Isis in Iraq targeted the Shia Muslim population, which Isis regards as heretics, with the goal of sparking a sectarian civil war. The same logic in the London or Manchester terror attacks: to sharpen the gulf between the Muslims and the non-believers, the kaffirs, and thus hasten the outbreak of full-blown ‘jihad’ in the central countries. This is further testimony that even terrorism can degenerate in a society which itself degenerating.

Apart from the openly racist right wing, who like the jihadis also long for a kind of race war in the streets, the stock response of governments and politicians to the terrorist attacks in Europe is to raise the national flag and proclaim that ‘the terrorists will not divide us ‘. They talk about solidarity and unity against hatred and division. But from a working class point of view, this is a false solidarity – the same kind of solidarity with our own exploiters which ties workers to the patriotic war efforts of the imperialist state. And indeed, such calls for national unity are often a prelude for mobilising for war, as after the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001, with the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. This is what Marx meant by workers being driven into the arms of the government party. In an atmosphere of mounting fear and insecurity, when you are faced with the prospect of random massacres in the streets, bars or concert halls, an understandable response of those threatened by such attacks is to demand the protection of the state and its police forces. Following the recent atrocities in Manchester and London, the question of ‘security ‘was a major issue in the recent UK election campaign, with the Tories denouncing Corbyn for being soft on terrorism and Corbyn denouncing May for cutting police numbers.

Faced with the terrorists on the one side and the capitalist state on the other, the proletarian position is to reject both, to fight for class interests and class demands. The working class has a deep need to organise itself independently, including the organisation of its defence against state repression and terrorist provocations. But given the weakened condition of the working class today, this need is a long way from being fulfilled. There is a tendency for many workers to see no alternative but to seek the protection of the state, while a small number of disaffected proletarians are drawn towards the putrid ideology of jihadism. And both these tendencies actively undermine the potential for the class to become self-aware and self-organised. Thus, every terrorist outrage, and every state-sponsored ‘solidarity’ campaign in response to it, must be seen as blows against class consciousness – and ultimately, as blows against the promise of a society based on real human solidarity.  

Amos 12/6/17

The general election on 8 June gave the UK a hung parliament. The Conservative Party were 8 seats short of the majority Theresa May had hoped to increase. This meant the possibility of a new election before the end of Brexit negotiations and further instability. This is a failure for Mrs May, and leaves her in office as Prime Minister only on sufferance until the Tory Party grandees feel it is opportune to oust her.

More seriously, it reopens the question of what sort of exit from the EU Britain will try to negotiate, which could prove useful for the bourgeoisie. The fact that the government looks likely to be dependent on the 10 Democratic Unionist Party MPs from Northern Ireland could undermine the power-sharing agreement there which relies on the government’s apparent “rigorous impartiality”. However, definitely on the plus side for the ruling class, the ‘Corbyn factor’ has really increased illusions in democracy among young people and particularly among young workers. Turnout among the 18-24 age group rose from 43% to 58% since the 2015 election, a significant leap in participation in the electoral circus.

The background to the 2017 election: Brexit

This election cannot be understood without seeing it in the context of the 2015 general election and last year’s Brexit referendum. Like many other countries, Britain faced the growth of populism[1]  in the form of the UK Independence Party which offers a simplistic answer to much of the discontent in the population, including parts of the working class, based on opposition to immigration, and the illusion the country could regain its former economic and imperialist power if only it took control back from the EU. In doing this it disparaged elites and experts – particularly economists who warned against the effect of Brexit on growth. On a totally bourgeois terrain of nationalism and xenophobia, without any pretence of humanitarian values, it appeals particularly to those with least hope for the future looking for someone to blame.

But UKIP does not offer a consistent or rational policy to run the state in the interests of the central factions of the ruling class and so is a problem for the bourgeoisie as a whole. While UKIP had been taking votes from both Tories and Labour, its anti-EU policies chimed with the Eurosceptic views that have existed in both major parties, particularly the Conservatives, for decades. In response to this pressure from both UKIP and Eurosceptics in his own party, David Cameron promised a referendum on EU membership in the election manifesto for 2015, with the aim of settling the issue for a generation. This was a huge miscalculation, a loss of control of the electoral game, which resulted in the vote for Brexit which they had not prepared for.[2]

Cameron resigned to be replaced by May, who did much to try and stabilise the situation.[3] She interpreted the referendum result as meaning that immigration had to be cut, and the country leave the European Court of Justice, hence leaving the single market and customs union, a ‘hard’ Brexit; and the government wanted to keep parliament out of any role in the negotiations. Saying that “no deal is better than a bad deal” for Britain in advance of negotiations made her look like a poker player with nothing in her hand trying to convince an opponent to fold. That was the hand she had been dealt. It was in these circumstances, with negotiations imminent and opinion polls strongly in her favour, that she called the snap election to try and strengthen her hand.

Although Brexit was the key to understanding why this election was called, it is not surprising that it hardly featured in the campaign beyond Mrs May telling us she would provide “strong and stable” leadership for the negotiation. With both main parties divided on the issue any discussion during the campaign could only risk severely weakening either or both of them.

Problems facing the British ruling class before the election

The British ruling class has tried to deal with populism in the form of UKIP by taking on a major plank of its policies, leaving the EU, as part of the policy of the government and main opposition party. The government had gone as far as insisting that this meant leaving the single market and customs union in order to limit immigration, whereas this was weakening it on both the economic and imperialist levels. The decision caused a fall in the value of the pound, and strict immigration control would deprive many businesses of either skilled or seasonal labour power. On the imperialist level, outside the EU, Britain will have far less influence. Merkel’s recent statement that the USA and Britain are unreliable partners is a small indication of this. Relying on the ‘special relationship’ with the USA is no compensation since the relationship is more of a fiction based on a huge imbalance in power to the UK’s disadvantage.

Brexit had reopened the question of Scottish independence since Scotland had voted clearly in favour of remaining in the EU, despite a clear vote against independence in the 2014 referendum. To this has been added the problem of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The open border, with both countries in the EU, was an important factor in the Good Friday Agreement which established power sharing between Catholic Republican and Protestant Unionist politicians. Power sharing has been called into question by Sinn Féin walking out of the government, the current sticking point appearing to be the demand for parity for the Gaelic language which has nothing to do with the pretext for the original walk out. So there is also the problem of tendencies towards the disaggregation of the UK.

The British bourgeoisie is also aware of the considerable discontent within the population, and particularly within the working class, after decades of austerity, particularly since the subprime crisis 10 years ago that have left workers worse off. In 2014 wages were almost 10 per cent lower than seven years before. In addition there are the cuts to funding in health and social services, to education, along with public sector pay restraint. Although this is not being expressed in working class struggle, and there is at present no strong feeling of being part of a working class that can struggle effectively – as there was in the period from 1968 to the late 1980s – which is the only really effective way to fight for a future society, the bourgeoisie still need to deal with this discontent. Some of this discontent was expressed in votes for Brexit, more to give the government a bloody nose than out of any conviction. However, the political apparatus has also provided another avenue for expressing discontent with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, which produced a large influx of new members into the party. Despite all the efforts to portray him as incompetent, unwilling to defend the country, going back to the 1970s, this promotion of a left-wing figure is the bourgeoisie’s tried and tested way of absorbing discontent and diverting it back into support for democracy and parliament, that is, for the very state that is imposing austerity.

Problems facing the British ruling class after the election

There is now a new problem with the instability of a minority government, that we might be expecting a new election sooner rather than later, and that the prime minister is much weakened and unlikely to last long. Theresa May did not strengthen her mandate for a hard Brexit, so much as lost it. She told the Tory 1922 Committee of backbenchers “I’m the person who got us into this mess and I’m the one who will get us out of it”. The change in the situation has strengthened the hand of those wanting to argue for a different Brexit that retains access to the single market or at least the customs union. Former Prime Minister, David Cameron, and Ken Clarke have both proposed that there is now cross party debate about Brexit. While this holds the promise of the possibility of a Brexit less damaging to the national capital, it also creates difficulties for negotiations starting only 11 days after the election! The EU negotiators are ready, Michel Barnier has a mandate from the other 27 countries, but no-one knows what Britain wants with only 21 months left on the clock. The EU is insisting on a programme of negotiation starting with the rights of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU, which might cause great controversy, despite everyone’s benevolent stated intentions. If there are what The Economist (17/6/17) called “silver linings” Britain remains in a very weakened position.

With the Scottish National Party losing 21 seats, although retaining a majority of Scottish seats, to unionist parties, ie the Tories, Labour and Liberal Democrats, a new independence referendum is now off the table. But the Tory reliance on the DUP for a majority only adds to Britain’s problems there. It is not only Republicans from Northern Ireland who have warned that the government may be in breach of the Good Friday Agreement to remain “rigorously impartial” between them and the Unionists (even if this could only ever be a fiction). Former PM John Major has also warned that the “men of violence” are still there and that it would be far better to run a minority government, however difficult, than to risk the Agreement with this alliance with the DUP.

Corbyn comes through – for the bourgeoisie

When it comes to the question of dealing with discontent, the election has clearly marked a step forward for the bourgeoisie, thanks to Corbyn. Being dismissed as weak and unelectable, and demonised as far left, soft on terrorists such as Hamas, no doubt improved his image as a radical socialist politician, although he is a long term supporter of state capitalism.[4] In much the same way as Bernie Sanders in the USA, Syriza in Greece, or Podemos in Spain, he was able to mobilise young people, particularly young workers, behind the idea that they can change things through the democratic process, encouraging them to register and turn out to vote. For those totally disgusted by the xenophobia of populism he offers the illusion of fighting against it within the democratic system, and he offers the hope of change based on ‘social justice’ – within capitalism. During the election campaign the terrorist attacks in Manchester and London gave him the opportunity to underline his support for the state as the only means to protect the population through the call for more police officers.

Before the election he was regarded as a pariah in the Parliamentary Labour Party, with many refusing to serve in his shadow cabinet after an attempt to get rid of him with a vote of no confidence among Labour MPs. This has all changed with his very successful election campaign and an increase of nearly 10% in Labour’s share of the vote to 40% and an increase of 30 seats. This result makes it appear that he has a credible alternative government, without the loss of credibility that would soon follow if he were to find himself in office and responsible for imposing austerity.

It is not surprising that moderate Labour MPs now recognise the important role Corbyn is playing in soaking up discontent and mobilising it for the election, overcoming much of the cynicism about Labour that is left over from the Blair and Brown governments. Particularly, if they consider how he is playing this role within the Labour Party, as opposed to what has happened in Spain where the growth of Podemos is largely at the expense of the Socialist Party, or in France where the opposition to the populism of Marine Le Pen through Macron’s new party has also come at the expense of the French Socialist Party.

Different ways of responding to populism

The Trump election, coming hard on the heels of the Brexit referendum, was an important warning for the bourgeoisie of the danger of the disruptive political force of populism. We have already seen how Britain has been weakened by the referendum result, and we can see the difficulties faced by the USA in trying to cope with and control a president who is something of a loose cannon with various investigations and even talk of impeachment. There has clearly been a loss of control of the political apparatus by the most powerful bourgeoisie, in the USA, and the most experienced, in Britain, a clear indication of the difficulties faced by them in the period of the decomposition of the capitalist order.

In the UK, the mainstream bourgeois parties have really limited the UKIP influence in the latest election (the UKIP vote went from nearly 3.9million to less than 600,000) but only by taking on much of its policy and rhetoric – on leaving the EU and on the limitation of immigration.

This has reinforced the political system of two main political parties but at the cost of the self-inflicted wound in the referendum, with the Brexit negotiations still ahead. In the Netherlands, the centre right Prime Minister, Rutte, also used the tactic of undermining support for Geert Wilders by showing he could also stand up to Islamic countries, in this case by refusing to allow Turkish ministers to speak at meetings in the country ahead of their constitutional referendum, and by this means limited the populist party to 20 seats in a chamber of 150. The French bourgeoisie has been more determined in creating a new centre party, La Republique en Marche, behind the new president Macron, who plays at being an outsider.[5] Even his predecessor Hollande, has backed this new party despite the fact it comes at the expense of a huge loss of deputies for his own party.

Our rulers are having difficulties in controlling their political game and their elections to get the results they need. That this is one more piece of evidence that the capitalist system is now obsolete is of no advantage to the working class. The bourgeoisie can no longer provide any sane perspective for society, but the working class has to a large extent lost not only any sense that it can offer the perspective of a new society but even the confidence that it is a class that can struggle against the effects of capitalism and its crisis as a class.

In this situation, while the ruling class has suffered the disruption caused by populism, the working class faces the danger of being caught up in the conflict between populism and anti-populism. And the greatest danger is from the anti-populists, especially those on the left such as Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, who appear to give an answer to xenophobia and hatred, and offer hope for the future within this decaying capitalist system, rather than a perspective for its destruction.

Alex 18/6/17

In Le Proletaire number 519, the publication of the Parti Communiste Internationale (PCI), there's a critique of our article "Attacks in Paris, down with terrorism! Down with war! Down with capitalism!"[i]

The PCI considers our article "superficial" and "impressionistic" and wax ironic about the fact that "the ICC is shocked" by the attacks, which is shown in the title of their article borrowed from the novelist Amelie Nothomb, "Stupeur et tremblements" ("dazed and shaken"). In fact here Le Proletaire confuses the indignation of the proletariat faced with barbarity with what they imagine to be petty-bourgeoisie sensitivity or pacifism.

Before responding to these criticisms and independent of the disagreements that we may have with this organisation, we first of all want to support its initiative in making this polemic. Polemics within the revolutionary milieu have always been the life-blood of revolutionary combat. Too infrequent today, they are nonetheless precious, notably between organisations which defend the principles of the communist left. Such attempts are indispensable for political clarification.

Nation or class?

Unfortunately we can't respond here to all the questions raised by this text but for us there's a priority issue, particularly because it's being debated by elements close to the PCI: the national question[ii]. In fact, reading Le Proletaire's article, it appears that within this same milieu of sympathisers who gravitate around "Bordigist" positions there exists a debate about the question of the nation and internationalism. We also understand that a participant in a PCI meeting, and other elements besides, have seriously asked whether we should refrain from condemning Daesh because we should adhere to"the principle of the anti-imperialist struggle"! This problematic is reformulated by Le Proletaire thus: "Should we conclude that IS (Islamic State) represents an anti-imperialist bourgeois force which, by attacking the status quo, unintentionally works in favour of a future proletarian revolution by accentuating chaos and the weakening of imperialism in the region? A force which, despite its brutality and its sinister reactionary tendencies, we should more or less support?" The response of Le Proletaire regarding such support (or, as it writes, "more or less support") is negative. It shows that the comrades of the PCI place themselves on the point of view of the working class. Moreover, one can observe that their approach to the national question is no longer applied in the same manner as during the 1980's, when they put forward the possibility "of a struggle for the national liberation of the Palestinian people".

But what is the argument of Le Proletaire today? Here's a first affirmation: "Because of the absence of any proletarian force, IS, as well as other 'moderate' or 'radical' armed forces, have been a counter-revolutionary bourgeois response - not 'medieval' or 'tribal' - to the unsettling of national and regional equilibriums. Isis is not fighting to spread chaos and undermine bourgeois order but to use it to its advantage (...)." Comrades of the PCI correctly talk of "the absence of any proletarian force". But in a passage of another article in the same number, responding to these same sympathisers, Le Proletaire adds that: "Daesh is an enemy of the proletariat, first of all the proletariat of Syria and Iraq, then of the proletariat of the imperialist countries. Before attacking Europe, it attacked Iraq and elsewhere. Before attacking Iraq and elsewhere, it repressed the proletarians in the regions that it controlled (for example, the case of the transport workers of Mosul who started up some protests over their working conditions and for this reason were executed by Daesh)."

In our opinion, a major problem rests in the formulation evoking the proletariat "of the imperialist countries". The comrades presuppose in fact, that certain countries today are not imperialist. We absolutely don't share this point of view. In the same extract, the PCI continues to affirm that: "The proletariat must struggle against all national oppressions, for self-determination and freedom of separation of all oppressed and colonised peoples;  not because their ideal is the creation of bourgeois states, but because in order to unite the proletarians of the dominant countries with those of the dominated countries, the former must demonstrate in practice that they do not support the oppression exercised by 'their' bourgeoisie and 'their' state, but, on the contrary, they fight them not only in words but if possible in practice. This is the only way that the proposal that they make to the proletarians of the dominated countries, of uniting on an anti-bourgeois class basis, can be understood".  This position of Le Proletaire, which differs from those peddled by the leftists, nevertheless remains dangerous and very ambiguous in its premises. Initially, it separates the proletariat of the "dominant" countries from those of the "dominated" and remains restricted to the problematic of "national oppression". But, they may reply, isn’t this position inherited from the workers' movement of the past?

The position of Rosa Luxemburg is confirmed by events

In fact this was the case up to when the historic conditions radically changed and when the experience of new struggles called into question practices which became invalid for the class struggle. At the time of its first congress in 1919, the Communist International (CI) recognised that capitalism was in its period of decline and thus insisted on the need for an international struggle of the proletariat. The Manifesto of the International to the proletarians of the world recognised that "The national state which gave a mighty impulsion to capitalist development has become too narrow for the further development of productive forces. "[iii]. In the same logic, it emphasised that "The small peoples can be assured the opportunity of free existence only by the proletarian revolution which will free the productive forces of all countries from the tentacles of the national states,". The proletariat could thus only make this leap in the framework of a world struggle, a unitary movement, including the bastions of the great metropoles.  As Lenin said, "facts are stubborn". The tactic adopted by the Bolsheviks, thinking that despite everything they could realise the extension of the world revolution by basing themselves on the old principle of national liberation, was a terrible fiasco, leading the proletariat to be overwhelmed and defeated. The examples are numerous. In Finland, the "free" bourgeoisie used the "present" of the Bolsheviks in order to wipe out the workers' insurrection of January 1918. In the Baltic states, the same year, "national liberation" allowed the British bourgeoisie to easily crush the revolution under a naval bombardment!

The most fertile criticisms of the national question were elaborated very early on and very clearly by Rosa Luxemburg: "Moreover, the Bolsheviks themselves have, to a great extent, sharpened the objective difficulties of this situation by a slogan which they placed in the foreground of their policies: the so-called right of self-determination of peoples, or – something which was really implicit in this slogan – the disintegration of Russia. While Lenin and his comrades clearly expected that, as champions of national freedom even to the extent of 'separation', they would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus, etc., into so many faithful allies of the Russian Revolution, we have instead witnessed the opposite spectacle. One after another, these 'nations' used the freshly granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian Revolution as its mortal enemy, and, under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself"[iv].

Despite some elements of clarity on the subject at the time of the First Congress of the International, successive workers' defeats and the growth of opportunism were engulfing these fragile efforts and favouring theoretical regression. The lucid critique of Rosa Luxemburg was only taken up in a minority fashion by the Italian Left, notably Bilan, a position inherited by Internationalisme and defended today by the ICC. Since the revolutionary wave of the 1920's and its defeat, which led to the terrible period of the Stalinist counter-revolution, no so-called struggle for national liberation has been able to produce anything other than massacres and forced mobilisations behind national and rival imperialist powers. What was shown at the time of Lenin as a tragic error has since been strikingly confirmed through bloody crimes. Since the First World War and with the historic decline of the capitalist system, all nations - big or small - have in reality become links in an imperialist chain plunging the world into permanent war. Every time imperialist manoeuvres are at work, whatever the nations involved, the proletariat is hostage to this so-called "liberation" and pitted against its sacrificed class brothers. This was the case in Sudan for example, which after its independence in 1956, suffered a terrible civil war implemented by the imperialist blocs of East and West and resulting in at least two million dead. In Angola, after the first uprisings in Luanda in 1961 and independence in 1975, years of war saw the governing MPLA (People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola, supported by the USSR) fighting the rebels of UNITA (supported by South Africa and the United States). The death toll of this "struggle for liberation" was close to a million. Decolonisation and the context of the Cold War would only further illustrate, in a systematic manner, that the proletariat was being used as cannon-fodder behind the national flags.

Some dangerous confusions

If the PCI doesn't support Daesh, if it has evolved on the national question, it nevertheless retains certain confusions which in the past have led it to suddenly abandon a proletarian internationalist position by supporting, even if critically, the capitalist forces of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. This is shown in a passage written at the time: "Through its impact on the Arab masses, the struggle against Israel constitutes a formidable lever in social and revolutionary struggle"[v]. The framework of the struggle for national liberation, which could only lead to a political fiasco, was theorised by Le Proletaire in this way: "Intransigent marxism itself recognises, that even where the autonomous intervention of the proletariat is not yet happening and even if these revolutions have not crossed the national and democratic horizons, there is an authentic value to the  upheavals as gigantic as those which have happened in the East during the last 60 years, and it would be vain to ignore them under the pretext that they haven't led to socialism"[vi]. The sudden abandonment of an internationalist class position regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict provoked a serious crisis within the PCI, leading to its fracture with the leftist elements of El Oumani (the PCI’s Algerian section). The latter put forward an openly Arab nationalist position that we rightly denounced at the time: "For El Oumani, the 'sacred Jewish union' makes class antagonisms disappear inside Israel. It is thus useless to appeal to the proletariat in Israel. That's exactly the same as 'the German people, a cursed people' of the Stalinists during the Second World War. And when, during a course of a demonstration in solidarity with the PLO, to the cries of 'Vengeance for Sabra and Shatila', El Oumani praised itself for having 'captured a Zionist who received a terrible beating', one is on the level of 'to each his boche' of the French Communist Party at the end of the Second World War. El Oumani joins the ranks of the most abject chauvinism of the bourgeoisie"[vii] .

The opportunist position of the PCI on the Israel-Palestine conflict in the 1980's was the soil which gave rise to El Oumani’s openly nationalist ideology. By critically supporting the fight of the Palestinians against Israel, by cutting them off from their class brothers in Israel under the pretext of the latter's allegiance to the Israeli bourgeoisie, Le Proletaire participated in the endorsement of division and abandoned all principle of class solidarity.

Today, Le Proletaire doesn't use the same arguments as in the past but seems to have evolved more through empiricism. If the PCI hasn't fallen into a major error by very clearly refusing all support to Daesh, it nevertheless remains prisoner to yet more dangerous conceptions and confusions for the working class, in particular in the context where nationalism takes on some nuanced shades from state propaganda and from the current powerful populist campaigns.  The reasons at the root of such confusions are linked to the terrible burden of the Stalinist counter-revolution. State capitalism in the USSR thus distorted the experience of the revolutionary wave of 1920 by exploiting its worst errors in order to crush the proletariat. In the name of "the right of peoples to self-determination" and "the national liberation of oppressed peoples" the Stalinist state perverted the errors of Lenin and turned them into an eternal dogma.  This has unfortunately led some revolutionaries like the PCI to draw false lessons by taking up old errors and seeing them as "revolutionary truths".

The PCI underestimates the reality of imperialist chaos

But the most recent developments since the imperialist butchery of the Cold War have only again confirmed the analyses of Rosa Luxemburg. Keeping up confusions concerning the "self-determination of peoples" is, in our opinion, largely responsible for the aberrant positions which still persist today and which pushes certain elements to pose the question of whether Daesh should be held up and supported by revolutionaries in a so-called "anti-imperialist" fight. Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, so-called national liberation struggles have only fuelled world chaos. We see it today with the birth of mini-states from the dislocation of the ex-Stalinist empire, generating abortions which do nothing other than propagate the noxious atmosphere of nationalism. We saw it with the breakup of ex-Yugoslavia and the war which followed it between the "liberated" nations, and we also saw it in Chechnya (where the town of Grozny was reduced to cinders), as well as in the conflict of the High Karabakh and Azerbaijan resulting in numerous victims and thousands of refugees at the beginning of the 1990's[viii]. Such a logic also extends to all the fractions of the bourgeoisie who do not possess any territory - the warlords and other terrorists who incarnate nationalist ideology and capitalist barbarity.

In its article, the PCI also criticises a formula used in our article, that of the idea of the "qualitative step taken with the Paris attacks". This formulation has been criticised among ourselves and can be the object of a debate. But not for the reasons that Le Proletaire gives, which raises questions of our "forgetfulness", of "the 'years of lead' in Italy in the Seventies", that of events "against the Algerian demonstrators killed by the police in 1961", "the hecatombs in the Eastern countries", etc. In fact our formulation, which is certainly open to criticism, simply wanted to point out that these attacks express an aggravation of the chaotic situation at the global level, which is very different from a "loss of memory" on our part. On the other hand, to criticise our so-called "forgetfulness" reveals that, for the comrades of Le Proletaire, these attacks are put on the same level as those perpetrated in the Seventies and the events of the Cold War. In some ways, there's nothing new under the sun. This tendency of Le Proletaire not to see the real dynamic of imperialism is linked to a fixed vision of history, continuing to deny the reality of a phase of decadence of the capitalist system and its evolution.  By defending the very principle of "national liberation struggles", whereas decades of experience, and the workers' defeats that go with them, have demonstrated how dangerous the concept is, Le Proletaire persists with its error. This which makes it difficult to take account of historical reality through a living and dialectical approach. It can only interpret events according to the same immutable dogma, a clearly sclerotic conception: the fossilisation of history and the lessons to draw for the future, which means that these analyses and positions often find themselves distant from reality and even in opposition to the needs of the class struggle.

That an organisation of the communist left is even led to pose to its contacts the question of a possible support for Daesh can only leave us in fact, "dazed and shaken". Such political confusion points to a failure to see the real strength of the proletariat: its solidarity, its international unity and its class consciousness.

In their very essence, the conditions of existence and the struggle of the proletariat are antagonistic to the framework of the nation. This is also the case faced with the archaic and stupid "Grand Caliphate", a typical form of interests of a bourgeoisie without a nation which progressively tries to impose through military conquests, an authority, an administration and a national currency.

Possessing only its labour power and deprived of any form of property, the proletariat has no specific interests other than its revolutionary project, which goes beyond national frontiers. Its fundamental interest lies in its self-organisation, in the development of its consciousness, and its world-wide unity. And the proletarians of the entire world can unite thanks to a powerful cement: solidarity. This solidarity isn't some sort of utopian ideal, it is a material force thanks to which the international proletariat can defend its class interests and thus its universal revolutionary project.

March 1, 2017

The events in Charlottesville Virginia in August highlighted the revival of “classical” fascism, which has developed in numerous countries as an extremist wing of populism. The white supremacist gangs which assembled in Charlottesville have flourished in the poisonous atmosphere released by the election victory of Donald Trump, whose comments after the murder of the anti-fascist protester Heather Heyer were widely condemned as a thinly-veiled apology for the far right. In Greece, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party has evolved a long way beyond the small groups of plotters which have usually been associated with nostalgia for Hitlerism. In Hungary, the anti-semitic, anti-gypsy and anti-Muslim Jobbik party is very close to the populist government headed by Viktor Orban. These groups can no longer be understood as merely a kind of bugbear used by the left to bolster support for democratic values, a view which had a definite validity in previous decades. Unlike the 1930s, they are not serious candidates for direct government office in the centres of world capitalism, but their closeness to the populist parties and governments means that part of their agenda is being taken into account by a number of ruling parties. More important, they act as a factor of division, intimidation and outright pogromist attacks on the street. They may not be able, like their predecessors in the 20s and 30s, to present themselves as a force for directly attacking workers in struggle, but they play an anti-working class role nonetheless, whether by infecting certain parts of the working class with their propaganda, or carrying out brutal attacks on immigrant proletarians and political and cultural opponents.

The growth of these groups, with their deeply reactionary ideology based on racial twaddle and paranoid conspiracy theory, a pure product of capitalism in decomposition, and the more this system sinks into decay without a clear proletarian response, the more we are likely to see this fascist renaissance winning new converts and arrogantly disporting itself in the streets.  In many ways they are the mirror image of the jihadi groups they often profess to hate; in both cases, an ideology rooted in violent nihilism draws in elements who are totally disaffected from this society but have no conception of a real human future.

But in the 1930s, when fascism was actually a government option for certain central capitalist countries, our political ancestors denounced anti-fascism as a “formula for confusion”, above all because it meant surrendering the independence of the working class in favour of an alliance with the left wing of the bourgeoisie. The Italian left communists, many of whom had been compelled to choose exile after the victory of fascism in Italy, maintained the position of the Communist Party of Italy in reaction to the rise of the blackshirts and their strike-breaking actions in the early 1920s: yes to working class self-defence against the fascist squads, but no to any broad anti-fascist front to defend capitalist democracy against the dictatorship of the right. In the article ‘Antifascism, formula of confusion’, an article published in Bilan no.7, May 1934, we read: “The problem is not therefore that fascism threatens, so we should set up a united anti-fascist front. On the contrary, it is necessary to determine the positions around which the proletariat will gather for its struggle against capitalism. Posing the problem this way means excluding the anti-fascist forces from the front for the struggle against capitalism. It means – paradoxical though this may seem – that if capitalism should turn definitively towards fascism, then the condition for success is the inalterability of the programme and the workers’ class demands, whereas the condition for certain defeat is the dissolution of the proletariat in the anti-fascist swamp”[1].

In 1936, around the tumultuous events in Spain, these warnings were to take on an even greater urgency. In July the initial assault of the Francoist forces was blocked by the proletariat of Barcelona especially, acting on its own class terrain and using the fundamental methods of the class struggle: general strike, fraternisation with the soldiers, arming of the workers. And yet within a matter of days and weeks this proletarian “front” had indeed been dissolved in the anti-fascist swamp as all the political forces acting within the working class, from the Socialist and Communist parties to the Trotskyists and the anarchists were, with few exceptions, unanimous in calling for the formation of an anti-fascist alliance with the priority of winning the war against fascism rather than deepening the class struggle. And in 1939-45, it was again under the banner of anti-fascism that millions of workers were dragooned into the second imperialist world war. Anti-fascism was revealed as more than a formula of confusion: it was the slogan of the counter-revolution.

By embracing this slogan, numerous currents which had belonged to the working class joined the camp of capital. This included the majority of the Trotskyists, who justified participation in the imperialist war through their policy of defending the “workers’ state” in Russia, but also through support for democracy against fascism and by calling for workers to enrol in the national resistance fronts. And the same went for a large part of the anarchist movement: if they did not have a “socialist fatherland” to defend, their engagement with the ideology of anti-fascism led them to take part in the resistance and even to form contingents within the armies of the democratic imperialisms. Thus the “liberation” parade in Paris in 1944 was spearheaded by armoured cars bearing the banner of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist union, the CNT, whose militants had enlisted in a division of the French army commanded by General Leclerc.

Anarchists and their own confusions

In our view, very few anarchists, even those who can generally be found in the internationalist camp today, have ever drawn the lessons of this experience. And in the light of the events of Charlottesville, and with the rise of a new generation of fascist gangs, the response of the anarchists to those who continue to expose the falsity of the anti-fascist formula demonstrates this very clearly. The left communist position, we are told, is just a dead dogma which has no relevance to the actual needs of the working class today. An example can be seen in a recent post on the libcom internet forum by Red Marriot, often one of the more perceptive participants on the forum, and certainly one who is very clear in his opposition to those anarchists currently flocking to the banner of the Rojava 'revolution' (ie the Kurdish nationalist enclaves in Syria). He writes in response to an article written by a member of the Internationalist Communist Tendency in the US, ‘Set-up in Charlottesville’[2]. In opposition to most of the anarchist accounts which give almost uncritical support to the actions of the “antifa” in Charlottesville and elsewhere, the article was sharply critical of the ritualised character of the clash around the white supremacist march in protest against the decision of the Democratic-led local authority to remove a symbol of the Confederacy from a town park. The article characterizes the confrontations in Charlottesville as follows:

“A spectacle motivated by factions of the ruling class is played out on the streets whilst the class is mobilized into the service of factions of the bourgeoisie. The two factions can control layers and circles around them, the Democrats and the unions and leftists that follow after them, or the Republicans with their fringe of neo-fascists”.

To this Red Marriot replied:

“This seems like dogma-by-numbers - a predictable restatement of the left-comm line eternally applicable since the 30s. Avoids dealing with any concrete needs of real proletarians - ie, how to deal with potential fascist encroachment in their lives - and spouts only abstraction based on the holy canon of the ancient sacred texts set in stone. Concludes with an idealistic ahistorical call for a sudden decision to 'fight for communism' regardless of current realities with no regard of what such an historical process entails starting from where we are; the same kind of assumption of a rapture and revelation occurring that much modern communisation millenarianism is based on.

There’s a theme here common in left-comm analysis; the ruling class is always an active conspiratorial subject doing manipulative things to a largely passive proletarian object with the proletariat awaiting its acquisition of absent left-comm consciousness – everything prior to this acquisition is no more than a deception done to it. That is a simplistic narrative with a simplistic resolution – acquire the consciousness on offer from its left-comm guardians and ‘begin the fight for communism now’”.[3]

This charge that left communists are basically millenarians passively waiting for the communist rapture and have no interest in the concrete needs of the working class, in particular faced with the real threat fascism can pose to its struggles, is a real caricature. 

We have already pointed out that this was never the approach of the communist left, which called for the self-organisationof the working class to defend itself from the strike-breaking actions of the fascists in Italy in the 1920s, and which supported the riposte of the Barcelona workers to the Franco coup in July 1936. We repeat: what the communist left criticises is the way anti-fascism is used time and time again as a means of dragging the working class off its class terrain and into alliances or popular fronts with the enemy. In our view, the actions and methods of today’s “antifa”, whose activists are often close to anarchism, offer us a remake of the same errors which led to the derailing of the class in the past. Instead of actually calling for the action of the workers around their “concrete” needs, for self-defence against all capitalist agencies, anti-fa advocates the action of minorities detached from the class struggle, focusing all their energies on physically confronting the fascists wherever they appear, and laying stress on the direct military confrontation with the fascist forces. This in essence is the same militarist conception which led the majority of anarchists in Spain to join the anti-fascist front and succumb to the idea that everything must be subordinated to the war against fascism. And today’s anti-fa is no less involved in the creation of a broad anti-fascist front, since it nearly always acts in concert with the “Leninists”, which is what the anarchists misleadingly call the Maoists and Trotskyists, i.e the extreme left wing of capital. In practice (and sometimes in theory) the anarchists active in anti-fa accept the need for collaboration with these “authoritarians” in the fight against fascism, even if the anarchists/anti-fa often advocate more violent methods – the “direct action” tactics practised by participants of Black Blocs on demonstrations.

Another poster in this debate, on a thread criticizing Chomsky’s recent statements about antifa[4], justified the tactic of “bashing the fash” by quoting Adolf Hitler in 1934. "Only one thing could have stopped our movement - if our adversaries had understood its principle and from the first day smashed with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement."[5]

This implies that the one obstacle to fascism would have been a much more effective and brutal alliance of Hitler’s political adversaries, something that would have been comprehensible to him, as opposed to an idea that was certainly beyond his ken: that the only possible obstacle to fascism would have been a working class fighting for its own interests. But this possibility had already been largely undermined by the role of social democracy - and subsequently Stalinism - which had “made the bed for fascism” by sabotaging the proletariat’s revolutionary struggles in the wake of the First World War.

Class solidarity or minority actions?

This problem of confusing a class movement with the action of anti-fascist minorities comes up again on libcom in the document launching the thread about Chomsky. Here, in seeking to identify the historical predecessors of today’s anti-fa, a number of other minority groups using military tactics (such as the 43 Group set up by Jewish ex-servicemen after the war with the aim of breaking up Mosley’s post-war meetings in the East End, or more recently the Anti-fascist Action group) are put in the same list as a large scale social movement which arose in response to a genuine threat to a local community - the so-called Battle of Cable Street. This took place in October 1936 when Mosley’s British Union of Fascists planned to march through the largely Jewish East End. The local population clearly perceived this as a real threat to carry out a pogrom. And the scope of the response went well beyond that of an “action” by a small military-style group: tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands came out onto the street to oppose the march and the police that were protecting it. Not only that, the Jews of the East End were joined by a large contingent of dockers, many from an Irish Catholic background, who had not forgotten the solidarity shown to them by Jewish clothing workers during the great dock strike at the end of the previous century. It was the intervention of workers coming from the docks areas that prevented the Jewish neighbourhoods being surrounded by Mosley’s forces.

And yet, precisely because this battle was fought under the flag of anti-fascism, the real class solidarity which was at its core was not strong enough to resist the subsequent drive towards world war; on the contrary, this was a temporary victory that was turned by the ruling class into a defeat, and the mythology surrounding Cable Street was added to the brew that would intoxicate the working class and lead it into the war.  As Bilan put it in relation to the July days in Barcelona: the working class had armed itself materially by its own actions, and yet it was disarmed politically, unable to develop its own alternative to the democratic, anti-fascist ideology which was sold to it so assiduously by all the organisations acting in its ranks.

Class identity and bourgeois recuperation

In another article we will examine the enormous bourgeois political consensus behind the condemnation of Trump’s apology for the “alt-right”, a front uniting parts of the Republican Right with the extreme left. The breadth of this democratic front shows how dangerous it is for the anarchists to dismiss the warnings of the left communists about the instrumentalisation of anti-fascist mobilisations. This was true in the 1930s when the working class had been through a historic defeat and it’s true today when the working class is suffering from a serious loss of class identity and is finding it very difficult to react as a class to the deepening crisis of capitalist society. Today - and perhaps especially in the USA – a whole generation has very little experience of massive workers’ struggles, which could – as in the strikes in Poland in 1980 – provide practical proof that the extension of the class struggle is the only effective response to capitalist repression. In the absence of such struggles, a growing social discontent is being channelled into a series of reactions based on “identity”, in which the working class is presented as yet another oppressed category alongside many others - racial, sexual etc - instead of as the class which concentrates in itself all the sufferings inherent in this social order and whose struggle constitutes the key to the overcoming of all oppressions and all divisions. In these conditions, it is all the more likely that social discontent which doesn’t move towards a class-based confrontation will be dispersed, repressed, and above all recuperated by those parts of the ruling class which present themselves as democratic and even socialist. We saw this with the Women’s March against Trump, we saw it with the way the official Black Lives Matter organisation took over the initial reactions against police violence against black people in Ferguson and elsewhere, and we can see the same problem with the anti-fascist mobilisations: that they are extremely vulnerable to being integrated into an overarching struggle between factions of the bourgeoisie. And the worst of it is that those who join in the anti-fascist mobilisations are often representative of the best of the present generation of proletarians, deeply opposed to racism and injustice, disgusted with the hypocrisy of the ruling class and yet unable to draw a class line between themselves and its most seductive mouthpieces. It was not for nothing that the Italian left communist Amadeo Bordiga insisted that the worst product of fascism is anti-fascism.

Let’s return to Red Marriot’s second criticism of the left communist approach: “the ruling class is always an active conspiratorial subject doing manipulative things to a largely passive proletarian object with the proletariat awaiting its acquisition of absent left-comm consciousness – everything prior to this acquisition is no more than a deception done to it”.

Another profound distortion. Throughout its existence, in innumerable reports and articles, the ICC has examined and analysed the advances and retreats in class consciousness through various phases of the class struggle since 1968. We have certainly made errors in our analysis – usually leaning towards an overestimation of the level of consciousness in the class – but we have never seen the advances merely as passively “acquiring left comm consciousness”, presumably the result of some “injection from the outside”. What we do insist on, however, along with the comrades of Bilan is that “principles are a weapon of the revolution”, and that these are weapons forged in the class struggle. This process certainly includes the reflection and intervention of communist organisations, but it's not reducible to that dimension. On the contrary, the principles we stand for today are the lessons learned through the victories and defeats of the working class as a whole, and one of these lessons is that the epoch where it was possible to form alliances with capitalist factions or parties (advocated to a limited extent in the Communist Manifesto) has been over for at least a hundred years. This remains as relevant today as it was in the 1930s, and the development of a revolutionary consciousness in wide layers of the class will have to involve the re-acquisition of lessons once learned but now largely forgotten - above all the lessons of the bloody defeats of the class in that period, from China in 1927 to Spain in 1936 and on to the Second World War.

If we insist that the working class is an active subject, we argue that this can also be applied to the ruling class, even if its consciousness can never break from the chains of ideology. It is indeed capable of understanding that it has its own class interests and privileges to defend and, at certain moments at least, it is able to recognise that the greatest threat to these privileges, to its entire civilisation, comes from the struggle of the exploited class. We have seen the bourgeoisie locked in the most savage imperialist warfare and yet capable of setting aside these conflicts to cooperate in the crushing of the working class – as when Churchill and the British military halted their advance through southern Italy to allow the Nazis to deal with the danger posed by the working class uprisings in the northern cities (the policy of “letting the Italians stew in their own juice”).  We can give other examples of collaboration between the fascist and democratic factions of the bourgeoisie, but the “conspiracy” of the ruling class can also be seen in the moments when its left and democratic wing uses the ideology of anti-fascism to rally the workers to line up in its inter-factional and inter-imperialist battles. It is this side of the equation we are seeing most clearly in the USA and elsewhere today: the growth of the right, whether in its populist or openly fascist form, is also seeing the emergence of a new left (typified by Sanders in the US and Corbyn in the UK) which has the function, for capital, of channelling the discontent of a part of the proletariat into the dead-end of defending democracy.

Defence of revolutionary organisations

Red Marriot’s post has a third criticism of the “left comms” which (amid some very gratuitous sideswipes at the ICC) boils down to this: we fail to understand that, “for the fascists, basically anyone who isn’t right wing is considered part of their prime target of ‘the left’ (even the rare breeds of left communism), with none of the niceties of distinction made by radicals themselves”. As a matter of fact we understand this very well and we certainly don’t reject the necessity for revolutionaries to take active measures to defend themselves against threats from capitalist thugs of one kind or another. A small example: prior to a public meeting of the ICC in Switzerland, we received threats that a local fascist group was planning to disrupt the meeting. So we called on other proletarian groups, sympathisers and so on to form a picket to defend the meeting. In the end the threat didn’t materialise, but we certainly took it seriously – as we did more recently when a libertarian bookshop/centre for discussion in France was invaded by a gang of racists[6]. But we are also aware that in some countries revolutionaries can also be threatened and attacked by leftist thugs – the examples of Mexico (where one of our comrades was kidnapped and tortured by the Maoist group he had broken from) and Maduro’s Venezuela today come to mind. And recently, we sent a letter of solidarity to two groups in Germany after a Stalinist anti-fascist group tried to prevent them selling literature which exposed the capitalist nature of both Francoism and the Popular Front in the Spanish war[7]. The defence of the revolutionary organisation is a permanent concern for us – whether that involves physical attacks from the outside or the infiltration of state agents and adventurers on the inside, a possibility that revolutionaries dismiss at their peril. But this changes nothing about the fundamental problem: defence of the organisation must remain on a class terrain and reject all forms of frontism: we don’t call on the capitalist left to defend us from fascist attacks any more than we call on the police to protect our meetings. That is the only starting point for a discussion about the concrete issues of proletarian self-defence.

Amos

The Duterte regime has been in power for more than one year now[1]. Since Duterte’s election more than 13,000 (mostly poor people) have been being killed by the state police in his “war on drugs”.

Despite these widespread killings, there are no massive and widespread condemnation and protests among the poor people, even by the victims’ families and relatives[2]. Instead apathy and fear prevail. A significant portion of the population, even among the poor, felt “relieved” that these “outcasts”, “evils” of society have been eliminated. Even though it is accepted that there are many innocent victims, there is a significant acceptance among the population that this is “justified collateral damage” for the interest of a general cleansing. And the (admittedly manipulated) surveys by bourgeois institutions claim that Duterte enjoys “excellent trust ratings”.

In short, we are seeing a real culture of killings.

Why is this happening in the country that overthrew a dictator 31 years ago through a combination of military coup and a “people’s uprising” led by the bourgeois opposition[3]? Why the acceptance of killings and violence?

Decomposing world capitalism and the culture of violence: impasse of the social system

Duterte’s “war on drugs” is a war against the poor.

According to the analysis of some Filipino leftists, Duterte was catapulted to power through a “revolt” of the masses against the neo-liberal policies of the past administration. Some of them even say that the Duterte phenomenon is the “rebellion of the lumpen proletariat”.

This is clearly false. Not only does Duterte continue the neo-liberal policies of the previous administrations, he has also killed thousands of lumpenised poor people.

To understand clearly and correctly the rise of the likes of Duterte we must understand first the world system we are living in and its evolution. Not only that. To understand the evolution of world capitalism means to comprehend why we are witnessing the dominance of “every man for himself” and this culture of violence.

Despite the whipping up of hatred and the campaign to kill suspected users and pushers of illegal drugs, most of whom are those living in slums, the supply of smuggled drugs mainly from China did not stop. On the contrary. Lately, the state apprehended drugs valued at 6.4 billion Philippine pesos. The smuggled drugs smoothly passed the eyes of the Bureau of Customs whose chief commissioner is a Duterte loyalist. Implicated in this drug smuggling is the son of the president and the current vice-mayor of Davao City[4]. Furthermore, while the poor are summarily executed by the state, the suspected drug lords are giving favor by the democratic due process of the state[5].

Recently Duterte admitted that he could not control the drug problem. This is a 360 degrees turn-around of his campaign promise last election in which he boasted that he could solve the drug menace within 3-6 months[6].

This means that the aggravation of the drug problem is a result of decomposing capitalism not because of this or that policy of the capitalist state:

“At the beginning of the 90s we said: ‘Amongst the most important characteristics of the decomposition of capitalist society, it is necessary to underline the bourgeoisie’s growing difficulty in controlling the evolution of the situation at the political level’. The reason for this lies in the difficulty that the ruling class is having in ensuring its political unity. The diverse fractions into which the bourgeoisie is divided are confronting each other, not only at the level of economic competition, but also (and fundamentally) politically. Faced with the drawn out economic crisis, there are some unifying tendencies, which are mediated by the state; but they only take place around short-term economic aims. At the level of political leadership, the worsening of competition caused by the crisis provokes the widespread dispersal of the bourgeoisie’s forces. On the international scale there is a growing tendency towards the struggle of ‘each against all’, a generalised lack of discipline at the political level, which prevents the imposition of the order that the old imperialist blocs were able to maintain during the Cold War. The atmosphere of ‘every man for himself’ which defines the international situation is repeated in the activity of the bourgeoisie in each country. It is only in this framework that we can explain the enormous growth in drug trafficking.”[7]

The massive consumption of drugs and alcohol is more than the mere consequence of addiction; it is the result of an ever increasing despair in the population. When it is no longer sufficient to look for consolation in religion, when it is no longer sufficient to emigrate and sell your labour power in other countries, and no jobs are available at home, the flight into drugs and alcohol is just one of many other consequences of a terrifying situation from which the working class and lumpen elements can see no way out. And the cancer-like growth of the drugs cartels (from producers to big and small dealers) are merely the other face of a system which can only thrive through spreading such poisons and thus push towards the demolition of human lives. The addicts, the suppliers of the drugs and those forces who propagate massive killings are all different faces of one and the same decaying system. And it is characteristic of this system that the Duterte regime, like an increasing number of regimes around the world, is a clear example of a state run like a mafia gang. Inside the Duterte government there are several factions competing against each other to amass wealth. Duterte itself is acting like the “Godfather” of these rival gangs. As the ICC text ‘Drug trafficking and the decomposition of capitalism’ stated:

“The weight of decomposition has certainly taken on growing dimensions in the least developed countries, where the bourgeoisie is less able to control its differences. Thus we see in countries such as Colombia, Russia or Mexico that the mafia has merged into the structures of government in such a way that each mafia group is associated with some sector of the bourgeoisie and defends its interests in confrontations with other fractions, using state structures as their battlegrounds. This exacerbates the whole struggle of ‘each against all’ and accelerates the rot in the social atmosphere.” (ibid)

We can thus see that the state itself is not only unable to fight those forces who benefit from the drugs trade, that it is totally unable to eradicate the problem: instead the State becomes the open promoter of barbarism, terrorism – and drug trafficking. But since we are living in a society which offers humanity no future, significant numbers of the poor and the petty bourgeoisie are infected by the culture of nihilism, despair and hatred and are prepared to support Duterte’s phony solution, based on generalising hatred and violence. Parts of the poor and the proletariat are thus mobilised against  another section of the oppressed who are being used by drug and criminal syndicates, agreeing that they are “outcasts” of society that must be killed. And because of the spreading attitude of “every man for himself”, of social atomization, as long as you or your loved ones are not victims of this cycle of killings, there is no feeling of sympathy and solidarity.

At the same time, the chaos, violence and killings perpetrated by the state are also the fertile soil of the ISIS-inspired Islamist terrorism in Mindanao, where we also see the incapacity of the state’s corrupt military to quell even a small number of terrorists occupying a small city in Mindanao[8].

The weakness of proletarian resistance

Filipino workers on their own cannot lead society in the Philippines out of this chaos.  The problem cannot be solved within one country; Filipino workers must unite with their class brothers and sisters in other countries to destroy world capitalism.

However - and this is again an international problem - Filipino workers seem to have lost their class identity. This is aggravated by the fact that the leftist organisations and the unions are controlling their struggles – if they struggle - and as a consequence they are fighting not on their own class terrain but as  atomised individuals under the banner of “citizens of the nation”. In the protests against killings of the poor, workers participated as pawns of the bourgeois liberal opposition and the left, who spew the poison of democracy and “human rights”.

In the history of the workers’ movement in the Philippines there was no period during which the workers struggled as a truly independent class. For more than 100 years of their history, workers’ struggles were generally controlled or influenced by the different bourgeois factions, using the unions and the parties of the right, but above all of the left[9]. In the Philippines, Stalinism, especially in its Maoist form, is the dominant ideology infecting the workers’ movement.

Many observers said that the Duterte regime is worse than the Marcos dictatorship. This is true. But it is also true that under Duterte, the left more openly shows its face as an instrument of the capitalist state. During the election campaign the Maoists openly campaigned for Duterte while the other factions of the left threw in their “critical support”. The Maoists were rewarded by Duterte through appointments of their cadres and close allies to his cabinet.

It is vital that workers learn from history the lessons of the left’s alliance with the state. An independent working class movement means no alliance with any factions of the ruling class. Instead all factions of the class enemy must be exposed and opposed in front of the working masses.

In addition, when different factions of the left and right are trying to mobilise the workers either to support imperialist USA or imperialist China in the contested islands in the South China Sea or West Philippine Sea, any form of nationalism or defense of the country must be rejected. Instead Filipino workers must hold up the banner of proletarian internationalism: workers have no country to defend.

Internasyonalismo, ICC section in the Philippines,
August 29, 2017

We are publishing here a statement by International Communist Perspective (South Korea) on the imperialist tensions in the Korean Peninsula.

We do have some criticisms of this statement, in particular its focus on the installation of THAAD, which could give rise to the idea that single-issue campaigns are the equivalent of the workers’ struggle to defend their interests against the demands of the war machine.  It is not by campaigning against this or that weapons system that the working class can develop its consciousness. The task of revolutionaries is to expose the impasse of the whole system, while participating in struggles for class demands that can tear apart the illusions of a “national unity” and develop a real solidarity with workers in other countries.

Nonetheless, we recognise the voice of the international working class in this statement: a voice that denounces the imperialists of the entire capitalist class (including those that are supposedly "communist"). We thus unreservedly stand in solidarity with the ICP comrades and all those fighting for real internationalism in this region.

For the ICC's analysis of the situation, please see here [98].

We criticize the Moon Jae‐In government and the United States for the deployment of THAAD.

Removal of THAAD! Struggle against the capitalist state! Struggle against capitalist governments and the threat of imperialist war!

On Sept. 7, the Moon Jae‐In government and the United States coercively deployed Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) on Sungju-gun Sogong‐ri against most of the Korean people’s opposition including the residents. The deployment of the THAAD in South Korea does not contribute to a resolution of issues on nuclear weapon of North Korea and the peace of East Asia. It is just a hypocritical security game. It is not only a programme heightening the threat of war for the sake of US imperialist force but also a scheme to assign South Korea at the front of imperialist war.

We once again confirm that the purpose of North Korea's nuclear weapons development is a genocidal massacre against civilians, especially the working class, even though North Korea insists that the nuclear weapon is a guarantee of its regime. In addition, we never forget that the only force using the nuclear weapons which slaughtered civilians indiscriminately in the war was US imperialism. History has shown that the two systems, which are different in the Korean peninsula, are the same in terms of the exploitation of the working class and are the absolute enemy of the working class. Workers should not take either side.

The maximization of tension in East Asia shows the destructive tendencies of capitalism. However, recent conflicts have raised the risk for humanity far more than before. This time, there is a growing clash among many forces. The United States, China and Japan as well as North Korea are stepping up the arms race.

Two world wars, the Korean War and numerous wars have always brought irreplaceable pain to the working class. Today, the working class in East Asia should no longer sacrifice itself in the deadly vicious cycle of capitalism. Only the working class can save humanity from barbarism. To that end, the working class must escape from the vicious circle of nationalism and militarism. The only solution is that workers from South and North Korea including workers form China, US, and Japan struggle against their own ruling class.

The deployment of THAAD of the Moon government, which is pretending to pursue the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, would not contribute to constrain the North Korea’s nuclear weapon development but rather pour oil on the fire of military confrontation involving nuclear weapon competition. The decision to add and deploy the THAAD also shows the hypocrisy and the incompetence of the Moon government’s claim that it pursues a peace policy, a democratic process, and an independent diplomacy. It is an expression of the political and the class nature of the current government serving the interests of the imperialist and ruling classes.

Against the government of Moon Jae‐In, which committed crimes no better than that of Park Geun-hae government in less than four months after the presidential election victory,

The working class must break with the "Moon Jae‐In fantasy", which the Moon government pursues about cleaning up an accumulated evil and changing the regime.

The working class should oppose forming a united front and cooperating with the Moon government.

The working class should fight against the deployment of THAAD, as well as against the capitalist government, and the Korean War threat.

1. We oppose both imperialist U.S. and its allies' threats to North Korea (threats of war, security campaigns) and the North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons against them.
    
2.  Both US imperialism, which actually slaughtered civilians with nuclear weapons, and North Korea's nuclear weapons, which is headed for another war, are the greatest disasters to the working class. The working class opposes all nuclear weapons.
    
3. We cannot believe any 'peace policy' of the capitalist‐imperialist countries that claim 'peace' on the one hand, while instigating arms competition and threat of war in the interest of their own capitalist regime.
    
4. We declare that only the workers’ international struggle and the workers' revolution can end the threat of barbarism, imperialist war, and nuclear destruction threatening humanity under capitalism.
    
5. Removal of THAAD! Struggle against capitalist governments and their threat of imperialist war beyond the borders of all capitalist states.

The workers have no country to defend

Workers of the world, unite!

September 7, 2017

International Communist Perspective

72 years ago, in August 1945 the first two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the wake of the massive levels of destruction already perpetrated during World War Two with all sorts of weapons, in particular incendiary bombs, the use of nuclear weapons ushered in a new stage of potential destructiveness, menacing all life on the planet.

On 9 September 2017, on the occasion of the commemoration of the establishment of the North Korean regime, the media showed us a huge state-organised party with a beaming Kim Jong-un praising the country’s hydrogen bomb as “an extraordinary accomplishment and a great occasion in the history of our people”.

North Korea had successfully carried out a nuclear explosion, the force of which by far exceeded any of its previous tests. North Korea has joined the exclusive club of the nuclear powers of the world. The news of this latest step of the descent of bourgeois society into barbarism did not arrive out of the blue. The macabre triumph of the technology of mass destruction on the part of the Stalinist regime in Pyongyang is a culmination point of months of mutual threats between the United States of America and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. North Korea has already carried out 17 missile tests this year – more than all the previous ones put together. With the threats to attack the US Pacific island of Guam or targets on the American continent, with missiles flying over Japan, and the threat to defend itself with nuclear weapons in case of a US attack, the showdown between North Korea and the US has reached a new stage. The US threatens to respond with their whole arsenal of military, economic and political weapons: President Trump talks about visiting North Korea with “fire and fury” if the US or any of its allies are attacked by the regime.  The risk of the use of nuclear weapons puts the stakes much higher than ever before and poses a direct threat to some of the biggest metropoles of Asia – Seoul, Tokyo, etc. The recent military steps by the US and its allies South Korea and Japan (in particular the installation of the new THAAD missile systems in South Korea) have sharpened the confrontation between the US and China and pulled other countries even more into this maelstrom.  

How can we explain these events in Korea and what do they mean for humanity?

North Korea hopes to survive thanks to the bomb

For decades, during the cold war, it was mainly the big powers that were armed with nuclear bombs. But after 1989 a number of other countries have gained access or are trying to gain access to the nuclear bomb, which make the threat of mutual destruction even more unpredictable. Different factors must be taken into account in order to understand why “underdogs” such as North Korea have been developing the capacity to make nuclear threats. These developments can only be understood in a broader historical and international context.

Following the devastation of World War Two and the Korean war which followed only a few years later, both North and South had to rely for their reconstruction on their “protectors“. North Korea became dependent on China and Russia, two countries ruled by Stalinist regimes which were unable to compete on the world market, since they were lagging behind the more advanced capitalist countries. Russia had become a bloc leader following the defeat of Nazi Germany, but it had been severely depleted by the war and now had to dedicate the greater part of its resources to the new arms race of the Cold War. The civilian sector was lagging ages behind the military sector.  The contrast between the blocs was summed up by the fact that an exhausted Russia had to dismantle factories in Eastern and Central Europe, while the US poured large amounts of money (the Marshal plan) specifically into German and South Korean reconstruction.

North Korean reconstruction followed the Stalinist model. Although more developed economically than the South before 1945 and better equipped with raw materials and energy resources, the North suffered from a similar backwardness – typical of regimes suffocated by militarism and run by a Stalinist clique. In the same way as the Soviet Union was unable to become economically competitive on the world market, and was heavily dependent on the use of, or threat to use, its military capacities, North Korea has been unable to compete at the economic level on the world market. Its major export products are weapons, some raw materials, and recently cheap textiles as well as parts of its labour power, which the North Korean regime sells in the form of “contract workers” to companies in other countries.[1] [101]

At the same time the dependence on its defenders China and Russia has risen so much that 90% of North Korean trade is with China. Ruled by a party dictatorship which keeps tight control over the army, and where any rival bourgeois factions have been eliminated, the regime has the same congenital weaknesses as all regimes under Stalinist control[2] [102], but it has survived through decades of scarcity, hunger, and repression. The military and police apparatus have been able to prevent any rising of the population, in particular of the working class. In comparison to the decade long rule of other dynasties in other backward countries, North Korea holds the record of a single dynasty terrorising the population for more than sixty years (Kim Il-sung [103],  Kim Jong-il [104], Kim Jong-un [105]) and forcing it to bow down to the most grotesque personality cult.[3] [106]

Faced with the nationalist ambitions of the South, with the imperialist interests of the US, unable to count on any economic strength, the regime can only fight for its survival with ferocious repression inside and through military blackmail towards the outside. And in the age of nuclear weapons the blackmail has to be terrifying enough to deter your enemies.

Kim Jong-un sees the nuclear bomb as his life insurance. As Kim Jong-un himself has declared in public, he has drawn the lesson of what happened in Ukraine and Libya on the one hand, in Pakistan on the other. After the break-up of the USSR, the newly formed Ukrainian state was obliged – under massive pressure not only from Moscow but also Washington – to hand over the nuclear arms on its territory to the Russians. As for Libya, it agreed to abandon its attempts to acquire an atomic bomb in exchange for the ending of the international isolation of the Qadafi regime in Tripoli. A similar fate occurred to Iraq, where Saddam Hussein's regime dropped its nuclear programme following the threats above all by the US.[4] [107] Pakistan, on the other hand, succeeded in acquiring “the bomb”. What is striking about these examples is how differently countries tend to be treated, depending on whether or not they possess a nuclear capacity. To this day, the United States has never even threatened Pakistan militarily. And this despite the fact that the regime in Lahore is still a prominent supporter of the Taliban in Afghanistan, harboured Bin Laden, and has moved ever closer to China, the main rival of the USA. As opposed to this, Ukraine, stripped of its nuclear weapons, was militarily attacked by Russia, and Libya by France and Britain (with the US in the background). The lesson is clear: in the eyes of their leaders “the bomb” is perhaps the most effective means for weaker powers to avoid being pushed around too much or even being overthrown by the stronger ones. This policy is of course considered to be unacceptable by the big powers, who have been disposing of nuclear arsenals for decades and used the nuclear threat themselves for their own imperialist interests.  Despite the Cold War being over all the existing nuclear powers (USA, Russia, China, France, GB) have all kept a gigantic arsenal of nuclear weapons – an estimated 22.000 nuclear bombs. And the US – as the only remaining superpower, although weakened and challenged everywhere in the world - has allowed its long-standing ally Israel or a country such as India to equip themselves with the nuclear bomb, as long as these are considered to be of some help to the US (as in the case of India, which is seen as a counter-weight to China and Pakistan). Thus the US themselves contributed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Amongst the existing nuclear powers, so far only Russian and Chinese missiles can reach US territory, Iranian missiles (whether equipped with nuclear warheads or not) cannot. North Korea would be the first “rogue” state to be able to do so. This is unbearable for the US.

During the time of the Cold War, the threat of the use of nuclear weapons was limited to the big powers. Since 1989 nuclear proliferation has meant that more countries have gained access to them, or could quickly produce them; and nobody can exclude the danger that these weapons might fall into the hands of terrorist groups. The threat of a “bi-polar” nuclear holocaust has been replaced by the even greater nightmare of “multi-polar” nuclear genocide.

But the new escalation cannot just be explained by the specificities of the North Korean regime and its struggle for survival. The conflict in Korea itself has another quality because of the geostrategic position of Korea and its importance for the US and China in the sharpening of their global imperialist rivalries. 

Korea on the imperialist chess-board

Korea has always been the target of the imperialist ambitions of its neighbours. As we wrote in our special issue of the International Review devoted to the Far East, “The reasons are obvious: surrounded by Russia, China and Japan, Korea’s geographic position makes it a springboard for an expansion from one country towards another. Korea is inextricably lodged in a nutcracker between the Japanese island empire and the two land empires of Russia and China. Control over Korea allows control over three seas – the Japanese sea, the Yellow sea and East China Sea. If under the control of one country, Korea could serve as a knife in the back of other countries. Since the 1890s, Korea has been the target of the imperialist ambitions of the major sharks in the area initially only three: Russia, Japan and China - with the respective support and resistance of European and US sharks acting in the background. Even if, in particular, the northern part of Korea has some important raw materials, it is above all its strategic position which makes the country such a vital cornerstone for imperialism in the region”[5] [108].

Especially since the carve-up of the country in the Korean war, North Korea has been serving as buffer between China and South Korea and thus, between China and the US. If the regime in the North fell, not only would South Korean troops but also US troops be stationed closer than ever before to the Chinese border – a nightmare for China. Thus China is condemned to support the regime in North Korea in order to defend its own borders above all against the US. Given the tendency for the North Korean regime to act in an unpredictable and maverick manner, China has to go along with certain sanctions against Pyongyang, but it opposes the complete strangling of the regime. For China the aggressive policy of the North Korean regime is a double-edged sword: on the one hand it provokes a stronger military response from the US, South Korea and Japan, weakening the Chinese position in its northern flank, yet possibly leaving it more room for manoeuvre in its southern flank (for example the South China Sea). But the collapse of the North Korean regime would make it much more vulnerable vis-a- vis the US and its arch enemy Japan. And the consequences of a possible collapse of the North Korean regime and the wave of refugees escaping to or via China are extremely daunting for Beijing.

Although threatened and undermined in their position, the US can – paradoxically – at the same capitalise from the North Korean threats because they are a welcome justification for strengthening its own military presence or that of its allies around China. We can assumethat if North Korea had not acted so provocatively, the US could not have installed so easily the new THAAD weapons system in South Korea. Any weapon stationed in South Korea can easily be used against China, so what is presented as a “defensive” weapon for South Korea at the same time is an “offensive” weapon against China.

The conflict between North and South Korea and the US is aggravated by the new constellation in the Far East. Almost simultaneously with its economic ascension since the 1990s, China also began to develop new imperialist ambitions. Thus we have seen the modernisation of its army, the establishment of the “String of Pearls” naval bases around its territory and in the waters of the Indian Ocean and South East Asia - a kind of military occupation of at least of parts of the South China Sea; the construction of a military base in Djibuti; increased economic weight in Africa and Latin America; combined manoeuvres with Russia in the Baltic Sea, the Mediterranean and in the Far East etc. The US has declared China the number one threat to be contained. This is why the process of rearming Japan (maybe even allowing it nuclear bombs), like the increased military efforts in South Korea, are part of a global strategy both to protect South Korea and to contain China.  Of course this has given an extra boost to the US armaments industry. Along with Saudi Arabia, South Korea has become one of the most important customers of the US armaments industry. Its contribution to financing the enormous military apparatus of the USA is today considerable.

At the same time, given the fact that North Korea now has the capacity for nuclear strikes, this makes it much harder for US imperialism to strike back militarily in this area and it is likely to intensify its resolve to react against China in other hotspots.

Any direct military confrontation with North Korea would trigger a chain of destruction on both sides. Half of the South Korean population lives in the Seoul area and many of the 250,000 US Americans in South Korea live in this area – all within easy reach of North Korean missiles. Trump's “fire and fury” threats would not only lead to the deaths of a very high number of Koreans, but also of many US citizens. The annihilation of the regime in the North could only be achieved at the cost of gigantic destructions in South Korea – not to mention the escalation this would meant the world-wide imperialist level. 

The dominant view of these developments in the mainstream press is that they are the consequence of having a madman in power in Pyongyang, or of the matching narcissism and irrationality of both Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. It’s true that both present many interesting features for a psychoanalytical study, and that their way of speaking and acting gives the escalation a spectacular and almost hysterical tone. But we have already seen that from the point of view of the defence of his national capital, Kim Jong-un’s nuclear policies make a good deal of sense. The real irrationality is located at a greater depth – in the irrationality of national competition in an era of advancing capitalist decay. The arms race in the Far East is only one expression of the spreading cancer of militarism, in turn a necessary product of a social system trapped in a historical impasse. No politician, whatever their psychological profile, can evade the deadly logic of this system. The very intelligent and articulate Barack Obama promised to scale down the Bush administration’s disastrous engagement in the Middle East, and yet if it withdrew troops from Iraq or Afghanistan it was obliged to increase its presence in the Far East. Trump criticised his predecessors for their inability to avoid involvement in “foreign wars”, especially in the Middle East, but has now had to increase the US military presence almost everywhere, including in the Middle East. In reality, both Obama and Trump have both demonstrated that the grip of militarism is stronger than the declarations or desires of individual politicians.

China's differences with North Korea

History has shown that China has paid a high price in the struggle over Korea. In the Korean war Mao Tse-tung's troops staged their first foreign invasion, suffering heavy losses, and ever since World War Two and even more following the Korean war the US have been able to use the Chinese threat to justify the maintenance of huge bases in the region. In addition there is China’s rivalry with Japan. In such a context, when there is no question of China employing weapons against South Korea at the moment, China has been playing the economic card. Its goal is to make South Korea as much as possible dependent on the Chinese economy. Already today, the main export market of South Korea is China (around 23%), no longer the United States (around 12%). And South Korea is the fourth biggest export market for Chinese products. The symbol of the serious setback this policy has suffered is the installation of the THAAD anti-missile system in South Korea. Beijing felt obliged to immediately react with the threat of economic sanctions against Seoul.  The policy of Beijing towards Pyongyang for some time now has been to try and persuade it to follow the example of China itself or of Vietnam: privatisation of state companies and the opening up to foreign investments, while maintaining the Stalinist party in power. Kim Jong-un has proven himself to be much more open to such idea than his father. Anything between 30% and 50% of the economy is said to be in private hands today – which as experience from the Eastern European countries, Russia and China has shown, means mainly in the hands of cliques belonging to the party or loyal to the party, and of the army itself.[i] Even though these privatisations are not official (they have no legal basis, so that they can be revoked at any moment), they do seem to have made certain branches of the economy more efficient. Even a mobile telephone system of its own, with one million users, has been set up (with the help of a Egyptian company). But despite all of this, relations between Beijing and Pyongyang have worsened steadily in recent years, and the degree of influence which the former has on the latter has clearly been waning. The main area of conflict is the nuclear programme. While going along with the Chinese proposals for economic development to a certain extent, Kim Jong-un has always insisted that his first priority is “the bomb”, not the economy. For him, the bomb is the guarantee of the survival of his regime. Once this has been achieved, he says, we will see about the economy. Kim's bomb is thus not only the symbol of the limits of Chinese influence; it also shows how much military interests outweigh those of the economy.

Because China is not a bloc leader and cannot impose any “discipline” on North Korea, this adds an additional element, where the tendency towards “every man for himself” makes the situation all the more unpredictable. Finally, it has to be stressed that while Kim Jong-un and his army gamble for their survival with the help of the bomb, reckoning with the desire of the US to avoid a nuclear conflict, such a calculation has never stopped capitalism’s rulers from carrying out a policy of scorched earth and risking their own annihilation in order to cling to power, or merely out of a lust for revenge. Did Hitler have any hesitations about ordering massacres and executions until his last breath; has Assad not been accepting the destruction of large areas of his own country to stay in control? 

In the Far East we can thus see a sharpening of the tensions between the main rivals US and China, with Russia and Japan ganging up behind these two leading powers. But none of these leading powers have grouped a military bloc behind them. Japan and South Korea support the US to the extent the US can offer some level of protection against North Korea and China, but they are no US lackeys and they constantly look for their own room to manoeuvre. And South Korea and Japan also have territorial conflicts between themselves over certain islands. Meanwhile other countries which in the past supported the US, such as the Philippines which relies on US military support to fight against terrorists of all kinds within the country, have threatened to take sides with China in the conflict in the South China Sea; and Duterte has also been sounding of about the possibility of buying Russian and Chinese weapons instead of those delivered by western countries. And within Korea itself, even though the US remains an indispensable bodyguard, the Americans cannot count on unconditional loyalty from the ruling factions of South Korea, some of whom feel they are just one figure on the chessboard for the US.

The national interests of the ruling class in South Korea

Because they both serve as vital buffers against bigger rivals, all the imperialist sharks of the region have an interest in keeping Korea divided. The same goes for the regime in Pyongyang. However, the South Korean ruling class has always dreamt of and periodically been aiming at reunification. The so-called “Sunshine policy” of advocating growing cooperation with Pyongyang is one attempt to pave the way towards some long-term settlement with the final hope of unification.

This dream within the South Korean ruling class became stronger after the unification of Germany in 1990. This gave a boost to the aspirations of the South to put the unification of Korea back on the agenda of world politics. Following the German example, South Korean politicians began to formulate their “Sunshine” policy as a kind of Korean version of the Ostpolitik of the West German chancellor Willy Brandt in the 1970s. Its goal was to create an economic and “humanitarian” dependence of North on South Korea as a means of preparing reunification. Once the two Korean states had recognised each other diplomatically, they both became members of the United Nations in September 1991. Three months later, North and South signed an agreement on “reconciliation, non-aggression, trade and collaboration”. Although not yet a peace treaty, this agreement officially ended the state of war between the two Koreas. As the South Korean government pointed out at the time, the peace treaty it had been calling for had been prevented by the refusal of the United States to diplomatically recognise North Korea. This attitude of Washington undermined the policy of the “Sunshiners”, so that a new president, Kim Young Sam, with the support of the US president Bill Clinton, reverted to the policy of aggressive containment of the North. This latter policy takes as its model the so-called Kennan Doctrine developed by the USA against the USSR in the course of the Cold War. It consists of the military encirclement and economic strangulation of one’s enemy, in order to bring its regime to its knees. In 1994, in response to North Korean steps to develop nuclear weapons, US President Clinton considered a preventive strike against the regime’s nuclear power plants. Despite the renouncing of nuclear weapons by North Korea in the Geneva accord of autumn 1994, the US hardened their stance towards North Korea. The renewed aggravation of the inner-Korean conflict which resulted certainly contributed to the gravity of the famine which afflicted North Korea between 1995 and 1998. This catastrophe, in turn, was used by the Sunshiners to launch a new bid for power.

The founder of the giant Hyundai concern, Chung Ju Yung, is said to have put the economic strangulation policy of the Seoul government in question in 1998 by symbolically donating one thousand cows to the North. At the beginning of the year 2000 Kim Dae-jung, the most prominent advocate of the Sunshine policy, and who had won the presidential elections on this basis, met his northern counterpart Kim Jong Il (the father of Kim Jong-un). The reluctance of the North to participate in this “historic summit” had to be overcome with the help of a payment of 186 million dollars provided by the Hyundai concern – a deal made with the help of the head of the South Korean secret service . This was followed, in 2004, by an important economic venture: the establishment, in Kaesong, North Korea, of a special economic zone on the Chinese model, where South Korean companies could invest and exploit the cheap North Korean labour power. For his Sunshine policy, Kim Dae-jung was awarded the Nobel peace prize. But it also brought him, and his successor Roh Moo-hyun, the opposition of their South Korean rivals, and of the United States.

North Korea was furious about the triumphant return of the Sunshiners in the south. To understand why, one only has to look at what happened in Germany. There, the Stalinist-ruled East Germany was swallowed lock, stock and barrel in 1990. In such a situation, the North Korean Stalinists would risk not only losing their power, as happened in East Berlin, but their lives. The more conciliatory approach  from Seoul  was  unable to disperse the fears of the Stalinists in Pyongyang sensing this might be  the beginning of the end of North Korea. The hopes of the Sunshiners that the regime in the north might support its policy of “transformation through cooperation” seemed to have been dashed. And the Sunshine policy did not receive any support from Washington.

After the intermezzo of the impeached Park Gyun-he, who stood for a more confrontational course towards the North, Moon took over in 2017[6] [109]. Moon came to power as a staunch defender of the “Sunshine” doctrine of dialogue and cooperation rather than confrontation with the North. He was reportedly outraged about the new escalation between North Korea and the United States. He at least initially put in question the decision of Donald Trump (taken apparently without consulting the Moon government) to install the American THAAD anti-missile system in South Korea, a step which had been planned already under Park Gyun-he, the impeached president. Instead of taking the side of Donald Trump in the present conflict, the government in Seoul was initially calling for restraint from both sides. However, after the most recent nuclear tests and threats Moon suddenly called for the deployment of US atomic weapons and rammed through the installation of new missile systems such as THAAD in South Korea. In addition, the radius of South-Korean missiles (so far limited to a distance of 800 km) and their carrying capacity of 500 kg is to be increased significantly. It is too early to conclude that all this means an irreversible abandoning of his Sunshine policy, but it certainly puts it at risk.

The key role of the working class

In all these countries the ruling class tries to pull the working class onto a nationalist terrain. But the working class must refuse to be lured into the trap. True, the combativity and consciousness of the working class in North Korea are hard to assess. In the face of daily surveillance and terror, any resistance would have to be massive and would immediately confront the state and its military and police apparatus. This seems unlikely at the moment. Moreover, the effects of the UN sanctions will not strangle the North Korean regime; but they will hit the working class above all. Whenever its rulers greet successful missile tests the workers and peasants know that new sanctions are on the horizon, for which they have to pay the bill. And they know that their rulers do not care about the risk of starvation.

All the more weight therefore lies on the shoulders of the working class in South Korea and China. Although decades of “anti-communist campaigns” have distorted the view of many workers about communism, South Korean and Chinese workers have in the last few decades engaged in many militant and massive struggles, which is an indication that they will not be willing to sacrifice themselves in an imperialist war for their exploiters. And whatever the level of resistance in the working class, to confront the war drive it is essential that there is present within the class a voice defending the oldest principle and slogan of the working class - “Workers have no fatherland”. This is why we support the internationalist leaflet which the comrades of the Korean group International Communist Perspective wrote and which we publish here [110].

We do have some criticisms of this statement, in particular its focus on the installation of THAAD, which could give rise to the idea that single-issue campaigns are the equivalent of the workers’ struggle to defend their interests against the demands of the war machine.  It is not by campaigning against this or that weapons system that the working class can develop its consciousness. The task of revolutionaries is to expose the impasse of the whole system, while participating in struggles for class demands that can tear apart the illusions of a “national unity” and develop a real solidarity with workers in other countries. However, different points of view should be debated amongst internationalists and should not prevent them from combining to defending their shared principles. We can recall that Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, after the outbreak of World War One, fought together against the imperialist conflict, but debated heatedly over the national question. We thus unreservedly stand in solidarity with the ICP comrades and all those fighting for real internationalism in this region.

International Communist Current

18/9/2017

[1] [111]              The workers get between $120-150 a month, working like slaves with only one or two days off a month 

[2] [112]  See “Theses on the economic and political crisis in the eastern countries”, https://en.internationalism.org/ir/60/collapse_eastern_bloc [113]

[3] [114]                The list of the titles of the leaders is endless. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Kim_Jong-il%27s_titles [115]

[4] [116]     The US Foreign Secretary Powell and British Prime Minister Blair all warned that nuclear weapons were already available to Saddam Hussein; as it turned out this was “fake news'” and a pretext for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

[5] [117] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/2012/5305/november/i... [118]

[6] [119]     The reasons for the impeachment of Park Gyun-he were multifold: on the one hand there was the power struggle between “Sunshiners” and “confrontationists”, and we can assume that the latter pulled some of the strings in the big wave of protest against Park Gyun-he; at the same time the outrage in the population about the high level of corruption also contributed to her demise. At any rate all of this was used to ramp up the image of democracy.

An overview of the international situation reveals the accentuation of barbarism and global chaos. The disturbing series of terrorist attacks during the summer, striking once again at the heart of the capitalist world, alongside the missile-rattling over North Korea and the endless wars in the Middle East, illustrate this tragically.

The impasse of an entire mode of production

Whichever party is in power and whatever their security measures, their promises empty when they claim to want to improve our daily lives and security. In fact, their behaviour is dictated by totally conflicting objectives: ensuring the exploitation of wage labour to the maximum in times of economic crisis and defending their imperialist interests through military and police operations which claim most of their victims among the civilian populations. It all confirms the historical impasse of a bourgeois ruling class that has run its course, but which is willing to do anything to maintain its privileges and its obsolete mode of production. Each and every day, corruption, increasing tensions between bourgeois cliques, mounting unemployment and poverty are the major elements of a chronic economic crisis, an expression of a capitalist mode of production whose prolonged agony now threatens the human species. In spite of the desperate attempts of the ruling class to create more lucid, responsible and presentable factions, as was the case in France with the successful effort to put Macron in power, the discredit suffered by the traditional parties is often leading to the formation of governments by elements least suited to defending the higher interests of capital: there is an inability to implement real global and coherent policies, to have a profound vision of the long term, beyond instant profit and return on investment.

This phenomenon is fueled by "populism", a product of capitalist decomposition which has become insidiously embedded in society. In many countries the ruling class has gradually lost control of the political machinery it has used for decades to try to curb the most harmful political effects of a bankrupt capitalism. The state and the most conscious factions of the bourgeoisie are attempting to react and with some success, as we just underlined in the case of Macron, but this can only delay or slow down the process, and cannot really stop it. On the contrary, the situation will continue to worsen. And indeed, since Brexit and the election of Trump, the total unpredictability of the situation has only given a boost to the dynamics of "every man for himself" and to the growing barbarism. Throughout the world, the politicians at the hub of major decisions tend to express the darkest aspects of human behaviour. We see the actions of a manipulative and paranoid Putin, while Erdogan pursues a personality cult in Turkey, a diehard Maduro clings to power at any cost, willing to "burn" everything in Venezuela, in the Philippines Duterte directs death squads ready to kill any opponent and openly boasts about it, and North Korea’s Kim-Jong-Un displays the traits of a real psychopath ... the list is too long to continue. The most striking thing of all is that the world's leading power, the United States, is now led by a personality like Trump, a narcissist steeped in brutality and known for his unpredictability. In Britain, too, the Brexit vote then the semi-defeat of Theresa May in the last general election makes the future of the EU very uncertain. How do we explain the simultaneous appearance of so many and sadly similar personalities, in what was previously the preserve of a few "banana republics"?

For us this is not all the fruit of mere chance, but a product of the current historical period. The phase of decomposition of the capitalist mode of production stamps its mark on the history and the personality of men. It defines their limits by almost dictating their actions, their displays of impotence, of blindness, of irresponsibility, of immorality, their thirst for repression and terror. From among the most remarkable reflections of the workers' movement on the subject, we look back to the writings of Trotsky: "Certain elements of similarity of course are accidental, and have the interest only of historic anecdotes. Infinitely more important are those traits of character which have been grafted, or more directly imposed, on a person by the mighty force of conditions, and which throw a sharp light on the interrelation of personality and the objective factors of history"[1]  Using a marxist theoretical framework, subtly outlining the portraits and the crossed destinies of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and King Louis XVI of France, Trotsky perfectly depicted the imprint of historical decline on these famous figures of the aristocracy:

"Louis and Nicholas were the last-born of a dynasty that had lived tumultuously. The well-known equability of them both, their tranquillity and “gaiety” in difficult moments, were the well-bred expression of a meagreness of inner powers, a weakness of the nervous discharge, poverty of spiritual resources. Moral castrates, they were absolutely deprived of imagination and creative force. They had just enough brains to feel their own triviality, and they cherished an envious hostility toward everything gifted and significant. It fell to them both to rule a country in conditions of deep inner crisis and popular revolutionary awakening. Both of them fought off the intrusion of new ideas, and the tide of hostile forces. Indecisiveness, hypocrisy, and lying were in both cases the expression, not so much of personal weakness, as of the complete impossibility of holding fast, to their hereditary positions."[2]  And he adds: " The ill-luck of Nicholas, as of Louis, had its roots not in his personal horoscope, but in the historical horoscope of the bureaucratic-caste monarchy. They were both, chiefly and above all, the last-born offspring of absolutism."[3]

With the phase of decomposition of capitalism, we are seeing a new dimension because the last two fundamental classes in history, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, in their reciprocal confrontation, have not as yet succeeded in affirming a clear perspective for society, in giving a visible meaning to our future. Our epoch also finds its own "offspring" of Louis XVI and Nicholas II. It is in many ways a caricature of what went before: today’s bourgeois leaders offer us only the smell of a scorched earth. Society is blocked, humanity is enclosed in the tragic prison of the immediate, thus plunging the world into everyman for himself, theft, chaos and growing barbarism.

Populist policies worsen the world situation

Since the election of Trump, the world situation has deteriorated considerably. Because of the particular historical context, this despotic and megalomaniac business leader, animated by a sort of sly, obscurantist, "anti-elite" revolt coming from within civil society, is being pushed to break with the traditions and codes of the established order.

The consequences can be sharply illustrated. We have seen Trump's foreign policy pour oil on the fire by entering into a game of military “stakes-raising” with North Korea, highlighting in the background a real and increasingly tense and dangerous stand-off with China and other Asian powers. Another significant example, among many, is Trump's conduct in the Middle East, challenging the traditional US policy through brutal diplomatic shifts, particularly against Iran, also throwing oil into this highly inflammable region. As a result, the United States, a declining power, appears even less "reliable", especially when they themselves are drawn into the dynamics of military tensions, driven to accelerate the spiral of war. This is the case in Mosul, where the war between the US-led coalition and Daesh has produced 40,000 civilian deaths, so quietly announced by the media. While the stated aim was to "fight against terrorism", the outcome was the opposite: an increased wave of attacks, such as the tragic events in Barcelona, and the resurgence of a flow of refugees trying to flee war and misery in peril of their lives. The latter are either driven back to camps or face death in the Mediterranean. This total absence of a political vision, this stalemate in a logic of war, will only generalise the violence and the mechanisms of revenge, spreading the cancer of jihadist ideology and terrorism towards new geographical zones.

These tensions and military conflicts in Asia and the Middle East are not unique. In the same vein, Trump's announcements of a possible US military intervention in Venezuela only hardened Maduro's position: instead of easing the situation, the latter using this US threat to justify his policies in the name of anti-imperialism. With regards to the domestic politics in the United States, Trump's wayward declarations and political actions have sharpened differences within the upper echelons of the state, and further discredited the government, for example, with the President's sympathy for the most extreme right-wing gangs following the recent incidents in Charlottesville, Virginia. All this weakens the image of the United States and especially of its head of state across the world.

But these worsening political and military tensions are not the only expressions of the historical impasse towards which capital and its corrupt leaders are driving us. The decisions taken also fuel the commercial war, despite alarm bells like the financial crisis of 2008. The strengthening of protectionism and "everyman-for-himself" in the economic sphere, the policy of "America First", will only plunge the world further into global crisis, mass unemployment and social deprivation. The worsening trade war also brings with it an increasingly irresponsible attitude to the protection of nature. Trump's statements, surpassing the bold claims of the oil lobby, reveal his cold casualness towards the threat of global warming. His ironic view of the Paris agreements (COP 21) shows clearly the increasing folly and vandalism of the ruling class in the face of a looming ecological catastrophe.

In short, what we can observe is that the ideological superstructures of bourgeois society, which are affected by the impasse of the capitalist mode of production, themselves act as material forces of destruction. The lack of perspective affecting society also constitutes a serious hindrance for the only class capable of posing a revolutionary alternative, the proletariat. Its loss of class identity and the propaganda seeking to distort and attack its revolutionary traditions oblige the proletarian political milieu and revolutionary organisations like the ICC to have a very great sense of responsibility. Because it bears a programme rooted in the whole historical experience of the workers' movement, the revolutionary organisation is indispensable for enabling the working class to reconnect with its past, in particular the wave of international struggles of the 1920s, and within that the combat of the Bolshevik party which resulted in the victory of Red October. With the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917, it is important to reconnect with the fundamental lessons of this irreplaceable experience. By appropriating this past experience critically, in a spirit of struggle, the proletariat will be able to prepare a future worthy of the human species.

WH, 28 August 2017

• In the name of the “struggle against terrorism”, the central power in Burma has used the opportunity to resume control of a strategic region, rich in minerals, and coveted by a whole number of imperialist vultures: the USA, India, China, Britain...
• The rebels themselves, like the mass of the ethnic group, have always served as pawns, manipulated by this or that power in the region. They were used by British imperialism as a “loyal” force against those calling for independence, from the 19th century until 1948. Today the rebels are widely suspected of being financed by Saudi Arabia; and there seems to be a rallying to the Rohingya cause throughout the Muslim world, from Morocco via Iran to Indonesia.

After months of violence, officially there have been 1000 killed and half a million forced to flee towards neighbouring Bangladesh. These now join the 300,000 Rohingya refugees already living in miserable and unhygienic camps in Bangladesh, having fled Burma after previous waves of persecution, such as the terrible military repression of 2012. This minority now joins the long list of minorities subjected to state violence in the region. Since 1948, for example, the Tibetan-Burmese Karen minority has suffered persecution on a scale where it is not an exaggeration to talk about genocide.

Ethnic cleansing, exclusion: specialities of capitalism

Burma itself is no exception when it comes to persecution and massacre. History is full of the most horrible examples, from the colonisation of Africa and Asia by Britain and other imperialist powers, passing through the very formation of the USA through the genocide of the native Americans to the methodical extermination of Jews and gypsies during World War Two. Since its origins, the life of capitalism has been marked by the extermination of whole populations. Although the democracies loudly chorus that the Holocaust must never happen again, fill scholarly books that call on us never to forget, make themselves the champions of freedom against the persecutions of Nazi or Stalinist totalitarianism, “ethnic cleansing” has continued and has even multiplied in the last few decades:  Chechnya, Darfour, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the Tamils in Sri Lanka...and these are only the most emblematic examples, the ones that have witnessed the  worst atrocities and the most hypocritical reactions from the democratic powers, who in some cases were directly implicated in the massacres (most notably Rwanda, with France backing the Hutu killers and the US the Tutsi rebels who came to form the present government).

The decadent, rotting state of capitalism today can only accelerate and amplify this process of persecution and destruction of peoples and ethnic groups accused of being the source of all that is wrong with society, an obstacle to the development of “civilisation”. They are the easy scapegoats that no state can do without.

Aung San Suu Kyi: an icon of peace in the service of war

For a month or more, the bourgeois press and numerous political, religious and artistic figures have been appealing to the sense of responsibility of Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been in power in April 2016, asking her to put a stop to the massacre. Initially there was total silence from Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1991, and known as an “intransigent” opponent of the Burmese military junta for nearly 15 years. Her imprisonment by the junta gave her a halo and when she was freed, she initiated a “democratic opening” for the country. When in mid-September she finally spoke, it was to deny the reality of the massacres and to denounce the “fake news” being put out by the western press. Presented yesterday as the Asian Nelson Mandela, a white knight for democracy, this is someone who declared that she had been born for no other reason than to “protect human rights, and I hope that I will always be seen as a champion of the Rights of Man”; someone who said that “all the repressive laws must be repealed. And laws must be introduced to protect the people’s rights”. Now she has fallen from her pedestal.

Yesterday, the whole humanitarian and diplomatic milieu, from rock stars like Bono to cineastes like Luc Besson and John Boorman, to former world leaders like Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Jacques Delors, all of them saluted the determination of this “Mother Courage”. The following declaration is typical: “it’s not said often enough that the strategy of active non-violence (which is also at the roots of ecology) followed by Aung San Suu Kyi and her partisans is the real success story.  Perseverance, patience, the will to understand and to reconcile, the capacity for compromise....but also firmness and inflexibility as regards the objective, all this Aung San Suu Kyi shares with Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mandela, Vaclav Havel...and today the Dalai Lama...In the face of totalitarianism, peace and democracy are possible one day, especially when you know that ‘the most patient wins out in the end’. And indeed, the evolution of Burma and the freedom of expression and action of the ‘Lady of Rangoon’ are signs of hope for the whole of Asia, for all the non-violent combats on the planet. Signs of hope for freedom, for solidarity, for ecology” (June 2012 communiqué of Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV).)  Are we dreaming?

Has the brave “Lady of Rangoon” betrayed, given up her principles? Is this someone who has deceived the whole world? Not at all. The reality is more down to earth. Aung San Suu Kyi is merely a representative of the capitalist world, an expression of the bourgeois class, no more, no less. This Nobel Prize winner is indeed the daughter of the general Aung San, protagonist of Burmese independence and Burmese nationalism, which from the start has always excluded the country’s ethnic minorities. Continuity, tradition....in mud and blood! She herself has declared proudly: “I have always been a  political woman. I didn’t go into politics as a defender of Human Rights or as a humanitarian worker, but as the leader of a political party”. This has the merit of being clear. The icon of peace has simply taken up her role at the head of the Burmese state, cooperating without problem with the very same soldiers who put her in prison, then put her in power, mainly with the aim of giving themselves a more respectable image and currying favour with the US

Certain people, aware of her role as a “politically correct” face of the Burmese state, have waited for at least a few worlds of compassion, an “appeal to reason” faced with the killings. But no: she salutes the army for its struggle against terrorism and in defence of the general interest. But for the bourgeoisie, defending the general interest, the national interest, means defending the capitalist state and its violence, whether democratic or not. Aung San Suu Kyi has always been loyal to her cause, the cause of capitalism and her class, the bourgeoisie. At root the stunning communiquéof the EELV is right: Aung San Suu Kyi is indeed in the tradition of all the other apostles of peace: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mandela, Lech Walesa, Desmond Tutu, Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter or Obama. A few examples:

• Mandela was freed after 27 years in prison and came to power to found a “new South Africa”; he was made a Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1993. And despite the fact that the extremely demanding role he was called upon to play demanded a person of a different calibre from Aung San Suu Kyi,  “South Africa remains a ‘third world’ state where certain high-performing sectors, diminishing in number and mainly run by whites,  sit over an ocean of poverty, corruption, and violence...the social climate is poisoned by the crying inequalities nourished by the ‘Black Diamonds’, the black nouveaux  riches, insatiable and corrupt profiteers who insolently flaunt their luxurious life-style”[1]. No comment.
• The ‘historic victory’ of Obama, the first black president of the USA, gave rise to the same kind of rhetoric: at last a black man in a command of a country ravaged by social inequality and racism. “Together we will change this country and change the world”. On 10 December 2009, Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. Eight years later, according to the organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD), the USA is one of the countries with the biggest gap between rich and poor. More than 30,000 people are gunned down every year in the USA, very often black people. From the military point of view, Obama continued to defend US imperialist interests in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, while involving the country in areas where it had previously been more or less absent: in Libya, in Mali and Nigeria. He set up drone bases in Niger which has frontiers with Nigeria and Mali and is close to Cameroun, while “targeted” air strikes have been carried out in Somalia and Pakistan.

Each time, these icons thrust forward as symbols of hope have played on the illusions of the exploited and diverted them from the collective, conscious struggle against capitalism and its barbarity.

Buddhism bolsters the capitalist state

We should also look at the religious dimension of the situation in Burma. The most violent rejection of the Muslim Rohingya has been expressed within the majority Buddhist population. Buddhist monks have themselves been stirring up this hatred and calling for pogroms. They haven’t hesitated to engage in physical aggression themselves, led by the ultra-nationalist, anti-Muslim monk Wirathu or the “Venerable W” as he is known. This person was himself imprisoned for several years by the junta for preaching hatred.

There are some who defend Aung San Suu Kyi whatever she does. According to Alter Info, September 2017, “the great lady follows a very pure Buddhist path, and she does her best despite all the insults and lies propagated by the western media...what can she do? Favour a minority which endangers the majority? Let the US destabilise the country through the Rohingya who, for many, are really Bengalis? No, she is doing what she can for the country and the majority of its inhabitants are certainly not responsible for the crimes attributed to them”.

In reality, the “purity” of Buddhism in Burma is being used in the interest of the capitalist state, a state based on religious identity and on national chauvinism. But here again, we shouldn’t be surprised. Like many of the world religions, Buddhism originated in a revolt of the oppressed against the existing order, in particular the Indian caste system. Hence, like the religion of ancient Israel, early Christianity and Islam, it was characterised by high moral values based on an emerging vision of a common humanity. But unable to offer a real solution to the sufferings of mankind, these movements were transformed into state religions which expressed the interests of the ruling class, and even their best ethical insights were turned into justifications for preserving the existing class-divided order. In decadent and decomposing capitalism, however, the religions of the world have increasingly become naked apologists for exclusion, racism and war. Buddhism, still widely reputed to be a religion of tolerance and peace, has not been able to escape this destiny.

The situation in Burma is only a further episode in the bloody agony of the capitalist system. Behind all the indignant noises coming from the bourgeois world, imperialism’s confrontations and alliances continue. Concretely, despite the denunciations, support for the Burmese state and its army will not be dropped by the western states because it can act as a barrier to the advance of Chinese imperialism  - its push to gain direct access to the Gulf of Bengal and from there to the open sea, and  its new “Silk Road” towards Europe.

Only the proletarian struggle, the development of international class solidarity, can put an end to the scourge of scapegoating and ethnic cleansing. The road ahead is long, very long, but there isn’t another one. 

Stopio, 2.10.17

Divisions in the ranks of the capitalist class are natural for a class that competes at every level, from individual enterprises to inter-imperialist war. However, in the face of imperialist threat, economic difficulties or a resurgent class struggle, there is a tendency for the bourgeoisie to come together in the national interest. The decomposition of capitalism has pushed forward the tendency to division within the bourgeoisie, and in particular a tendency towards a loss of political control among the most experienced bourgeoisies.

The 2016 UK Referendum on membership of the EU produced a result against what the central factions of the British bourgeoisie considered as their best interests. The international populist tide was amplified with the election of President Trump. And the specific political difficulties of the British government were exacerbated by the general election of June 2017. Called to increase the Conservative government’s majority and strengthen its position in negotiations over British withdrawal from the EU, the election resulted in a loss of seats and the need to form an alliance with the DUP from Northern Ireland.

Far from improving the position of the British government and assisting in the EU negotiations, the loss of control is being shown in the plotting of various factions, divisions that go beyond those of Leave v Remain and Hard v Soft Brexit, and a general disarray within a ruling class that seems to have no coherent plans and is improvising at every turn. The British bourgeoisie faces real difficulties in the Brexit negotiations, yet appears to be unable to regain political control and at least try to get the best out of a difficult situation. The economic consequences of Brexit will be made worse by this political disarray.

The contrast between the historical strengths of the British bourgeoisie and its current situation is dramatic. The long term experience of the British bourgeoisie has meant that it has been able to unite in times of imperialist war, adapt in the face of economic crises, and adopt an appropriate strategy in the face of workers’ struggles. In 1974, in the middle of an open economic crisis and with a miners’ strike as the latest expression of a wave of workers’ militancy, an election was called which resulted in a Labour government that would be far more effective in dealing with the working class because of the extent of illusions in Labour and the unions. In the 1980s, while the Conservative government presided over attacks on the wages, jobs and conditions of the working class, Labour in opposition posed as the workers’ friend.  Together with the unions, Labour presented alternative capitalist economic strategies and, in various ways, recuperated and/or diverted working class militancy.

In addition to the different ways that the British bourgeoisie have used the Labour Party against the working class, they have also handled well the differences within the ruling class. In 1990, the attitude of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher towards Europe was deemed inappropriate in a period where the blocs dominated by the US and Russia were breaking up. The ‘men in grey suits’ had the previously unassailable Thatcher removed with very little fuss.

Today there are still manoeuvres going on within the British bourgeoisie, and specifically in the Conservative Party, but, far from leading to coherent policies or at least a dominant position by one faction, the strife within the ruling class shows every sign of growing. Britain was one of the countries worst hit by the economic blows of 2008, and the political unravelling within the Tory party is contributing to a further worsening of the situation.

The weaknesses of the bourgeoisie are not necessarily opportunities for the working class. The view of many leftists is summarised by the Socialist Workers Party when they say “The Tories are down but not out - we need to start kicking to bring them down” (Socialist Worker 4/7/17). They see the problems of the Conservative Party and declare that “We need resistance on a scale that can get rid of Theresa May and the rest of the Tory rabble”. (4/10/17). This is the prelude to a Labour government, although “A Corbyn-led government would not make Britain a socialist country. But millions will have been cheered by his pledges to tax the rich, renationalise industries and put more money into services.” (3/10/17). That is to say, many have illusions in Labour, and it’s one of the functions of leftism to reinforce illusions in this cornerstone of British state capitalism. Against this the working class need to understand that it is only through its own self-activity, through a growing consciousness that capitalism has nothing to offer, and an understanding that the working class is not just an exploited class but has the capacity to transform society, that the squabbles of the right and the lies of the left can be left behind. Car 21/10/17

On the first of October the masses who had been led by the Catalan separatists to the farce of the referendum were brutally beaten by the police dispatched by the Spanish government. Both Madrid and the Catalan authorities covered themselves in the mantel of democracy in order to justify both the vote and the repression. The Catalan separatists have presented themselves as the victims of repression in order to advance their call for independence. The Rajoy government has justified its repression in the name of defending the Constitution and the democratic rights of all Spaniards. The “neutrals” (Podemos, the Party of Ada Colau[1] etc.) have declared that democracy is the means for containing Rajoy and “finding a solution” to the Catalan conflict.

We denounce this trap set by the struggles between factions of capital: on the one hand, the deception of the rigged referendum; on the other, the brutal repression of the Spanish government. The working class and the oppressed are the victims of both.

All of them present democracy as the Supreme Good. However, they want us to forget that behind the democratic mask hides the totalitarian state. Like the military regimes and one-party states, the democratic state is also a dictatorship of capital that imposes its own interests and designs in the name of the popular vote, and against the real interests of all the exploited and oppressed.

In the First World War with its 20 million dead, all the contending gangs justified their barbarism in the name of democracy. In the Second World War, whilst the defeated Nazi regime was based on openly reactionary ideologies such as the “supremacy of the Aryan race”, the victors - which included not only the democratic powers but also the tyrannical regime in the USSR- dressed themselves in democratic robes in order to justify their participation in the massacre of 60 million human beings, which included the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It was in the name of democracy that the Spanish Republic managed to enrol the workers and peasants in the terrible slaughter that was the Civil War of 1936-9; a war between factions of the bourgeoisie -Republicans and Francoists - that cost a million dead.

In the name of democracy, the modernized Francoists and the self-proclaimed democrats, through the regime set up by the 1979 Constitution, have imposed the non-stop degradation of our living and working conditions. This has led to the present situation where permanent work has been replaced by generalized job insecurity. The Catalan separatists and Spanish nationalists have collaborated in this degradation. We cannot forget that it was the government of Artur Mas which in 2011-12 pioneered the cuts in health, education, unemployment payments etc, which have been generalized throughout Spain by the Rajoy government!

The hands of both the Spanish nationalists and Catalan separatists are stained with blood from the repression of workers’ struggles. Democracy began in post-Franco Spain with the death of 5 workers in the 1976 mass strike in Victoria. During the Felipe Gonzalez government, 3 workers were killed in the struggles in Gijón, Bilboa and Reinosa, The Catalan separatist government of Artur Más unleashed a brutal repression against the assemblies of the 15 May, leaving 100 injured. Before, in 1934, the current partners of the ERC organised a militia – Los Escamots - which specialised in the torture of militant workers.

They all flout their own “democratic” rules which they claim to be their Ideal. We have seen this with the separatists who have organized the parliamentary stupidity of the “Process” towards independence,  with its “pregnant” ballot boxes, filled to the brim with Yes votes.

In the name of Democracy a war to the death is being unleashed around that other pillar of capitalist domination: the Nation. The nation is not a “fraternal” amalgamation of all the inhabitants of the same land, but the private estate of all the capitalists of a country, who through the state organise the exploitation and the oppression of the great majority.

The Catalan separatists, who are aspiring for a new estate of their own, present themselves as victims of the barbarity of their rivals, claiming that “Madrid robs us”, in order to mobilize their cannon fodder in the name of “true democracy”.

This “true democracy” of the separatists is based on the exclusion of those who do not share their aims. The harassment of those who did not vote; posters and public displays aimed at shaming those who don’t agree; the moral blackmail of those who simply want to maintain a critical attitude. In all areas the “civil” associations have imposed their dictatorship, with the weapons of insults, lies, ostracism, harassment, control, trying to “homogenise” the population around “Catalonia”. This is even more marked with the Catalan separatist groups that use Nazi methods and theorise about the “purity” of the “Catalan race”.

The Spanish nationalist democrats are likewise not holding back. The stirring of hatred against Catalans; the manoeuvres to get large companies to move away from Catalonia; “spontaneous” demonstrations in favor of  urging on the  repressive forces with the barbaric slogan "give it to them", recalling the Basque nationalist cry of "ETA kill them"; the call to put Spanish flags in windows: all this reminds us of the way the Franco regime unleashed the nationalist beast in order to impose a reign of terror.

What both sides share is exclusion and xenophobia; they all agree on hatred of immigrants, contempt for Arab, Latin American and Asian workers, under the repugnant slogans of “they take it away from us”, “they steal our jobs”, “they increase waiting times for health care” etc, when it is the crisis of capitalism and the bankruptcy of its states, whether the Spanish or the Catalan Autonomous government, which generates attacks on everyone’s conditions and pushes thousands of young people into a wave of migration that recalls the ones in the 50s and 60s.

Meanwhile the “neutrals” of Podemos and the followers of Ada Colau try to make us believe that democracy with its “right to decide” will be the balm that allows negotiation and a “civilized solution”. From within this medley of illusions has appeared “Hablemos/Parlem” -Let us Talk-, which wants to put the Spanish and Catalan flags to one side and raise the “white flag” of dialogue and democracy.

The proletariat and with it all the exploited cannot have such illusions. The conflict that has irrupted in Catalonia is of the same ilk as the populist conflicts that led to Brexit or the enthroning of an irresponsible neurotic at the head of the world’s main power: Trump. It the expression of the degeneration and decomposition of the capitalist system which has provoked not only an economic crisis but also a political one in different capitalist states.

Capitalism at the present gives the appearance that “all is well”, that “we are getting out of the crisis”, that there is “technological progress” and dynamism on a world scale. But behind this superficially dazzling facade the violent contradictions of capitalism are growing in strength. Imperialist war, the destruction of the environment, moral barbarity, centrifugal tendencies of each for themselves are feeding the ideology and actions of xenophobia, exclusion, pogromism.

This volcano is also bursting out in the Middle East and with the danger of war between North Korea and the USA; and it is also seen in the Catalan conflict, where the apparently civilized and democratic forms, the use of “negotiations” and “truces”, are progressively disintegrating and run the risk of becoming entrenched and insoluble. If until now there have been no deaths, this is an increasingly dangerous prospect. A climate of social dislocation, violent clashes, intimidation, is taking root throughout society, not only in Catalonia, but in the whole of Spain. Growing numbers of people are finding it hard to bear a situation which is affecting  friends, families, children, workmates…

We are getting a glimpse of what Rosa Luxemburg wrote about in such a penetrating and prophetic way in 1915, faced with the horrors of the First World War :“Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form.” (The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis of German Social Democracy).

The danger for the proletariat, and thus for the future of humanity, is that it will be trapped in the suffocating atmosphere that is being spewed forth by the Catalan swamp. The proletariat’s sentiments, aspirations and thinking, are not currently gravitating around what the future holds for humanity, how to respond to job insecurity and miserable wages, how to overcome the general worsening of living conditions. Rather they are polarizing around the choice between Spain or Catalonia, the Constitution, the right to decide, the Nation…that is, the very factors that have contributed to the present situation and threaten to take it to the level of paroxysm.

We are conscious of the situation of weakness that threatens the proletariat today. However, this cannot stop us recognizing that a solution can emerge only from its autonomous struggle as a class. To contribute to this perspective today means opposing the democratic mobilization, the choice between Spain and Catalonia, the national terrain. The struggle of the proletariat and the future of humanity can only be determined outside and against the putrid terrain of so-called Democracy and the Nation.

International Communist Current 9th October 2017.

Leaflet for our organization’s intervention – help to distribute it!

Saturday 11 November 2017, May Day Rooms, 88 Fleet Street, London EC4Y 1DH, 11am to 6pm

One hundred years after the October insurrection in Russia, we will be holding a day of discussion about the relevance of the Russian revolution for the class struggle today. We will look at its historic importance as a first step towards the world revolution against capitalism, at its huge political and organizational achievements, as well as the tragic process of its degeneration and defeat.

Presentations will be given both by the ICC and the comrades of the Communist Workers Organisation [36]. We also hope that the debate will include other groups and individuals who are trying to understand history - and what the future holds in store for us - from the standpoint of the working class.

Email: [email protected] [127]

Website: en.internationalism.org

The Labour Party, that last year was hopelessly divided and looking as if it might split, today presents itself as the new normal, a government in waiting. This is taking place in the context of Brexit on the one hand, and a situation where we see other left wing forces and personalities around the world, whether Sanders in the US Democratic Party, or Podemos in Spain and Melanchon in France, that have grown at the expense of the Socialist Parties. So what is the real state of the party led by Jeremy Corbyn? And who benefits from its actions, the working class or the capitalist state?

Promising to undo the damage done by austerity, to close the gap between rich and poor, to increase tax on the top 1% of earners and, at least until the election, to scrap and repay tuition fees, it has mobilised many young workers to register to vote, and even to join the party. Led by a man who has visited many picket lines and was welcomed as a “socialist” by the Socialist Workers’ Party when elected to the leadership, it sounds – and is – too good to be true. Corbyn’s long record as a ‘radical’, complete with previous MI5 investigation of most of his advisors, underlines and emphasises his credentials, but as Paul Mason shows, recalling his days as a full-on Trotskyist, this is false: “The idea that the left, the miners and various environmental groups wanted to ‘destroy the democratic system’ in the 80s was pure paranoia. ... what we wanted was a left Labour government.... a new kind of radical social democracy stands on the brink of government. It wants to save British capitalism from wage stagnation, grotesque inequalities of wealth and the kamikaze mission of a no-deal Brexit. .... It has boosted democratic engagement, especially among the young, by building the biggest mass political party in Europe”[1] (Our emphasis).

In other words it wants to save capitalism from those policies likely to create discontent and to provide a harmless channel for the discontent that does arise. This is why the Labour Party has played a key role for capitalism in opposition as well as in government, as we can see from its role over the last century. In fact, it can be more effective in responding to discontent within the working class when in opposition, since it does not have to impose austerity at the same time. In opposition it has tended to elect more left wing leaders, such as Corbyn today, or Michael Foot in the 1980s, as opposed to the likes of Blair or Brown in government, and to display more ‘radical’ policies. Policies such as spending more on health and education, and even the police, paid for either by taxing the rich, or as Dennis Skinner so helpfully explained, “we’re going to borrow it. ... When the private sector expands where do you think they get their money from? They borrow it.”[2] And the renationalisation of railways etc, when the contract comes up for renewal. These policies hark back to the 1945 Atlee government that is so beloved of the left because of it nationalised parts of the economy and set up the National Health Service – actions which can only be called “socialist” by forgetting that they flowed from the needs of capitalist reconstruction after the war, whatever government was elected, and the Conservative government of the 1950s had no thought of reversing them. They were policies of a capitalist state which had just waged a devastating imperialist war. Some Labour leaders in opposition, such as Foot and Corbyn, have a long record of campaigning against nuclear weapons, but this has never been more than window dressing in a party that has consistently supported all the UK’s imperialist wars since 1914, whether in or out of government, and has never put in question its nuclear arsenal when in office.

Greater difficulty in political control

However, Corbyn is leading the Labour Party in a new situation in which there is a much greater tendency to fragmentation internationally, and in which the ruling class is finding it more difficult to control the political situation. The old USSR has broken up, as has Yugoslavia, and more recently we see calls for independence in Scotland and Catalonia. The Trump election and the Brexit referendum result also show the difficulty our ruling class has in getting the electoral results it wants.

In relation to Brexit, it is easy for Labour to point to the “chaos” in the government, to call for a Brexit for jobs, and to promise to unite the Leave and Remain voters, but it remains a difficult and divisive issue for Labour as well, so much so that the party congress vote on the issue was cancelled. It is hardly surprising to find the Labour Party divided on an issue that divides the whole of the UK bourgeoisie. Corbyn, following a tradition of Labour nationalism, was always a reluctant and half-hearted Remainer during the referendum campaign, and he is happy with Brexit to the extent that it gives more leeway for state capitalist policies - not only nationalisation but also favouring British suppliers for nationalised industries which would not be allowed in the EU. The local authority in Preston is “inspiring” in carrying out such policies by encouraging businesses to buy locally and set up co-operatives that “begin to democratise the economy”. But unfortunately the real inspiration for Preston is that “you have to be clever in austerity” when the annual spending on services has been cut by a third.[3] These are absolutely not policies that help the working class.

We will not speculate about whether there is likely to be a Labour government, or even an election, soon, but remaining vague on such a key policy issue as Brexit is the privilege of opposition.

Another aspect of the greater tendency to fragmentation and loss of control can be seen in the changes taking place in long-established political forces. One example we see of this is the way the left forces are now split in France and Spain between the traditional Socialist Party and Melanchon and Podemos respectively. This tendency underlines the seriousness of the divisions in the Labour Party at the time of the parliamentary party’s vote of no confidence in Corbyn and the subsequent leadership challenge. It is a sign of the strength of the UK bourgeoisie and its two party system in parliament that the Labour Party has held together as a ‘broad church’, in contrast to the marked decline in several Socialist Parties in Europe. Despite the fiasco of the Brexit referendum and all the pressures on the political system, we should not underestimate the ability of the UK bourgeoisie.

The other side of the new political difficulties we can see in many countries is the rise of right wing and populist forces, such as the NF in France, AfD in Germany, and Trump in the USA. Here, the rise of UKIP with its xenophobia and little Englander ideas was one of the factors, alongside a longstanding Euroscepticism particularly in the Tory party, which pushed the government into the referendum and Brexit. We can see the efforts made internationally to deal with this problem in the elections this year, most dramatically with Macron’s new party, République en Marche, in France. Despite the record of Labour governments on immigration policy, the Labour Party is perceived as being a way to fight such xenophobic populism, and this is part of its attraction to many, particularly young urban proletarians.

Another important strength of the Labour Party in dealing with discontent is its close historical link to the trade unions, particularly emphasised by the left of the party and when it is in opposition. Corbyn’s close association with Len McCluskey, leader of the Unite union is a good example. This not only provides a power base for some politicians on the left of the party, but is an important resource for the bourgeoisie. The trade unions continue to be the major arm for monitoring discontent in the working class for the bourgeoisie and to containing it in limited, divided, demonstrations and strikes. Through the Unite union the Labour Party, and the bourgeoisie as a whole, have been made aware of the anger of public sector workers against the long continues 1% pay cap and the fact that continuing it would necessarily lead to disruptions. In addition, mobilisation through the “grass roots” of Momentum has a very important role in supporting Corbyn, and allows the party to respond to the discontent of an important part of the working class, particularly young workers,  offering them a false perspective of change through electing a Labour government.

The Labour Party is not and never has been a revolutionary party, and since the First World War it has been an integral part of the capitalist state. It has nothing to offer the working class but the illusions that it can speak on their behalf, when in reality it is one of the strongholds of the ruling class’ political apparatus, with an important role in responding to and dissipating discontent through providing false alternatives.  Alex, 21.10.17

The escalation of the push towards Catalan independence and the difficulties of the Popular Party government, and more generally the whole of the state, in dealing with this problem through a framework of agreements and negotiations, represents an important political crisis for the Spanish bourgeoisie. It has thrown the “1978 consensus”[i] up in the air (i.e. the rules of the game that the state has followed since the democratic transition in 1975). And this is a state which has already been greatly weakened by the crisis of two party rule – the tandem of the PP and the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Party)  -  and the difficulty to provide an alternative through the formation of new parties (Podemos and Ciudadanos)[ii].

The immediate causes of this situation are the intensification of the struggles between factions of the bourgeoisie and the tendency towards irresponsibility which places particular interests before the global interests of the state and national capital. To these factors can be added the crisis of the principal state party since the transition: the PSOE. The underlying historic causes are the aggravation of the economic crisis and the decomposition of capitalism[iii]

In the absence, at the moment, of the proletarian alternative to the situation, the workers have nothing to gain and much to lose. The demonstrations in Catalonia, the encircling of the Conselleria de Economia and the confrontation with the Guardia Civil after the arrest of several heads of the Generalitat (the Catalan government), or the dockers’ boycott of police boats, do not express the strength of the workers. On the contrary, these actions are being pushed:

• by the openly separatist parties to defend the arrested members of the autonomous government (the same one which cuts wages and attacks living conditions) and party leaders such as those of the PdCat or ERC parties that are openly bourgeois; the fact they are Catalan serves our interests no more than do their rivals, the PP or Ciudadanos;
• and by Podemos or the “Comunes” of Barcelona’s radical mayor Ada Colau[iv], to  take up the “defence of the democratic state” against the repression directed by the PP.

In short, the danger exists that the workers will be pulled from their own class terrain, from the confrontation with the bourgeoisie, to the rotten terrain of confrontations between factions of the bourgeoisie; that they will be shackled to the defence of the democratic state, which is the expression of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Is exploitation, moral barbarity, ecological destruction, war, going to go away because democracy dresses itself up in the Spanish flag or the Catalonian?

The problem of separatism in Spain

In order to understand the Catalan conflict it is necessary to step back and understand the international and historical situation in which it is unfolding.

We will begin with the international context. The worsening of the Catalan conflict is taking place at the same time that the Kurdish referendum is pouring oil onto the fire of the tensions in the Middle East, and that the confrontation between two nuclear armed thugs -North Korea and the United States- further demonstrates the degradation of the imperialist situation. All this, as well, at a moment when the world economy is being darkened by storm clouds.

We now pass to the historic analysis. We have already presented before in our publications the marxist analysis that in Spain there is not the problem of a “prison-house of nations”[v] but the poor cohesion of the national capital[vi]. The development of capitalism in Spain was held back by the powerful disequilibrium between those regions more open to trade and industry - those on the coast- and the rest, who were trapped in isolation and backwardness. The country entered the decadence of capitalism (1914 and the First World War) without the bourgeoisie having found any solution to this problem. Rather, faced with the blows of the crisis, there was an aggravation of tensions, particularly between sectors of the bourgeoisie in Catalonia and the Basque Country on the one hand, and the central bourgeoisie on the other.

Each time that Spanish capital has posed the necessity to restructure its economic and political organisation, the separatist fractions have asserted their aspirations by all means at their disposal, including violence (ETA, or Terra Lliure), and the attempt to use the proletariat as cannon fodder.

Thus the publication of the Italian Communist Left, Bilan, wrote in relation to Catalan separatism and the events of 36:

“The separatist movements, far from being an element of the bourgeois revolution, are expressions of the irresolvable contradictions and inheritances of the structure of Spanish capitalist society which carried out industrialization in the coastal regions whilst the central plateaus remained sunk in economic backwardness. Catalan separatism, instead of tending towards total independence, remains trapped by the structure of Spanish society. This means that the extreme forms in which it manifests itself serve to channel the proletarian movement”.[vii]

The relations between Catalan separatism and the proletariat, despite the present “left” discourse of the CUP, is not that of fellow travelers but class antagonists.

Maćia, founder of the ERC, originally came from reactionary Carlism (Spanish monarchism); but many years later, after taking up Basque nationalism, he integrated elements of Stalinist ideology into Catalan nationalism. During the 2nd Republic his party organized the Escamots, a militia that specialized in persecuting and torturing militant workers.

Cambó, leader of the Regionalist League, made a pact with the central bourgeoisie in order to confront the strikes in Spain that were part of the revolutionary wave of 1917-19, and supported the Primo de Rivera dictatorship.

Companys in 1936 made the independent Generalitat of Catalonia the bastion that saved the national state and mobilized the workers onto the front of the imperialist war against Franco, diverting them from the class front against the central state and the Generalitat[viii].

And Tarradellas, then leader of the ERC, made a pact in 1977 with the old Francoists to restore the Generalitat[ix].

The autonomous regions and the 1978 consensus

The way the democratic transition faced up to the problem of separatism was through the idea of autonomous regions, which, without leading to a federal state, conferred powers in relation to collection of taxes, health, education, security, etc to the different regions and particularly to Catalonia and the Basque Country.

The pillar of this policy was the PSOE. It set up a “federal” structure which maintained the discipline of the regional organizations. To this was added the PNV( the Basque Nationalist Party)  and the Catalan right-wing party, the CiU, who were conveniently bulldozered  into it [x]

The PNV as much as the CiU for a long time played the role of a tampon, channeling the demands of both the most moderate and the most anachronistic nationalist sectors towards the framework of negotiations, serving as a crutch mainly to the right wing governments, but also to the PSOE when they needed to be in government[xi].

This does not mean however that the stormy sea of nationalist conflicts was calmed. Behind the facade of the PNV’s parliamentary fairplay the intransigent separatism of the HB and ETA was growing. Equally with the CiU and the ERC in Catalonia. Likewise, in the PSOE, regional barons emerged who increasingly put centralized discipline into question.

The sectors of Basque nationalism used the ETA’s outrages in their negotiations in the same way that they have been pressured by HB and ETA to put into question the framework of autonomy and to move towards independence.

Not only that: because of the configuration of the problem of separatism in Spain, there is no solution, but instead it will continue to deepen. The worsening of the crisis and decomposition has lead to “a spiral of increasingly blatant challenges, which tend to lead Spanish capital into insurmountable dead ends”, where in addition “the most radical sectors (from Basque nationalism to more reactionary forms of Spanish nationalism) instead of losing relevance, have in reality become more predominant”[xii].

In the Basque Country, the Ibarretxe[xiii] Plan, a real declaration of independence, was the confirmation of this dynamic. The central state, however, knew how to deactivate this separatist challenge. Ibrarretxe believed it could be carried out with constitutional legality but when he took it to parliament, it was treated with contempt and rejected out of hand.

In Catalonia there has been the formation of the two three-party alliances (under Maragall and Montilla[xiv]) and the wearing out of the CiU and its involvement in cases of corruption, and this has stimulated the rise of the radical separatists. Faced with its noticeable loss of electoral support and the threat of its disappearance in the medium term due to the rise of the ERC and the impact of the decline of “Pujolism”, the CiU converted itself into the PdCat in order to hide its shameless corruption, and launched a take-over bid hostile to the separatism of the ERC. However the result has been the ERC gaining electoral ground, making the PdCat its hostage and indirectly the CUP.

On the other hand, the PSOE begun the manoeuvre of the “reform of the autonomous regions” which resulted in a resounding failure and ended up weakening its own cohesion. In the resolution on the national situation which we published in Accion Proletaria 179 we took account of this fiasco: “the fact is that the famous and talented Zapatero has not managed to reduce the pro-sovereignty claims of Basque nationalism, on the contrary, because Ibarretxe has renewed his gamble in the face of  Spanish nationalism. The same is true of the situation in Catalonia, where the attempt to control the most radical sectors of ERC through the tripartite government led by Maragall is leading to Maragall appearing (to what extent it is difficult to know) as a hostage to the ultra-nationalist Carod Rovira. The problems of the cohesion of Spanish capital are being aggravated, since Zapatero’s policy of 'gestures' is not satisfying the Basque and Catalan nationalists, who see his proposal of constitutional reform as a scam. Rather it is serving to encourage in other nationalisms the same feeling of "chauvinism", of "shared grievance", etc., which in turn leads to opening the Pandora’s Box of  Spanish nationalism that is not limited to the PP, but has important branches within the PSOE itself”.

The two Catalan “tripartites” did not serve to calm the pro-independence movements in Catalonia, nor have they subjugated the ERC, which, on the contrary, became radicalized in its claims for "sovereignty", and ended up dislocating the Catalan branch of the PSOE that lost a large part of its pro-Catalan fraction. In fact this laid the foundations of today's enormous radicalization.
 

The Catalan quagmire, product of decomposition
 

All this confirms what was said in the Theses on Decomposition “Amongst the major characteristics of capitalist society’s decomposition, we should emphasize the bourgeoisie’s growing difficulty in controlling the evolution of the political situation (...) …..The absence of any perspective (other than day-to-day stop-gap measures to prop up the economy) around which it could mobilize as a class, and at the same time the fact that the proletariat does not yet threaten its own survival, creates within the ruling class, and especially within its political apparatus, a growing tendency towards indiscipline and an attitude of ‘every man for himself’”[xv]

This has led to the present situation in which the PP government and more generally the Spanish bourgeoisie has really underestimated the 1st October Referendum.

The impression is that they thought that the failure of the Ibarretxe Plan could be repeated faced with the challenge of Catalan separatism, and that after the fiasco of the 2014 referendum, the pro-independence sectors would be pushed back. But on the contrary, not only has their determination grown, but the Spanish bourgeoisie has not taken into account the impact of decomposition upon the political apparatus of the state, particularly:

• The crisis of the PSOE, a party divided into regional fiefdoms and which has partly lost its capacity to take political initiatives and its role as an example of responsibility for all the parties of national capital[xvi]
• The separatist drift of the CiU; the party has become increasingly controlled by a gang of ultra-nationalist Taliban, based in the most backward comarcas (counties) of Catalonia, which has led to a succession of purges of those suspected of “Spanish proclivities”.  First it was Duran i Lleida and then all those that preached the old nationalist politics and collaboration with the whole of Spanish capital.
• The ERC, an old pro-independence party which, however, has given great service to Spanish capital (see above), has taken as its flag the immediate achievement of independence (before, it was an “historical” aim) and has developed a nationalist and xenophobic discourse[xvii]  all of which could turn it into  the central party of the Catalan political spectrum, displacing the old CiU, today the PdCat.
• The irruption of the CUP, an indigestible mixture of Stalinists, former Catalan terrorists and anarchists, that practice a discourse of exclusionary, quasi-ethnic purity and xenophobic Catalanism, which speaks of independent and republican "Catalan Countries" and whose aim is to force the ERC-PdCat duo to go as far as possible in the challenge to the central Spanish bourgeoisie.

The Ibarretxe Plan was “resolved” and this appears to have re-established “tranquility”; the PNV has been turned into an “exemplary pupil” in the hands of Urkullu. This has made the central Spanish bourgeoisie believe that history will repeat itself faced with the Catalan challenge. Enter the Catalanists who have not made the same monumental error as Ibarretxe of going to the Spanish Parliament. They have followed the only possible route: a unilateral referendum which leaves the central Spanish bourgeoisie without room for manoeuvre since the constitution does not allow it “to tear up national sovereignty” in the 17 autonomous regions.

What we are living through is the crisis of the “1978 consensus”, the agreement that in 1977-8 all the political forces signed up to in order to assure a “democracy” whose axis has been until very recently, the two party system, the alternation of the PSOE and the PP, although the first of these parties has shown a much greater political capacity than the second.

All of this has been blown to pieces and the Spanish bourgeoisie is faced with the danger that the main economic region of Spain – which represents 19% of GDP- could escape its control. It has bet on a repressive response: the courts, arrests, de facto suspension of Catalan autonomy...

In other words, it is incapable of putting forward political alternatives that will allow it to control the situation. The supporters of this course (Podemos, Cola…) lack sufficient strengthen to put it into practice and are themselves divided by contradictory tendencies. The partner of Pedemos, IU[xviii], has roundly declared its rejection of the Catalan referendum and its unconditional defence of “Spanish Unity”. But on the other hand Iglesias is face by a rebellion of his Catalan constituents, who are inclined to “critically” support separatism. For its part, Colau plays the mediator and has been obliged to make an unlikely balance between one and the other, which has earned her the jocular name of the Catalan Cantinflas[xix].

The PSOE is incapable of a coherent policy. One day its supports the government, even defending article 155 of the Constitution that allows the suspension of Catalan autonomy. On another day, it proclaims that Spain is a “nation of nations”. It has proposed a “parliamentary commission in order to discuss the Catalan question” which has been rejected with disdain by its political adversaries[xx].

However, the main reason for the failure of the political system is not the clumsiness of this one or the other but the inflammation of the situation, the impossibility of finding a solution. And this can only be explained by the overall analysis that we have developed, the notion of the decomposition of capitalism.

It is now obvious that we are witnessing the general crisis of the Spanish political apparatus which, with the Catalan question, will end up being even more divided.

However it is necessary to underline another element of this very important analysis and that is equally linked to decomposition: political blockage.

Although the situation is very different, it is something that we also see in Venezuela: neither of the two teams  is capable of winning the game. We can also see this at the level of imperialist conflicts, where the authority of the United States, its role as world policeman is getting weaker, a process that has accelerated with the victory of Trump. This has led to an insoluble deadlock in numerous conflicts around the world.

The separatist gang has a “ceiling”: its powerbase is in the Catalan comarcas of the interior. However it is weaker in the large cities and, especially, in Barcelona’s industrial belt. The high Catalan bourgeoisie view it with reserve because it knows that its businesses are linked to the hated Spain. The petty bourgeoisie are divided, although, of course, the comarcas of “deep Catalonia” massively support “disconnecting from Spain”. But the enormous economic concentration of Barcelona – more than 5 million inhabitants- is inclined towards indifference. This concentration has much less “Catalan purity”; it is an enormous “melting pot” made up of people from more than 60 different nations.

We must complete the analysis by showing the importance of the centrifugal tendencies, the flight towards taking endogamic, identity-based refuge in "small closed communities", tendencies endlessly fed by capitalist decomposition. Capitalism’s decadence leads fatally “to the dislocation and disintegration of its components. The tendency of decadent capitalism is discord, chaos; this expresses the  essential necessity of socialism which seeks to build a world community”[xxi] The mounting disarray, exacerbated by the crisis, “generates growing tendencies  to clutch onto all sorts of false communities such as the nation, which provides an illusory sense of security, of ‘collective support’”[xxii]

In the three Catalanist parties this is clear. Completely absurd propaganda that represents “free” Catalonia as an oasis of progress and economic growth because “we will have gotten rid of the weight of Madrid”; the CUP’s advocacy of the persecution of tourists because they " make life in Catalonia more expensive"; offensive allusions to immigrants and foreigners, all this shows a clearly xenophobic, identitarian tendency which is little different from the populist preaching of Trump or Alternative for Germany.

These tendencies towards exclusion have their root in society but they are blatantly and cynically used by the three parties of the JuntsXSi[xxiii], although the prize goes to the CUP.

But the Catalan separatists do not have a monopoly of this barbarity. Their Spanish rivals engage in double speak: the great leaders fill their mouths with the “constitution”, “democracy”, “solidarity between Spaniards” “co-existence” etc. At the same time they incite hatred of “the Catalans” and everything “Catalan”, propose boycotts of “Catalan” goods, call for “reinforcing the identity of the Spanish people”, while their anti-immigration politics are stock-full of racism.

The true face of the democratic state

In reality, the conflict between Spanish and Catalan nationalists demonstrates what Rosa Luxemburg said with great insight: “Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form.” (The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis of German Social Democracy, chapter 1, 1915)

This situation shows the true face of the democratic state. All the political forces defend democracy, freedom, the rights they claim are in the tradition of the state. Some in the name of the “defense of the constitution” and “national sovereignty” (PP, Ciudadanos, PSOE). Others in the name of the “democratic freedom” to organise a referendum and equally the Constitution (Podemos, Comunes, Separatists).

But behind this official democratic discourse, what is really dealt are low blows, traps, corruption scandals that they expose when it serves their  interests.

Some deal in "blows" in the strictest sense of the term, sending in the civil guard and the police (even in ships painted with drawings from Warner Brothers [xxiv]); others deal in theatrical stunts. But the point is that what counts are not the ballot boxes nor the votes, but the relations of force, the blackmail, in the purest Mafioso style.

CUP’s “anti-system” stance does not fall far short of this, organizing demonstrations in front of private houses to intimidate their occupants, putting up posters denouncing the mayors who oppose the referendum.

This is the real functioning of the democratic state. It cogs are not driven by votes, rights, freedoms or other phrases, but by manoeuvres, lies, campaigns of harassment and discrediting…

The situation of the proletariat

The proletariat is disorientated. It has lost its sense of identity, its movement is in retreat, and it is very weak, but there have been pointers to the future, in particular the 15M[xxv], the “Indignados” movement, despite its many confusions and its difficulties in grasping its real class interests. The greatest danger is that the proletariat’s thinking remains trapped in the poisoned well that is the Catalonia-Spain conflict, forcing it to think and feel according to the dilemma “with Spain or Independence”.

These are feeling, thoughts, aspirations which are not centered around the struggle for our living conditions, the future for our children, the future of the world; thinking that expresses the proletarian terrain, even in an embryonic way. Rather this is a way of thinking polarized around ideas like “Madrid robs us” or “do we want to be part of Spain”, around the choice between the  Catalan star and the red and yellow of the Spanish flag; thinking entangled in a web of bourgeois concepts: democracy, national self-determination, sovereignty, the Constitution..

The thinking of the proletariat in the main workers’ concentrations in Spain is being kidnapped by conceptual garbage that only looks to the past, to reaction, to barbarity.

In these conditions the methods of repression that the central government adopted on the 20th September creates a series of martyrs, which will generate an irrational sense of victimisation and, in this way, ratchet up an already emotional situation to a higher pitch, probably on the nationalist side.

The main danger, however, is to diverted towards the defense of democracy.

The Spanish bourgeoisie has a long experience of confronting the proletariat by diverting it towards the defense of democracy then massacring it and violently strengthening exploitation.

We should recall how the initial struggle on 18th July 1936 faced with Franco’s uprising was on the class terrain, but was then diverted towards the defense of democracy against fascism, choosing between two enemies: the Republic and Franco, the result of which was ONE MILLION DEAD.

We should also recall how in 1981, faced with the threat posed by the latest threats of Francoism, with the ‘coup’ of the 23rd February, there was a large scale democratic mobilization of the “Spanish people”. In 1997, a decisive step in the isolation of ETA was the massive mobilizations around “the defense of democracy against terrorism”.

The Catalan imbroglio is a dead-end. With or without the referendum of the 1st October it can only lead to one conclusion: the radicalization of the confrontation between the separatists and Spanish nationalists, as in Goya’s Fight with cudgels, that will go on piteously exchanging blows, will dislocate society even more, accentuating increasingly irrational divisions and confrontations. What is most dangerous is that the proletariat will become trapped on this battlefield, above all because all the contenders will ceaselessly use the weapon of democracy in order to legitimize their proposals, to ask for new elections and new “rights to decide”.

We are conscious of this situation of weakness that threatens the proletariat. However, it cannot stop us recognizing that a solution can emerge only from autonomous class struggle. The contribution to this perspective today is to oppose the democratic mobilization, the choice between Spain and Catalonia, the national terrain. The proletarian struggle and the future of humanity can only emerge from outside and against these putrid terrains.

Acción Proletaria, (section of the ICC in Spain) 27 September 2017

In a TV broadcast in 1965, the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, one of the leading scientists working on the development of the US atomic bomb during World War Two, recounted his feelings when he witnessed the first atomic bomb test in the deserts of New Mexico in July 1945:

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another”[1].

Prior to capitalism, many societies had developed mythologies of the end of the world. The apocalypse anticipated by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, seen as the final destiny of this world, was understood to be the precursor of a new heaven and a new earth that would last for all eternity; whereas in the Hindu vision, new worlds and even new universes are endlessly born, dissolved and reborn in a vast cosmic cycle.

But if the idea of the apocalypse is not new, what is new in the capitalist mode of production is first, that the world inhabited by humankind for hundreds of thousands of years can be destroyed by the technologies that human beings themselves have created, rather than by supernatural beings or an inexorable fate. And second, that such a destruction would not be the prelude to a new and better world, but destruction pure and simple.

The atomic bomb tested in the desert in July 1945 would, one month later, be tested on tens of thousands of human beings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world would indeed not be the same. The atomic bomb was the “scientific” proof of something that many had already begun to suspect in the wake of the First World War: in the words of Sigmund Freud in 1929, that “men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of the current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety”[2].

Psychoanalysts of the future – if mankind is able to survive capitalism – will perhaps write treatises on the enormous psychological cost of living with the threat not only of individual death, but the death of humanity and perhaps even all life on earth. It’s already possible to discern many of the outward manifestations of this mental burden: the flight into nihilism and the numerous forms of self-destruction, the vain search for hope in returning to old apocalyptic stories, central in particular to Christian and Muslim “fundamentalism”. For Freud’s rival Jung, the wave of UFO sightings in the late 40s was a modern version of old myths: faced with the unbearable reality posed by the nuclear threat, there was a marked tendency to project one’s real fears into “things seen in the skies”, often accompanied by hopes that wiser beings would come and save us from our own follies[3]. Little wonder that in 1952, during the Korean war, which many feared would explode into World War Three, the comrades of the Gauche Communiste de France were observing that “mental alienation in all its forms is to our epoch what the great epidemics were to the Middle Ages”.[4]

The nuclear Sword of Damocles, from 1945 to 2017

The democratic ruling class justified the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the story that, on balance, it saved lives, above all American lives, because it made it possible to avoid a military invasion of Japan. In reality, the bomb was a warning directed less against the collapsing Japanese military than against the USSR which had only recently declared war on Japan and was asserting its presence in the Far East. So Hiroshima was more the first act of “World War Three” than the last act of World War Two. This third world war, the global contest between the American and Russian imperialist blocs, remained a “cold” war in the sense that it never took the form of a direct conflict between the two camps. Rather it was waged via a series of proxy wars with local states and “national liberation movements” doing the actual fighting, while the two superpowers supplied arms, intelligence, strategic support and ideological justification. At certain moments, however, these conflicts threatened to escalate into all-out nuclear confrontations, in particular, during the Korean War in the early 50s and over the Cuba crisis in 1962. And all the while the spiralling “arms race” meant that the two blocs were directing vast quantities of labour and research – which in capitalist terms, means vast quantities of money – into perfecting weapons that could obliterate humanity several times over. Politicians tried to reassure the world’s population with the notion of Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD – the idea that world war was unthinkable in the nuclear age because no one could win it. Thus the best guarantee of peace was to maintain and develop this gigantic arsenal of death. Or in other words: a Sword of Damocles hangs over your head? Get used to it, because it’s the only possible way to live. 

After the collapse of the Russian bloc at the end of the 80s[5], the politicians tried a new line: the end of the Cold War would mean a New World Order of peace and prosperity. A little over a quarter of a century later, the words of George Bush Senior, the president who “delivered” the US bloc’s victory in the Cold War, sound extremely hollow. Prosperity remains a chimera for millions, and this in a world system constantly menaced by huge financial storms, like the one in 2008. As for the promise of peace, the breakdown of the discipline of the old blocs has engendered a series of increasingly chaotic military conflicts, above all in the area around the Biblical Armageddon – the Middle East. This region – already the scene of the Arab-Israeli wars, the war in Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war, and the battle for Afghanistan – has hardly known a day when it was not being torn apart by war, from the first major military adventure launched by the US after the collapse of the eastern bloc – the 1991 Gulf war – to the current military nightmare stalking through Syria and Iraq. This conflict, perhaps more than all the others, reveals the profound irrationality and uncontrolled nature of the wars in this present phase. Unlike the proxy wars between the two blocs which dominated the previous period, we now have a war with so many sides and so many shifting alliances that it is increasingly difficult to count them.  To keep himself in power, Syria’s president Bashir Assad lays waste large swathes of his own country, while the opposition to his rule splits into “moderate” and  “radical Islamic” factions constantly at each other’s throats. The American-backed coalition against “Islamic State” in Syria and Iraq is rent by rivalries between Shia militias and Kurdish peshmerga, especially following the controversial referendum on Kurdish independence which threatens to disintegrate the fragile Iraqi state; regional powers like Saudi, Qatar, Iran and Turkey play their own game and swap pawns and alliances to suit their immediate interests. Meanwhile the vast majority of the population is either forced to flee towards Turkey, Jordan or Europe while those that remain try to keep sane and survive in ruined cities like Aleppo, Raqqa, Mosul... Furthermore, these conflicts are linked to a wider band of equally intractable wars, from Libya to the Horn of Africa and from Yemen to Afghanistan and Pakistan. And this epidemic of warfare can no longer be isolated from the centres of western “civilisation”: the blowback of western involvement in these wars is the wave of refugees heading for the “haven” of Western Europe and the efforts of terrorist gangs like IS to take the war to the homelands of the “unbelievers”

These wars already provide us with a terrifying glimpse of what could lie ahead for the whole world if the destructive tendencies within the capitalist system are allowed to reach their full fruition. But there is another aspect to the spreading law of “every man for himself”: the reappearance of the nuclear threat in a new form. Under the reign of the blocs, the two superpowers had a real interest, and capacity, to limit the spread of nuclear weapons to themselves or to regimes that they trusted to obey their commands. The nuclear arming of China in the 1960s was a break in this chain of command because China had by then broken from the Russian bloc; but since the blocs came to an end “nuclear proliferation” has increased at some pace. India and Pakistan, two states which have already gone to war on several occasions and live in a permanent state of tension, now have nuclear weapons pointing at each other. Iran has made considerable steps towards acquiring one and numerous other regimes and even terrorist groups are no doubt quietly working to join the club.

But looming above all this today is the acquisition and piratical testing of nuclear weapons by the Stalinist regime in North Korea, while the world’s leading military power, the USA, is in the hands of an unpredictable narcissist who rode to power on the global populist wave. These two forms of “rogue regime” issue new threats of fire and fury against each other with each week that passes, and it is not possible to say that this is all bluster. There are, within both regimes, factors that constrain them from unleashing a nuclear holocaust. Trump for example does not have an entirely free hand because he is opposed at almost every turn by powerful elements in his own security and military apparatus. But these inner conflicts, like the populist wave itself, point to a loss of political control by the bourgeoisie which favour unpredictable, rash decisions. And more: behind the conflict between the US and North Korea lies a more global rivalry, between China and the USA. Meanwhile Russia remains the second most heavily armed nuclear power in the world, has recovered much of the status it lost with the collapse of the USSR, and is pursuing an ever more aggressive foreign policy, especially in the Ukraine and Syria. The danger of nuclear warfare remains as real as ever, even if the form it takes may have changed since the period 1945-89.

“Ecological Armageddon”

During the Cold War period, a considerable part of which was characterised by the economic growth that followed the Second World War, there was little awareness of what this growth might hold in store for the balance between man and the rest of nature. But the last few decades have shown how limited “mans’ control over the forces of nature” really are under the capitalist drive for profit, where looting, wastefulness and destruction have always dominated what Marx called man’s “metabolic exchange” with nature.

On October 19, The Guardian reported that “The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists. Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies [141] were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is ‘on course for ecological Armageddon’, with profound impacts on human society”[6].

We already knew, of course, about the alarming decline of the bees. And this is only one part of a tendency towards the mass extinction of countless living species, brought about by the poisoning of the air and seas by pesticides, industrial and transport emissions, and the veritable scourge of plastic waste. And this toxic cloud is also killing human beings at an increasing rate. The day after the article about insect decline, The Guardian published a new report that estimates that nine million people die every year as a direct result of pollution[7]. Add to this the melting of the ice caps, the unleashing of superstorms, the droughts and wildfires all linked to man-made climate change, and the threatened “ecological Armageddon” more and more closely resembles the traditional stories about the world perishing in flood and fire.

Thus to the menace of destruction through imperialist war, the ecological question adds another and no less terrifying menace, but these two horsemen of the apocalypse will not ride separately. On the contrary: a capitalist world faced with dwindling vital resources, whether we are talking about energy, food or water, is far more likely to deal with the problem through exacerbated national competition, military pillage and robbery – in short, economic  and imperialist war – than through the rational, planet-wide cooperation which alone could find a solution to this new challenge to human survival.

The other side of despair

Looked at one-sidedly, this summary of humanity’s situation can only induce despair. But there is another side: if the products of man’s own hands have become capable of “exterminating one another to the last man”, realising the darkest apocalyptic nightmares, so the same powers of production could be used to realise another ancient dream: a world of plenty where there is no need for one sector of society to lord it over another, a world that has gone beyond the divisions that lie at the heart of conflict and war.

It is one of contradictions in the evolution of capitalism that precisely at the point that such a world becomes materially possible – we would say round the beginning of the 20th century – this social order plunges mankind into the most barbarous wars in history. From this point on, its very survival becomes increasingly antagonistic to the survival of humanity. This is the most striking proof that capitalism, for all its intact capacities to innovate, to develop, to find remedies for its crises, has become obsolete, a fundamental obstacle to the future advance of our species.

The recognition of this reality is a key factor in the development of a revolutionary consciousness among the exploited masses who are always the first victims of capitalism’s crises and wars. The understanding that capitalism, as a world civilisation, had entered its epoch of decay, was a crucial factor in the monumental events set in motion by the revolution in Russia in 1917 – in the international revolutionary wave which forced the bourgeoisie to call a halt to the slaughter of the First World War and which, for an all-too-brief period, brought the promise of the overthrow of capitalism and the advent of a world communist society.

Today, such revolutionary hopes might appear to belong entirely to the past. But contrary to the ideology and active propaganda of the bourgeoisie, the class struggle has not disappeared from history and indeed, even before it takes on a generalised and conscious revolutionary character, still has an enormous weight in the world situation. During the Cold War, as we have seen, the ruling class tried to convince us that its MAD doctrine was preserving the planet from a third world war. What they would never tell us is that there was a more powerful “deterrent” to world war after capitalism entered its present phase of economic crisis at the end of the 60s. This was a factor that had been missing in the 1930s, when the economic depression did lead rapidly to war: an undefeated working class more prepared to fight for its own interests than to rally to the war plans of the bourgeoisie.

Today, the break-up of the blocs and the accelerating imperialist free-for all is another factor that makes a classic third world war a less likely scenario. This is not a factor that favours the proletariat however, because the threat of world war has been by-passed by a more insidious slide into barbarism in which, as we have argued here, the danger of nuclear warfare has by no means diminished. But the class struggle – and its escalation towards revolution – remains the sole barrier to the deepening of barbarism, the sole hope that humanity will not only avert the apocalypse of capital but realise all its untapped potential.

Amos, 21.10.17

We are publishing here an article written by our comrades of Internacionalismo, the ICC's section in Venezuela, in which our organisation takes a position from the viewpoint of the international proletariat on the serious crisis which is hitting the country. Within this we denounce the hypocrisy of the world's bourgeoisie and its complicity with both the Chavist clique and the opposition which have plunged the proletariat and the population as a whole into the most barbaric conditions. Our comrades analyse how Chavism, a product and expression of the decomposition of the capitalist system, uses an ideological swindle of "the socialism of the twenty-first century" which is set up on the basis of an attack against the living conditions, consciousness and combativity of the proletariat. Similarly, they analyse how inter-imperialist tensions are a factor which contributes to aggravating the crisis. The article gives the perspective that the only possible outcome to the barbarity of the situation of Venezuela and the entire world continues to remain in the hands of the proletariat which, through its conscious struggle, can aim to overthrow the capitalist system which is plunging us into chaos and despair.

Every day the world's press and an endless number of internet and social networks are drowning us with news of the dramatic situation coming from Venezuela: the aggravation of shortages, lack of food, medicines and basic products; uncontrolled increases in the prices of the few products which remain available, now reducing a part of the population to famine; death by the malnutrition of children and sicknesses caused by the degradation of the health and hospital system. To this situation add more than 120 deaths to date, thousands of wounded and those detained, coming from the confrontations between rival factions of Venezuelan capital in their struggle for power, caused by the brutal repression of police and military forces of the Chavist regime of Maduro during the demonstrations called by the opposition and the protests of the population between April and June this year.

The despair of the population is such that thousands of people are trying to flee the country. The governments of Colombia and Brazil are faced with the arrival of thousands of Venezuelan migrants, some of whom are living in miserable conditions on the streets of towns closest to their respective borders. The increase of political tensions with the accentuation of the economic crisis threatens to create a wave of refugees similar to that produced by the exodus of populations from Syria, Afghanistan or some African countries fleeing the barbarity and misery of war.

However, the media, conforming to its ideological role, conveys a totally deformed vision of reality by taking sides with one or the other, pro-Chavist or oppositional, bourgeois factions who are fighting each other for power in Venezuela. On one hand, a great number of Latin American other governments try to outdo each other by coming forward and denouncing the "humanitarian crisis" and the repression against the population and demanding that what they call the dictatorial regime of Maduro respect "democracy" and "Human Rights". They want us to forget that the majority of them, just a few years ago, enthusiastically welcomed and saluted the government of Chavez for "taking into consideration" the fate of the disinherited and marginalised masses and which, according to them, brought millions of Venezuelans out of poverty thanks to a so-called "redistribution of social wealth"; and that the UN paid homage to the successes of the Venezuelan government for having fulfilled the objectives of the Millennium. What these governments and organisations express is the immense hypocrisy of the bourgeois class at the world level: the same goes for the Venezuelan bourgeois factions fighting for power: the Chavists regrouped in the GPP, the Great Patriotic Pole, and the oppositional forces brought together around the MUD - Mesa de la Unidad Democratica, the Democratic Unity Roundtable[i]. The ruling classes at the regional, as well as at the global level, have a responsibility for the barbarity in which the proletariat and population of Venezuela have been immersed.

In order to stand up to this ideological campaign, it's necessary for the proletariat to get to the causes of this tragedy by, in the first place,  keeping in mind that it mustn't back any of the bourgeois factions confronting each other in their struggle for control of the state. This crisis is a pure product of the decadence and decomposition of the capitalist system which is no longer a factor in the development of the productive forces, in particular of labour power; instead of that, every day society sinks further into misery and barbarity. On the other hand, faced with this historic impasse the only thing that matters to the factions of capital (whether they defend the models of the pretend-left "socialists" like the Chavist/Maduro regime or the neo-liberal models of the centre-right that the opposition forces defend) is to maintain their power at any price; and in their thirst for power they couldn't care less that the working population that follows them in the circumstances, die like flies in their hundreds or thousands because of hunger and repression.

The crisis hitting Venezuela is the expression of the fact that no country or region of the world can escape the effects of the decomposition of the capitalist system. The reasons for this crisis are the same as those which provoked the barbarism which reigns in Syria, Afghanistan or in a number of African countries; or those which are expressed by the terrorist attacks which follow one another in a growing sequence in Europe, the United States and other central countries. The world finds itself in a situation of impasse, at the mercy of the actions of the most irrational factions of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie.

The only way of really coming out of this situation is in the hands of the proletariat which, through its combat, its class consciousness, its unity and solidarity can serve as a reference point for the indignation of the despairing masses of the population who want to break out of poverty and suffering.

How did Venezuela come to this?

Some analysts and intellectuals, when asked for their opinion on the situation in Venezuela, try to explain why this country, having been one of the most rich and stable among the countries of South America, has fallen in such a brutal manner since the beginning of the century into such poverty and suffered a political chaos which threatens to make it ungovernable. Some see the Maduro regime as a failed state; others designate it as the retreat of another "Castro-communist" dictatorship. And as good defenders of bourgeois order they don't lose a trick in feeding the repugnant lie which assimilates the Stalinist-type totalitarian regimes with communism. They try to hide the fact that the regime imposed by Chavez, of which Maduro is a successor, is a new offspring of the decomposing capitalist system that they themselves feed with their so-called "analyses".

We have analysed the causes of the rise of the Chavez project in an article published in 2013, written after his death[ii]:

"Chavez first came to public notice when he led the attempted military coup against the Social Democrat Carlos Andrés Péres in 1992. From then on his popularity underwent a spectacular growth until he was elected President of the Republic in 1999. During this period he capitalised on the discontent and lack of trust across broad sectors of the population towards the Social Democratic and Christian Democratic Parties who had alternated power between themselves since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1958. This discontent was particularly marked amongst the most impoverished masses affected by the economic crisis of the 80s, who were the main protagonists of the 1989 revolt. The two main political parties were undergoing a process of disintegration, characterised by corruption at the highest levels and the neglect of government tasks. This was an expression of the decomposition that had engulfed the whole of society, principally the ruling class, which had reached such levels that it was impossible to cohere its forces in order to guarantee reliable governance and ‘social peace'.

Maduro has  inherited from Chavez a country and a political project affected by a terrible economic crisis and capitalist decomposition. Chavez and the highest civil and military executives always underestimated the weight of the world economic crisis while the price of oil remained high. At this time the repositories of state funds had not yet been emptied by the country's new proprietors and the state still had the capacity for debt and borrowing. Already in 2012, when Chavez was still in power and the price of a barrel of oil went over $100, shortages and lack of provision of different food and basic goods had begun. The reduction in the price of oil of 2013 aggravated the situation. Since then the government of Maduro, like other oil-producing countries of the region (Ecuador, Columbia, Mexico, etc.), have used the lower price of oil as a pretext to accentuate the deterioration of the living conditions of the population and the workers. With the intent of giving a "socialist" colour to these measures, the Maduro regime opened up an ideological campaign, which continues up to today, which claims that the lower price of oil is due to an "economic war unleashed by 'North American imperialism'" allied to a bourgeois Venezuelan oligarchy whose intent is to attack the "Bolivarian Revolution". However, the world economic crisis and the fall in oil prices are not sufficient in themselves to explain the gravity of the situation in this country. The implementation of the political, social and economic measures required by the "socialist" plan of Chavez, in a context of accelerating  decomposition, has also contributed to such an outcome.    

Contrary to other governments of the left allied to Chavism (Bolivia, Ecuador, etc.), Chavez developed a Stalinist-type totalitarian state capitalist model. He progressively took measures to weaken and exclude private sectors of capital and the old state bureaucracy which controlled the institutions and enterprises of the state. Through expropriations in industry and agriculture, nationalisations and economic measures (price controls among others) the productive infrastructure of the country was dismantled. This economic policy, as in other countries where similar measures have been applied, created distortions in the economy which added to an irresponsible management of state funds and an unrestrained corruption which led the country into an economic collapse.

The previous state bureaucracy was replaced by a new hegemonic caste in which the military predominated but which had no experience in economic and administrative management. The Chavist nomenklatura practically abandoned economic management by the state and squandered the national resources, using it to get rich and create networks of corruption which amassed immense fortunes which were deposited in fiscal havens, showing the pathetic degree of decomposition achieved by the Venezuelan bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie.

The left-populist character of the Chavist project, used to enrol masses of the poor and proletarians which served as its electoral base, transformed social programmes (called "missions") under the flag of "Bolivarian Socialism" with the pretended aim of "overcoming poverty". Maduro followed the same economic policy as his mentor by keeping up public spending, a determinant factor in sharpening the economic crisis which exists today in Venezuela[iii].

The high costs involved in the development of an imperialist policy aiming to make Venezuela a regional power within a multi-polar world which led to rivalry with the United States and other countries in the region. With this aim it developed a strategy of "selling cheap" to other regional countries, principally those of the Caribbean and Central America; it increased the purchase of armaments; it dedicated considerable resources to develop means of international communications for intervening in different countries of the region and the world with the aim of supporting parties and groups of the left opposed to the interests of the United States and other powers.

In order to strengthen its populist policy, on many occasions Chavez advanced the idea that his government wasn't going to "repress the poor who stole by necessity". On this basis, the regime developed a policy of impunity in certain areas: "laissez-faire" towards law-breaking by armed groups made up of lumpenised elements and formed by his own regime; he reduced police surveillance mainly through the night leaving the population at the mercy of bands of thugs who imposed their own laws. In this way, he used and accentuated the level of social decomposition which already existed before his arrival to power by implementing a curfew at night and part of the day which wasn't imposed by direct state terror but by the terror sown by lumpen elements. This policy multiplied the rate of criminality which made Venezuela[iv] one of the most dangerous countries on the planet; and this situation also contributed to the increase in the rate of emigration.

Chavism fashioned a state subject to decomposition: a gangster state dominated by lumpen behaviour  within sectors of the petty-bourgeoisie and the new "Bolivarian" bourgeoisie; it has established a state run by new mullahs who don’t pay the external or internal debts which they have contracted with their capitalist partners, and which also don’t pay past contracts with the workers through collective agreements. Lying and impunity are the norm within this state. Chavism, aided by the very mechanisms of the democratic bourgeoisie, has implanted a real mafia at the heart of the Venezuelan state.

The crisis in Venezuela: an international crisis

The Chavez project sees itself as a regional and global project. It's fed by the fact that since the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989, the world has ceased to be ruled by the two great imperialist poles, the United States and the USSR: the world has become multi-polar. The regime developed with a vision of being able to constitute one of these regional poles by profiting from the strategic regional position of Venezuela in South America,  due to its oil reserves and the weakening of the United States as a world power. With this objective, Chavism developed an aggressive imperialist policy at the regional level, a policy  of confrontation with the United States and other countries of the region. For this it has used oil as a weapon to play a role in regional geopolitics, principally aiming at the Caribbean and Central America. Its policy is fed by a radical anti-Americanism and for that it has looked for alliances with other governments of the region, as well as at the global level, who reject the imperialist policies of the United States.

With this aim, it has tightened links with Cuba which has need of oil and capital after the collapse of the imperialist bloc around the USSR. With Cuba it has formed the group of countries of ALBA to compete with ALCA[v] which is promoted by the United States; it has strengthened its alliance with Lula in Brazil, Kirchner in Argentina, the Indigenists of the Cordillere (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador), the Sandinista Movement of Nicaragua, etc. It has largely opened the door to Chinese capital, to Russia (mainly through armaments purchases), to Iran and even to the representatives of the so-called "Arab Socialism" of North Africa and the Middle East.

Thus, as Cuba did some years ago, Chavez developed a strategy of posing as the victim of the United States, which is permanently accused of wanting to expropriate Venezuelan Oil and conspiring against the "Bolivarian revolution" since the time of George Bush. In effect, since the beginnings of the Obama administration, the United States has developed a policy against the Chavez regime and against its influence in the region through the OAS[vi], which hadn't been able to obtain advantageous conditions. However, Obama was able to weaken the influence of governments of the left in the region (through its strategy of "the fight against corruption and drug-trafficking") which is shown in the changes towards governments of the right in Brazil and Argentina and the policy of rapprochement with Cuba.

Before the latest US election and after the triumph of Trump, there was a period of several months of blockage of the US policy in the region, concentrating mainly on the question of the construction of a wall on the Mexican border; during this period there wasn't a clear position from the new government towards the situation in Venezuela. In mid-July, before the call from Maduro to vote for a new National Constituent Assembly[vii], the Trump administration again took the initiative in actions against Venezuela through an aggressive policy aimed against the regime by declaring that it would use all means to confront it, including the recourse "to military force if it was necessary", which showed a change in relation to the more prudent policy of Obama. The Maduro government has profited from Trump's declarations and his international unpopularity in order to pose as the victim and try to rally support domestically as well as from the outside.

Today, the regional geopolitical configuration has changed and the influence of Chavism has been significantly weakened: Argentina and Brazil are no longer its allies; it looks like the new government in Ecuador will take up a different policy than its predecessor of Correa who openly supported the Maduro regime. At the same time, important states of the region, like Mexico, Peru and Colombia, have taken a more active part in the region by supporting American policy. The tendency is towards the isolation of the Maduro regime. Much more than the actions of the leaders of these states have been the sanctions of the Trump government for the violation of human rights, narco-traffic and money-laundering. Similarly Spain and the countries of the European Union have pressured for the "return of democracy" to Venezuela. The support of the countries of the OAS is also weakening bit by bit.

Everything seems to indicate that the Maduro regime has no other outcome than to bow to domestic, regional and international pressures. But that's not quite the case. The regime has picked up the challenge: it has profited from the threats of Trump in order to look for international support. Maduro has declared that he was ready to fight "imperialist aggression" and he claims to have concluded military alliances with Russia in order to ensure his defence. Even if it looks difficult for China or Russia to directly intervene in an armed conflict in America's "back-yard", these states have certainly intervened for some years now in support of the Chavez and Maduro regimes through arms supplies, financial aid, provisions, etc. , and through blocking any action of the Security Council of the UN against Venezuela,  all in the name of the "self-determination of the people"

The radicalisation of the Maduro regime is about to create a situation of destabilisation in the whole region through the emigration of Venezuelans to other neighbouring countries. On the other hand, the unpopularity of the Trump administration at the world level could allow radicalised elements of the left, including some partisans of jihadism, to come into Venezuela to support the Maduro regime by perpetrating terrorist actions or supplying the guerrillas.

The situation in Venezuela is unpredictable. The Maduro government has declared that it will use armed force to impose itself and, on the other side, it is possible that sectors of the opposition could again call for demonstrations in the streets, knowing that the government would respond to them with increased repression. All the competing cliques of the bourgeoisie in Venezuela are caught up in a cycle which is inciting them in their strategy of confrontation up to its ultimate consequences. Up to now they have shown that they haven't the will or the capacity to reach a minimum agreement to be able to govern.

Apparently, international pressure has had no effect on the Maduro regime. Worse, it serves him as a pretext to intensify his repression of the opposition and the population in general. An important factor which increases the uncertainty even more is the unpredictable imperialist actions of Trump whose engagement in a unilateral military action would be an aggravating factor of the crisis (in some way similar to his trial of strength between the US and the North Korean regime).

As in other conflicts around the world, it would be the Venezuelan population who pay the costs of military confrontation. Already, it's suffering from a vociferous ideological campaign against "North American imperialism". Anti-Americanism is the scapegoat that the factions of the left use at the global level in order to sow confusion among the population and within the proletariat; that serves them as an alibi to support other, also despotic and imperialist, regimes such as China, North Korea or Cuba. It allows them to mask the imperialist policies of the regimes of the left, like Chavez and Maduro, who, in their turn, impose their own local model of a system of exploitation and reduce the population to conditions of misery that are identical, or even worse, than the regimes of the right.

Chavism: an attack against the living conditions, the combativity and consciousness of the working class

The Chavist project rests both on an ideological attack and on an attack on the living conditions of the proletariat. Like other plans of the capitalist class, the so-called "Socialism of the 21st century" is fed by the pauperisation and the precarious position of the workers. The regime has systematically worked to reduce wages and the social advantages that workers were receiving under contract; it began with the workers of the oil sector and commodity-based primary industries and then moved to the public sector. The social plans of Chavism, used to share out some crumbs to the "people", were principally financed by cuts in the wages and social conditions of the workers under contract. After the death of Chavez, he left a mass of impoverished workers and a greater number of people still more miserable and betrayed, each month receiving less state subsidies. Similarly, on the economic level, Maduro has only impoverished even more workers up to the point that wages and social payments do not even cover basic needs and each month the poor who receive sacks of provisions that the government sells them cheap are less and less numerous, while the members of the Chavist nomenklatura live like lords.

The political bi-polarisation has been a strategy permanently maintained and fed by the Chavist regime up to today; this has constituted a decisive factor whose effects reverberate on all social life and has led to the situation of disorder. Chavez was able to stoke up his policy of bi-polarisation because of the support of the most deprived masses, pariahs excluded from society, who saw in him a new Messiah who would offer them the gifts of a benefactor state as, decades before, the Social-Democratic and Social-Christian parties had offered them. But Chavism needed to dragoon the mass of workers who were constituted during these years behind him, while at the same time he began to put in place a political strategy of division and the bi-polarisation within the Venezuelan working class. Through the ideology of the "Socialism of the 21st Century", he developed an attack against the consciousness, combativity and solidarity within the working class of Venezuela. As the noxious campaign of the world bourgeoisie proclaimed "the death of communism" after the collapse of the Russian bloc, he proposed the building of "Bolivarian Socialism". Chavism, with the help of parties of the left in other countries, principally the Cuban Communist Party, developed a real laboratory of pitfalls against the proletariat: self-management, workers' control, etc., while in an increasing and systematic manner they accentuated the divisions in the ranks of the workers and made the living conditions of the most advanced sectors of the working class more precarious. 

Despite this ideological attack the workers have, since the beginning of the Chavez regime, developed important struggles against the state on their class terrain. But these same workers have been systematically confronted by the unions controlled by Chavism and, when these weren't sufficient, came the repression from the police and military forces (in the same way that preceding governments had done, with the parties now opposed to the regime at their head), or those of armed lumpenised bands formed by Chavism. Up to today there are an incalculable number of expressions of struggle and of discontent of workers from different sectors, but these struggles appear sectoral, atomised and they remain strangled by the political bi-polarisation. This situation has allowed the petty-bourgeoisie to play a political role, from its radicalised sectors on the left, most of which supported Chavez and encouraged greater control by the state, up to those who have openly defended neo-liberal measures.

Because of the gravity of the economic crisis, shortages and lack of supply of basic products and ever-increasing prices, the popularity of the Maduro government has gradually dwindled. This situation was shown in the parliamentary elections of December 2015, in which the opposition largely triumphed and took control of the National Assembly, which represented the most stinging electoral rout that Chavism had received during the course of its sixteen year existence. Since then the political confrontation has sharpened due to the fact that the regime sees itself as under the threat of losing power. Its reaction, like a wounded beast, has been to look for the means to keep itself in power at any price.

For its part, the opposition grouped in the MUD today presents itself as the real defender of the Chavist Constitution of 2000 that it rejected years ago. Like the governing party it presents itself as the real defender of democracy. The two factions fight each other to show who will be the most democratic: everyone knows very well that the slogan "the struggle for democracy" represents a very powerful ideological weapon for the control of the population and of the proletariat, as well as  a key to gaining recognition at the international level.

The two rival bands say to the population that we are at the final stages of the confrontation between the "dictatorship" and "democracy". The reality is that each one of these two cliques defends the dictatorship of capital through democratic republicanism or by the democratic totalitarianism of the Chavist regime. On the other hand the Venezuelan opposition and those of other countries say that the failure of the Maduro government represents the setback of "Castro-communism"; and they advocate neo-liberal policies with a human face, that's to say the old recipe of implementing "capitalism with a human face". They say that Maduro has set up a "communism" similar to that of Cuba. Left Communism has shown since the beginning of the so-called "Cuban revolution" that the regime in this country for more than 50 years is a Stalinist-styled state capitalist regime. Maduro and his allies are trying to apply the same model with their "Socialism of the 21st century".

The millions of people who are today protesting against the Maduro regime show the indignation, despair and anger of a population which doesn't want to just "survive" in such miserable conditions. Although many of them have illusions in the proposals of the MUD, many others are calling for demonstrations in order to express their discontent, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are partisans of this bourgeois oppositional regroupment; this is expressed mainly through the resistance movements formed mainly by young people, many of whom have been cowardly assassinated by the regime's forces of repression or by thugs in the pay of the regime, while others have been imprisoned after being taken to military tribunals. Hypocritically, the leaders of the MUD present these as "martyrs for the democratic cause", seeking to use them as cannon-fodder with the aim of imposing their neo-liberal capitalist model which also offers no solution to the crisis hitting the population.

What is the perspective?

The dangerous and difficult situation in Venezuela is the expression of the decomposition of the capitalist system as a whole which is expressed in a caricatured manner in this country. Different ruling factions in this region and the wider world are today pointing the finger at the Maduro regime as an example of how not to run a government. In the present situation of capitalism in Venezuela there are no guarantees about what could happen; a handful of spiteful and lumpenised adventurers, whether of the right or left, could assume control of the state and submit the population, including the proletariat, to chaos and barbarity. In fact, the United States, the main economic and military power on the planet, has as its Commander-in Chief, a populist adventurer of the right whose sole difference with Chavez is that the latter proclaims himself of the left and that he puts forward an imperialist policy marked by "amateurism".

No nation can escape the effects of decomposition, in which the future is seriously threatened by wars, poverty and famine. This impasse is the consequence of a situation in which the two principal classes, the bourgeoisie and proletariat, have not been capable of imposing their respective "solutions": either humanity submits to a new world war on the side of the bourgeoisie, or a world communist revolution in the perspective of the working class. Such an impasse plunges society into a growing loss of reference and a decay of the whole social body.

Venezuela, like Syria or other countries of the Middle East, Asia or Africa are the mirror in which is reflected what we, the proletarians of the world, have to see; they show us what capitalism has in store if we don't finish with this system. For some years now decomposition has been knocking at the door of the most developed countries of Europe, Asia and America through the advance of terrorism.

The populist leftist regime put in place by Chavez is the demonstration that neither the left of capital, nor its right, nor the most extreme sections of these bourgeois expressions, can represent any sort of escape from the exploitation and barbarity of capitalism: from the right to the left both must be rejected and consciously fought by the proletariat and by the minorities of the class who are fighting against the existing order. The "Socialism of the 21st century" and the so-called "Bolivarian revolution" have nothing to do with socialism. They are one and the same patriotic and nationalist movements. As defenders of socialism, we stand before everything with the spirit of the Communist Manifesto, the first political programme of the proletariat put forward in 1848, which says that "the proletarians have neither country nor national interests to defend".

We must be conscious of the strength of the working class because it is the producer class whose exploitation produces all social wealth. The indignation of the proletariat and the majority of the Venezuelan population who are fighting for a decent life, impossible under the reign of capitalism, must serve as an encouragement to develop this feeling among the proletarians of the entire world, to become conscious that the proletarian revolution is the sole way out of the barbarity that capitalism is reserving for us all. To finish with this barbarity threatening the whole of humanity, it is necessary to destroy the bourgeois state apparatus, supported by an exploitative minority which increasingly is showing its incapacity to manage and which, day after day, strengthens and imposes its terror on the whole of society. Only through its consciousness and international solidarity can the proletariat put an end to this dramatic situation.

It is a reality of the present time that the world proletariat hasn't the capacity to break this advance of barbarity. However, despite the political bi-polarisation by the factions of the bourgeoisie, whether of the right or the left, there exists in Venezuela and other countries, an immense number of the population, who do not believe that "we are coming out of the crisis". Many of those who march in an honest fashion behind one or the other of these cliques are confronted by the reality that they can see no solution to the situation. Similarly, even if they only represent a minority of the working class, elements exist who are looking for a proletarian perspective faced with the barbarity in which we are living.

It is for that reason that it's urgent that we, as a revolutionary minority of the working class, intervene with the aim of of recovering the revolutionary consciousness and class identity of the proletariat. We must take up the road of the struggle for real communism  like the Bolshevik Party and the Soviets a hundred years ago, protagonists of the first great attempt at the development of the world revolution: the October revolution.

Neither the "Socialism of the 21st century", nor democracy, nor the right populism of Trump or the left populism of Chavez and Maduro.  The proletariat must find its own perspective outside of capitalism by returning to the struggle for its own class interests.

Internacionalismo, section of the International Communist Current in Venezuela, September 25, 2017.

For the most “responsible” factions of the world bourgeoisie, the international upsurge of populism has created a succession of problems and obstacles, not least Brexit and the unpredictable reign of Trump in the USA. In the last few months we have seen some vigorous attempts to stem the populist tide, the most evident expression of which was during the French presidential election last April/May, when weighty international figures like Merkel and Obama, plus the French Socialist Party and others gave their unqualified backing to the pro-EU candidate Emmanuel Macron, widely seen as the most effective barrier to the populist, anti-EU Front National. However, the underlying social forces generating the populist tide have by no means gone away and its political expressions continue to exert a real weight in bourgeois political life. The result of the general election in Austria – coming soon after the spectacular gains made by the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland  in Germany - provides further confirmation that populism is much more than a political bubble and expresses a real dysfunction at the roots of capitalist society. 

The rise of Sebastian Kurz

The winner of the recent general elections (Nationalratswahlen) in Austria has been acclaimed the new young shooting star of European politics: the Christian Democrat Sebastian Kurz. His “List Kurz – new ÖVP“ gained 31,49% of the votes, followed by the Social Democratic SPÖ with 26,86% and the right wing populists of the FPÖ with 25,97%. For the first time ever, an ÖVP leader won a general election against an SPÖ chancellor in office. It is also only the second time since the beginning of the chancellorship of the famous Bruno Kreisky in 1971 that the ÖVP won more votes at a general election than the SPÖ.

Sebastian Kurz has been mandated by the Austrian president Van Der Bellen to form a new government. If he succeeds, he will become Europe’s youngest head of government at the age of 31. Kurz is being compared with the new French president Emmanuel Macron, not only on account of his youthfulness, but also because he – like his French counterpart – waged a successful electoral campaign essentially around his own person and his own “charisma”.

But despite these similarities, there are also important differences between these two politicians. Whereas Macron created a kind of new political movement around himself (République En Marche), Kurz used the existing structure of the ÖVP for his electoral campaign. How he did this was very different from the way Donald Trump in the United States more or less hijacked the Republican Party for his own purposes. The once proud ÖVP, one of the two main parties of the Austrian state throughout the post-war epoch, gladly accepted being degraded to the status of electoral helping hands of its leader. They did so because Kurz successfully presented himself to them as the only hope they had not only of getting more votes than the Social Democrats, but also of avoiding being overtaken electorally by the populist FPÖ. In other words, what motivated the ÖVP was not a political strategy in the interests of the national bourgeois state (which was clearly one of the motives of Macron and his supporters), but the preservation of the particular interests, the influence and privileges of the ÖVP.

The gamble paid off. During the summer Kurz, who was the leader of the ÖVP as the junior partner in the social democratic-led coalition under the SPÖ chancellor Christian Kern, actively provoked a governmental crisis and the calling of new general elections. In fact, Kurz had prepared this coup step by step over a period beginning in the autumn of 2015 with the “refugee crisis”. Originally, the Kern government had supported the so-called “welcoming” policy of the German chancellor Angela Merkel. This was not difficult, since the role of Austria consisted mainly in waving the refugees on through from the Balkans route to Germany. All of a sudden Kurz, who obviously has a finely developed sensitivity for changes of mood within the electorate, initiated a radical reversal in the refugee policy of the Austrian government: the closing of the Austrian border, active assistance to Hungary and other states in sealing the Balkan Route. Kurz profited from his role as foreign minister in promoting this new policy, which became associated with his person. The refugee question was and is entangled under capitalism with foreign policy interests. The end of Austrian support for Merkel’s refugee policy introduced an element of confrontation into the relations of Vienna with Germany, and also with Turkey. Berlin wants Turkey, and also the North African coastal states, to play a leading role in preventing refugees from fleeing to Europe. In this way, it also hopes to gain in influence in these countries, and to counteract the influence of such powers as Russia or China there. By concentrating on closing the Balkan Route, Austria, under the impulsion of Kurz, is more determinedly pursuing its own interests on the Balkan peninsula, which are antagonistic to those of Turkey. However, on this point, the thinking of Kurz may have been somewhat short-sighted (in German: kurz-sichtig). Unlike Hungary, for example, Austria is not only a neighbour of the Balkans, it is also an Alpine country. With the closing of the Balkans route, the refugees started arriving instead from northern Africa through Italy into Austria. By closing one gap, Kurz helped to open another. In response to this, the government in Vienna announced the mobilisation of the army (there was even talk of setting tanks in motion) against half-starved and helpless men, women and children. Government circles in Rome were dismayed by this sudden deployment of the Austrian military close to its border with Italy. But even Austrian diplomats began to express consternation about Austria, in response to the refugee question, worsening relations with its two most important neighbours: Germany in the north and Italy in the south. However, there was no stopping Kurz, since his foreign policy against refugees managed to stir up a wave of nationalism among parts of the population. Among the ingredients of this nationalism were, alongside fear of refugees and Islamophobia, old anti-German and anti-Italian resentments which suddenly re-surfaced.

But above and beyond the refugee question, Kurz increasingly began to put in question the coalition government itself, condemning stagnation and blockages which he himself was partly helping to cause. In the end, all involved were relieved when the coalition was brought to an end and new elections called. Already when in government, Kurz had begun his electoral campaign, developing the rhetoric of an oppositional leader. He profited from his youth to present himself as the champion of a revolt against “the establishment” to which he belongs. His success with these ploys is all the more striking when you consider the failure of the neighbouring Bavarian CSU in Germany under Horst Seehofer, who as a member of the Grand Coalition in Berlin tried to profile itself as an opposition force in the refugee question. The CSU lost more votes at the recent German general elections than any of the other parties of the government coalition. At this level, Kurz seems to have something else in common with Macron: a highly developed ability to win and to wield political power. But whereas, for Macron, power is not only an end in itself, but a means of realising a political programme for the national capital, it is not yet at all clear what Kurz wants to achieve. Apart from the vague promise to lower taxes, and making Austria a safer and more homely place... nobody seems to know what he intends to do. Does he know himself?

The consolidation of the populist FPÖ

Alongside the “List Kurz” the main winner of this election is the right wing populist FPÖ. Under its leader Heinz-Christian Strache (a rhetorical talent) it almost attained the record score achieved by the “Freiheitlichen” (“The Free”) under the notorious Jörg Haider around a quarter of a century before. It also obtained almost as many votes as the leading party of the Austrian state for many decades, the SPÖ. Today, the FPÖ is one of the most experienced, best organised and established populist right wing parties in Europe. It succeeds in avoiding many of the mistakes of similar parties in other EU countries. For instance, it strongly criticised Madame Le Pen and her Front National in France for toying with the idea of leaving the European Union or the Euro Zone. Instead, the FPÖ calls on Austria to play a leading role in making the EU “more a Union of Fatherlands”, and in making the Euro a more “Nordic” currency (getting rid of Greece and possibly other southern members). It also condemned as ridiculous the proposal of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands to have the Koran forbidden. None of this means that the positions and members of the FPÖ are any less “extremist” than in the days of Jörg Haider. But it should be recalled that Haider, before he died in a car crash, split off from the FPÖ and founded his own party, the BZÖ (now no longer in parliament). The FPÖ of today is not the same as the Haider FPÖ. It is more professional, more “market liberal”, and above all a current has disappeared which under Haider played a prominent role, the “Deutschnationalen”. This was the current which, partly out of nostalgia for the Third Reich, expressed sympathy with the idea of a “re-unification” of Austria with Germany. This option is at present anathema to the main factions of the Austrian (and also the German) bourgeoisie. In the past quarter of a century, the FPÖ has succeeded in making itself more acceptable both to the Austrian and to the European bourgeoisie. When Jörg Haider’s FPÖ formed a government with the ÖVP in 2000, there were big protest demonstrations on the streets of Austria and Europe, and the European Union imposed a kind of diplomatic semi-isolation on its Austrian member. Today the situation could hardly be more different. Not only the ÖVP, but also the SPÖ have signalled their readiness to govern with the FPÖ; there are no objections to be heard from the other European states, and so far no big protests either.

The present success of the FPÖ is another confirmation of the failure of the policy of the former ÖVP Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, who justified forming a government in 2000 with Jörg Haider with the argument that involving the populists in power would rob them of their anti-establishment nimbus. Now the FPÖ is not only as strong as ever, it has been able to maintain its image as a protest party. It has partly learnt this at the provincial and regional levels, and partly, as the FPÖ themselves say, from the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban. Although Orban has been the head of the Hungarian government for seven years now, he still partly succeeds in presenting himself as an oppositional force: in opposition to “Brussels”, to “finance capital” or to the “Open Society Foundation” of his favourite enemy, the Hungarian-American hedge fund billionaire George Soros. In fact, the “anti-establishment” reputation of the likes of the FPÖ is largely based on their readiness to advocate – and implement – measures which contradict some interests of the “elite”, and even the best interests of the national capital as a whole, but which are “popular” among parts of the electorate. The “business as usual” reaction of the bourgeoisie in Austria and in the rest of Europe does not mean they now think the FPÖ have become a reliable representative of their interests. It reflects in the first instance a certain resignation in face of the inevitable. Unable to resolve the problem of “populism”, which is a product of the rotting of its own social system, the bourgeoisie has to make the best of it, limiting as much as possible its negative effects.

The present hobby horse of the FPÖ is that Austria should “join” the Visegrad-Group, an informal regroupment of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, originally formed to counter the overweight of the older western members within the European Union institutions. No more than a loose coordination, it has gained a new impetus and prominence through the present refugee crisis and through the rise of populism in Europe. Hungary and Poland already have right wing “populist” governments. The ANO of Andrej Babis (known as “the Donald Trump of the Czech Republic – in fact he is Slovakian) has just won the elections in Prague. All four countries are in the forefront in refusing refugees and Muslims into their countries. After his electoral victory, Babis declared that he is counting on Austria and Sebastian Kurz joining what he sees as an “anti-liberal” front within the EU. The “Visegrad movement”, as it is now being called, tends to give populism an additional dimension by establishing a policy of “popular provocation” as part of relations between European Union governments. But the FPÖ has another provocation up its sleeve: it wants to “re-pose” the question of South Tirol, presently a northern Italian province which many in the FPÖ want to see return to Austria. Depending on whether or not the FPÖ joins the government, and how far it intends to go on this question, this could amount to the first putting in question of a border between two members of the European Union (the rule is that the EU does not allow membership of countries which dispute borders with EU countries).

The crisis of the existing bourgeois party political system

The partisans of political stability, and not only within Austria itself, would have preferred it if the previous coalition under Christian Kern could have continued its work. The SPÖ and even the ÖVP still have the reputation of being the two most responsible and reliable state parties. Between the two of them, they would have a stable majority to form a new coalition now, this time under the leadership of Sebastian Kurz. But precisely this option appears in many ways as the most problematic. Because Kurz campaigned against the Grand Coalition, not only the votes for the FPÖ, but also those for the ÖVP appear as votes against the Grand Coalition. To ignore this would mean putting the political leadership of the country in blatant contradiction with its own democratic ideology. The dilemma of the Austrian bourgeoisie today is that the viable alternatives to a Grand Coalition both involve having the FPÖ in government.

A few weeks before the Austrian elections, the German bourgeoisie, at its general election, was able to respond to the rise of the right wing “populist” Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) by creating a new six party constellation in parliament. The option of bringing to an end the Grand Coalition (Christian and Social Democrats) in Berlin was opened up by bringing the liberal FDP back into parliament. If the establishment of a so-called Jamaika-Coalition between the Christian Democrats, the Liberals and the Greens (presently under negotiation) succeeds, the AfD in Germany will not only be kept at arm’s length from governmental responsibility, it will also be prevented (by the SPD) from being the biggest opposition party in the new Bundestag. No such precautions were taken in Austria. On the contrary. The electoral campaign there was dominated by a brutal power struggle between the SPÖ and the ÖVP to the extent that Kern and Kurz seemed completely oblivious to anything else. The contest between the two took on such scandalous proportions (blatant defamations and intrigues) that the FPÖ (normally the provocateur par excellence) was able to remain calmly on the sidelines, presenting itself on its best behaviour. Under these circumstances, nobody paid much attention to the fact that the Greens (the only established party maintaining the “refugees welcome” slogan) were being buried beneath the monstrously xenophobic electoral campaign of all three of the bigger parties, and were splitting on account of a power struggle within their ranks. The result was that the Greens are no longer represented in the new parliament. This is a party which the Austrian bourgeoisie had been trying for years to encourage as an additional governmental option, as a possible alternative to the FPÖ.

After World War I, Vienna was still one of the great centres of cultural activity and of learning in Europe. During those years, one of the main centres of intellectual life there was the regular public, one man dialogue of the most celebrated figure of Viennese culture at the time. This person was not Sigmund Freud (the father of psychoanalysis) or Robert Musil (one of the creators of the modern novel) or Arnold Schönberg (who revolutionised modern “classical” music). It was a man called Karl Kraus. Kraus was able, on the basis of an analysis of changes in the local Vienna slang, or the way headlines in the sensationalist press, or death announcements were formulated, to detect what was going on in society – and not only in Austria. He was like someone looking at a single raindrop and seeing reflected there the whole surrounding landscape in every detail. Instead of ignoring these details, instead of getting lost in them, he strove to unlock the general truths contained in the more significant specificities. It is clear that the analysis of the elections in Austria today can also help us to better understand the world political situation as a whole. Austria is one of the countries in Europe where contemporary right-wing populism developed earliest and most. Today the FPÖ is on a par with the two traditional established parties in Austria. Like the Brexiteers in Britain, the Trumpists in the United States or the Independentists in Catalonia, they are ready to do things which mobilise people behind them, even when these things sometimes contradict the interests of capital and even their own particular interests.

Perhaps the most striking specificity of Austria, which favours the development of populism there, and which at the same time represents a general tendency in contemporary capitalism, is the decline of its party political apparatus. The SPÖ and the ÖVP have had such an undisputed monopoly of party political power and privileges for over three quarter of a century now, that they are for the most part more concerned with protecting their own vested interests than with doing their job for capital. They are also increasingly discredited in the eyes of a significant part of the population. It is in relation to this question that Sebastian Kurz has put forward something like a political project of his own: “Rationalising”, “cutting down to size” the apparatus of the ÖVP. If he is serious about this, it will entail party members losing their privileges and even their jobs. This would inevitably create new conflicts, this time within the ÖVP itself. On account of its inability to put forward a perspective for society as a whole, the ruling class has enormous difficulties in renewing its party political apparatus. With the recent elections, Austria seems to be sinking deeper into the quagmire of its political crisis in the context of capitalist decomposition.

Steinklopfer. 23.10.2017

On the 11th November, the ICC is hosting a Day of Discussion [150] on the Russian Revolution. Several comrades have been already been reflecting seriously on the importance of this all-important episode in the history of working class struggle. A comrade on our discussion board, Link, has already reposted a presentation he prepared for a previous meeting on the topic. It can be found on our discussion forum here [151].

The text that follows has been sent to us by a close sympathiser of the ICC. We are publishing it in the hope that as many comrades as possible will read it prior to the meeting in the hope that it will stimulate further thought and discussion.

We encourage all comrades to attend the meeting if they are able and to consider making further contributions, either in the form of texts or participating on our forum.

The revolutionary events in Russia in 1917, "the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny", (Trotsky) the uprising of millions of proletarians, poor peasants and soldiers, together with the revolutionary wave which it started from Finland to Sicily, from the Ruhr to the Urals, with influences in the USA, Spain, China or Argentina, the hopes which it raised among millions of oppressed in the world, cannot be approached from a narrow ideological  affiliation. The Russian Revolution and the international revolutionary wave which it initiated, its critical assessment and its contributions to the communist programme, belongs to oppressed humanity as a whole, in its age-old struggle against the oppression of man by man, and particularly to the perspective of the communist alternative, which is still to be written, and which is led by the revolutionary proletariat.

Increasingly incapable of offering a positive project that justifies and supports the maintenance of the domination of capitalist social and production relations, the international bourgeoisie focuses above all on repeating that there is no alternative to its rule, or if any, this would be even worse, leading necessarily to Nazi or Stalinist-kind “totalitarianism”. The identification (i.e., denigration and ridicule) of the communist historical alternative with different forms of especially brutal red-wrapped state capitalism is undoubtedly the main ideological dogma, along with the one of "democracy", which uses capitalist civilization, corroded by its contradictions, to sustain itself.  It is in this context that one must place the (not new of course) campaigns of ridicule and denigration of the revolutionary experience in Russia in 1917 and, by extension, of the international revolutionary wave which followed it.

In this strategy of falsification of the Russian Revolution there is at play a prominent role for the false polarization between "supporters" and "opponents" of this lie within the bourgeois ideological and political spectrum. The "supporters" with Stalinists, Trotskyists or Maoists positions (from the crude paleo-Stalinist versions to the more neo-social democratic variations which ridicule the revolution, turning it into an exercise in a “follow-my-leader” attitude on the part of powerless masses, in intrigues and manoeuvres by professional politicians and "genial bosses”, in messianism and personality cult (whether for Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin) under a narrow Russian framework. In other words, they present the proletarian revolution as if it were vulgar bourgeois politics, of which these currents form its left wing, applying the pattern of "revolutions" (power struggles between national and international factions of the ruling class, using the discontented populations as cannon fodder for interests outside of their own) in China, Cuba, Vietnam or Venezuela. Its "defence" of the Russian Revolution is the worst ridicule.

The anarchist current bases its alleged "criticism" of the Russian experience on the same bourgeois dogma and patterns of its "defenders" from the left wing of capital: the Russian revolution as a "putsch" led by manipulative elements who use the masses for their own interests, and the identification of the marxist method and the communist historical perspective with Stalinism and similar regimes. In addition, in an exercise in cynicism typical of bourgeois politics, this current, while denigrating marxism and communism, hides or manipulates its collaboration with Stalinism in the 1930s in Spain, its "proud" participation in the "French resistance" under the bourgeois and Stalinist banner in WW2, or its support for bourgeois factions under the "democratic confederalism" discourse of Kurdish militias. Anarchism engages in a work of historical falsification by fraudulently vindicating the revolutionary sailors of Kronstadt (determined supporters of the "authoritarian coup" led by the Bolsheviks in October 1917) or the workers' insurrection in May 1937 in Barcelona (against the republican State of which the CNT was part, collaborating in its "pacification”). Actually, it should rather vindicate Kropotkin and the Manifesto of the Sixteen, the Spanish anarchist ministers, or the crypto-Stalinist Abdullah Öcalan, as a legitimate member of the extreme left of the political and ideological spectrum of capital.

The clearest and most sincerely revolutionary elements within anarchism, such as Victor Serge or some of the most combative fractions of Spanish working class anarchism, embraced the path of the need for the insurrection and the revolutionary dictatorship concretized by Bolshevism.

This strategy of denial of the possibility of a viable alternative to the dictatorship of capital by the bourgeoisie finds a fertile historical ground in the current incapacity of the proletariat to pose a political and social alternative. The phenomena which objectively show the historical crisis of bourgeois society through its inability to solve them (chronic economic crisis, mass unemployment, unending imperialist wars, terrorism and gangsterism, etc.), in the absence of a social and political alternative, become elements which underpin the rule of the capitalist class, which consciously makes use of them. The bourgeoisie consciously strikes on hot iron. In fact, for the bourgeoisie, within the limits of a certain maintenance of "public order", bourgeois property, circulation of goods, and the existence of a capable and willing labour force, given its inability to solve the contradictions of its system, the worse the better. The capitalist class has no problem in taking refuge in armed bunkers surrounded by poverty, like in the mega cities of Latin America. Without a revolutionary alternative, the capitalist mode of production will plunge society into barbarism.

The bonding and unifying organs of proletarian struggle are not to be found in the happy kingdom of "workers' democracy", but on a new battlefield, in a higher historical level, between, on the one hand, the positions of the bourgeoisie and its agents, and on the other, those which lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat. They are a necessary but not sufficient condition to break bourgeois power. Any uncritical illusion in the formality of "workers' democracy" in its different forms (assemblyism, councilism, etc.) politically disarms the proletarian alternative.

The leftist vision (coherent with its bourgeois approach) of the Bolsheviks, and more in particular, their leaders, as a triumphal, homogenous body, acclaimed by the masses in speeches in bourgeois electoral circus fashion, is again a complete falsification of the conditions under which revolutionary activity takes place. The Bolsheviks, until a few weeks before the October insurrection, are in a clear minority, in some cases in a situation of clandestinity, with deep discussions and confrontations in their ranks, finding rejection if not hostility from wide sectors of the proletariat and poor peasants, not to mention of course the “respectable” democrats and socialists who, as in Germany the following year with the Spartacists, will incite their murder once they have posed a threat.

The great strength of the Bolsheviks is the understanding that revolutionary activity is not the adaptation to bourgeois ideology and weaknesses of the proletariat, diluting themselves opportunistically in it, but on the contrary,  means standing firm and patient and trying to be an active factor in the elevation of the communist political consciousness within the revolutionary proletariat. And this can only take place in the framework of positions and theoretical-practical activity in opposition to the "respectability" of bourgeois order.

Another major merit and contribution to the communist program of the Bolsheviks is their conscious acknowledgement that the class struggle is above all a relation of forces between two projects of society, between two powers. The proletarian revolution is not a beautiful democratic ideal of the “whole people”, nor the realization of "workers” democracy". Although the formation of unifying organs (mass assemblies and workers' councils) are a necessary condition to break capitalism's normality of proletarian atomization and de-politicization, they are not sufficient in themselves to isolate the bourgeoisie and its State, to destroy its power. Without the communist programme, without revolutionary theory, the effort, combativeness and heroism of the masses is in vain. Even in a revolutionary situation, workers' councils can commit hara-kiri and dig their own grave by giving the power to the bourgeois State, through their "representatives", as was shown in Germany when the SPD and USPD dominated councils gave up their power to the National Assembly, or in Spain in 1936 with the renunciation of power by the CNT in favour of the collaboration with the Republican state.

As an irony of history, it was precisely under conditions of Russian backwardness that a challenge was  made to the vulgar materialism present in a large part of the organizations of the 2nd International, which defended the need to go through a phase of bourgeois democracy (with its parliaments, legal unions, etc.) before socialism could be introduced.  What was crucial in 1917 were the general historical conditions of  proletarian struggle at that moment in world capitalism. And these conditions meant that the proletariat as a political and social force could only take shape and express itself in rupture with the capitalist normality which atomizes and divides it. A year later, at the end of 1918, the same question arises in Germany: either workers' councils or national assembly. That is to say: either the maintenance of the permanent mobilization of the proletariat through its unifying organs of power, or the extinction of these organs and the dissolution of the proletariat into an atomized and powerless mass.

A new period begins for the class struggle. A period in which the proletarian class can only exist as a social and political force "in rupture". The acknowledgement that the class struggle is at a qualitatively higher historical level, a level at which the proletariat, in order to exist as an autonomous and antagonistic social and political force to the existing order, as a class, must confront what every day denies and prevents it as such. This means that the methods and dynamics which the proletarian class needs to assert its living conditions and its human nature, to assert itself as a collective force against capitalist social and production relations and the bourgeoisie in this historical period demands a profound confrontation with the "everyday normality", a profound questioning of its position; in short, a rupture with the daily domination of capitalist social relations, a social, organizational, and political rupture. In other words: in decadent capitalism the proletariat as a collective social and political force can only exist in rupture with everything which denies it precisely as a collective social and political force. It is in "backward Russia," precisely because it didn't fit in the patterns of vulgar materialism of the time, because it didn't go through a phase of legality, of stable and legal mass organizations, of democratic mystification, because of the need of the proletariat and poor peasants to defend themselves against the capitalist and landlord class, where the first great act (after 1905) of the class struggle of the future took place.

As stated above, in coherence with its view of the class struggle as a confrontation and a relationship of forces between two antagonistic historical projects, and not the realization of a "beautiful ideal" or of "workers' democracy", comes the audacity and the coherent acknowledgement by the Bolsheviks of the natural consequences of the proletarian revolution: the destruction of the bourgeois state, the abolition of bourgeois democracy, and the preparation and assumption of the historical necessity of the international expansion of revolution and civil war. The abolition of the bourgeois Constituent Assembly and the disregard for the mystique of power and the results of "democratic" elections (in which the Bolsheviks and Left SR by no means had a mathematical majority) in favour of the power of the armed soviets under Bolshevik influence in a context of favourable relations of forces for the seizure of power, will henceforth stand among the major programmatic points of the communist revolution. The alternative to this would have been to hand over power to the forces of "democracy" and the bourgeois state, preparing the ground for the counter-revolution. By acting in this way, the Bolsheviks of 1917 would have placed themselves in the same counter-revolutionary historical situation as the German SPD or the Spanish CNT, instead of occupying a place of honour in the historical programme for communism.

To understand the degeneration of the Russian Revolution from beacon of the world communist revolution to a capitalist state, the theoretical and practical vanguard of international counter-revolution, it is necessary to understand the nature and acting forces of the proletarian revolution. To understand the causes and nature of a counter-revolution, it is necessary to understand the revolution. The "mystery" of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution cannot be understood without understanding that the fuel of the revolution was exhausted: the most advanced and combative detachments of the proletariat (the backbone and driving force of the revolution) were physically and morally decimated and atomized in a bloody civil war against an army of mercenaries of the international bourgeoisie, by the terrible misery caused by eight years of war and economic strangulation of the world bourgeoisie, and by the stagnation of the world revolution. With the failure of the revolutionary attempts in the rest of Europe, which could have broken this blockade and added oxygen to the revolutionary fire, the fuel and revolutionary momentum was extinguished step by step. Karl Marx's statement that "the emancipation of the working class must be the task of the workers themselves" is not a mere empty slogan or an ode to self-management, it expresses among other things the idea that only the proletariat in struggle can provide the social and political fuel necessary to lead a struggle and an alternative to capitalism.

Deprived of this fuel, what was left of the Russian revolution was its state and the institutional structure for the management of the territory, showing itself increasingly antagonistic to the interests and needs of the population, and irremediably taking an autonomous life for its own development and survival under a world ruled by capitalist social and production relations. All kinds of unscrupulous careerists and social climbers, the natural eco-system of the bourgeois state and political apparatus, occupy the apparatus of the state and the Communist Party, both in the USSR and in the organizations of the Stalinized Communist International. This regime, formal heir to and at the same time an expression of the defeat and death by suffocation of the Russian Revolution, would make use of the greatest brutality for its internal and external preservation (starting with the elimination of revolutionary militants) and the greatest cynicism using all kinds of pseudo-marxist and pseudo-revolutionary phraseology to keep its influence and prestige among the oppressed at the international level. The international bourgeoisie (with the collaboration of its left wing) will make use ad nauseam of this precious historical gift of the identification of different forms of state capitalism with the communist alternative to bourgeois society. In fact, as said above, together with the "democratic" farce, it has become one of the main ideological arguments to justify its domination. The perspective of the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism will have to break with those two dogmas, or it won't happen at all.

It is necessary not to forget that, despite the extremely valuable lessons of the Russian Revolution, and the fact that, as stated above, it expresses the general conditions of the class struggle in decadent capitalism, these historical conditions will never occur again in exactly the same way. In several respects. First, because at that time there was an underestimation of the international bourgeoisie towards the proletarian communist threat: sealed trains for revolutionaries won't occur again, nor will “foreign” revolutionaries simply be deported to the revolutionary stronghold. The conditions of a Trotsky cornered and finally assassinated with the complicity of the international bourgeoisie will be the norm.

The revolutions of the future most probably won't confront either a political and ideological apparatus of mystification and channelling as little developed as the one in Russia in 1917: they will be confronted with a whole range of left wing and extreme left organizations directly or indirectly at the service of the bourgeoisie and its state, organizations whose main task will be to disarm theoretically and practically the revolutionary proletariat.

D. August 2017

The history of Turkey, particularly its relatively recent history, is a complex one and we can't possibly cover all of it in one article. For example, we will produce a separate piece to look at the intimately-related "Kurdish Question", in which the demand for national self-determination was already an anachronism at the turn of last century. But in looking at some significant examples of the operations of the Turkish state from its inception, and particularly since the 1990's, we can clearly identify the global developments of economic crisis, repression, militarism and irrationality that have marked the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. We can ask the questions of what global components of the decadence of capitalism, and what specific elements of Turkey's past, affect and direct the present situation of a totalitarian, militarised and increasingly Islamicised state; and we can also ask to what extent this dire situation is the result of the unbridled ambition of one man and his "vision" or whether it represents the latest twists of Turkish imperialism in the increasing chaos in the Middle East imposed on it by a generalised capitalist decomposition.

The new Turkish "empire" resurrected from the past

But first let's start nearly a thousand years ago, with the Battle of Manzikert, 1071, where a Turkic tribe from Central Asia routed the Christians in Byzantium and started a chain of events which allowed the Seljuk Turks to capture the lands of modern Turkey and create an empire stretching across modern-day Palestine, Iraq, Iran and Syria, thus laying the ground for the construction of the mighty transcontinental Ottoman Empire. The rather obscure fact of the Manzikert battle is important for our investigation because it has been talked about a lot recently by Recip Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey. The fact that much of the story is lies, exaggeration and wishful thinking doesn't matter, just as it doesn't matter to any other scurrilous politician who wants to take us back to a mythical and rose-coloured "great past of the nation". It won't stop Bilal Erdogan for example, the son of Recip directing Turkey's education policy (who because of his - and his family’s - financial dealings with the 'Caliphate' earned the name of "oil minister to Isis"), drumming up the example of Manzikert in Turkey’s now heavily Islamicised schools. The religious schools, the Imam Hatip Lisesi (IHL), have grown from 23,000 to well over a million pupils in a year and, in most cases, evolution theory and physics have been dropped or downgraded, with many thousands of teachers intimidated, sacked or imprisoned so that the loaded concept of jihad can be taught to what President Erdogan now calls, the "Pious Generation" in schools under surveillance by the religious police. The Wall Street Journal recently called Turkey "the other Islamic State".

Apart from Erdogan's preparations for the millennial anniversary in 2071, he has also been laying out his vision for the challenges facing the "New Turkey" over the next two decades. At fiercely nationalist rallies, imbued with the trappings of the Ottoman Empire, including scimitar-wielding soldiers in traditional garb and soldiers playing Ottoman-style instruments, Erdogan has talked about the emergence and prospects of the "New Turkey" for the next twenty years, based on the Grand Vision he laid out in the 4th Congress of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2013. He has subsequently elaborated that Turkey would become the "Epicentre" of the Middle East, a New Middle East where Turkey holds a central and model role (New York Times, 24.9.17), "A great nation, a great power... where brother and sister Arabs with the same civilisation and common history... work together". Erdogan is prone to ranting, changing his mind and exaggeration, but there's no doubt that under his leadership Turkish imperialism is going to try to reassert itself over the region of the Middle East and beyond. Erdogan's praise for the past poses the vision for the new Turkish "empire". The hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Turkish state in 2023, much vaunted by and campaigned around by Erdogan, carries the idea that his country will become as powerful and influential as the Ottoman Empire was during its heyday.  And today Turkey is indeed becoming the "Epicentre", but the epicentre of capitalist decomposition where centrifugal tendencies, corruption, the cynical use of refugees, debt and war predominate.

The geostrategic position of Turkey and its role in the birth of the country from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire

Turkey is both a barrier and a bridge between two continents at the very centre of imperialist rivalries that date back well before the existence of the country; and its geographical position and size gives it the ability to shape events around the Middle East, the Balkans and the Caucasus. Its geographical position gave it the ability to hold back Russia from its passage via the Black Sea into the warm waters of the Mediterranean, and this made it of central importance in the 19th century for France and Britain in their rivalry with the Czarist state. This was a key issue during the Crimean War, ending in defeat for Russia, which was registered in the Treaty of Paris in March 1856. The war marked the ascendency of France as a major power, continued the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which Britain wanted to maintain against Russia, thus giving it a brief lease of life. It also saw  the beginning of the end of Czarist rule. It was successful for Britain in reducing and confining the Russian fleet to the Black Sea, leaving Britain free to "rule the waves" for the next two or three decades. The war accelerated the decay of the Eurasian and African-wide Ottoman Empire, with nationalist ambitions arising in its various constituent parts, sponsored or influenced by Britain and France. The Empire had already been weakening since the 1820's with the internal decay of its ruling class, originating in fetters that were more akin to Asiatic despotism than a pre-capitalist feudalism. It was unable to staunch the tide of capitalism whose framework is the nation state, and the national movements which resulted in independence for Greece in 1832, Serbia in 1867 and Bulgaria in 1878 further accelerated its decline.  

There were tensions within the Ottoman state apparatus itself, with some elements welcoming capitalist relations; the same relations which when implemented gave rise to workers' struggles from the 1860's into the early 1900's, including Christian and Muslim shipyard workers striking together in Kasimpasha (in modern day Turkey) and larger strikes in Constantinople in various industries involving workers from different ethnicities and religions fighting side by side[i]. The subsequent break-up of the Empire, from Bulgaria to Arabia, would be exploited by the major powers during and after World War I where, in the image of its decadence, imperialism would draw up the new frontiers. The world war was in fact the final nail in its coffin. Turkey came into the war on the side of Germany after its resources had been greatly depleted in the Balkan Wars of 1912/13. There had already been growing German influence on the Ottomans before the war with the construction of the Berlin-Baghdad railway, and their attack on Russia as one the Central Powers brought Russia's now allies, Britain and France, to declare war on them in November 1914[ii].

The rise of Kurdish nationalism is entirely linked to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. It first appeared in 1880 when the Ottoman rulers used mainly Kurdish forces to protect their borders against Russia. To this end they co-opted powerful Kurdish leaders to its government and the latter gave considerable support to the regime, including being involved in the massacres of Armenians at the end of the 19th century and fighting for them during the First World War. Attempts at Kurdish independence, promoted by the British for their own imperialist ends, were squashed by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. A real Kurdish independence could not survive the shocks of World War One and its subsequent convulsions and many thousands of Kurds were displaced and perished, following a pattern that preceded the war. The Kurds were mainly against the secularisation policies of Kemal Ataturk and his new regime and a number of Kurdish revolts were violently repressed by the Turkish state through the 20's and 30's.  

The new Turkish state, born through violence and genocide

The residues of the decomposing Ottoman Empire were carved-up by the European colonial powers, particularly Britain and France. In 1916, the French and British, with the assent of Imperial Russia, drew up the secret Sykes-Picot agreement. This plan divided up zones of interest and imposed arbitrary borders, giving rise to Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Armenia, Lebanon and the formation of the modern Turkish state, the Turkish Republic founded by its first president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in 1923. The terms of the Republic were codified by the major powers in the Treaty of Lausanne signed in July 1923. It brought an official end to the conflicts of the war and defined Turkey's borders and its relationship with its neighbours. Turkey was to cede all claims to the remnants of the Ottoman Empire[iii]. The break-up of the Empire and the character of the "nations" born from its ruins show the inescapable dynamics of capitalism's decadence and its descent into full-blown imperialism as outlined by Rosa Luxemburg in her 1915, Junius Pamphlet: "Imperialism is not the creation of one or of any group of states. It is a product of a particular stage in the ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognised only in all its relations and from which no nation can hold aloof".

Thus the new Turkish state was born out of the decay of the Ottoman Empire and plunged straight into the whirlpool of capitalism's decadence, a whirlpool of violence, war, state capitalism and ethnic cleansing. One of the first recorded incidents of capitalist genocide took place under the new regime, with one-and-a-half million Armenians dying as a result of forced marches, rape and murder in May 1915. Up to a similar number of Greeks were killed by the Turks and over a quarter-million Assyrians at the end of World War I. Pogroms were carried out in Turkey, including those against its substantial Alevi minority[iv]. Religion was frowned upon by the new ruling class, the nascent bourgeoisie, the leading cadres of which had fought against the old regime. The Ottoman Caliphate was abolished along with Sharia courts. They abolished all the trappings of the Ulamas (Islamic religious leaders), purged them from the state apparatus and transferred their wealth and property to the treasury. Kemalism's fight against religion was also the struggle against the old regime. Kemal was from the very first determined to crush any attempt at Kurdish resistance: "There were no Kurdish representatives at the Lausanne Conference and the Kurds played no role in the presence of non-Muslim minorities - Armenians, Greeks and Jews in Turkey"[v]. Kemal Ataturk's regime was further strengthened by support of the Bolsheviks in their disastrous foreign policy which was made official in 1921.

The secular republic was an early expression of state capitalism and this was an expression of the necessity for the Turkish "rump" of the old empire to survive and compete. The early concentration of power in the secular Turkish state explains why the army has always been central to Turkish politics.

The Kemalists had to create a secular Turkey that hardly existed in anyone's mind so it took time to take hold and its grip was far from solid. The religious fervour of the Menemen incident, an Islamist inspired revolt in 1930, and various Kurdish uprisings, are examples of these upheavals. The Kemalists allowed two official opposition parties (the Progressive Republican Party, 1924, and the Free Republican Party, 1930), but both had strong religious elements and were closed down by the state in a very short time[vi].

As far as the working class was concerned it followed and deepened the struggles that had taken place under the Ottoman ruling class. The appearance of a communist left, a left wing of the Turkish communist party (TKP) paralleled the development of these struggles and both took place in very dangerous and sometimes deadly situations for revolutionaries and workers. This was an expression of the revolutionary wave that was sweeping the world, and some of these left communists had been involved in the Spartacist uprisings in Germany and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The reality of the workers' situation meant that they clearly confronted the now reactionary nature of "national liberation" from the outset. From Mayday 1920 through most of the twenties, strikes and demonstrations broke out amongst workers in Turkey with frequent internationalist slogans and banners raised in solidarity with workers' struggle everywhere[vii].

Turkey remained a powerful component of imperialism up to and into the Second World War. Due to the historic conditions imperialist tensions had sharpened primarily in the Far East in the thirties and were just brewing in Europe. This is why in the 30's Kemal Ataturk's policy could still steer clear of foreign intervention, enabling him to focus on stabilising his internal power. This was apart from one exception in 1937-38, when he risked war with France by trying to annex the Alexandretta province of the then French-held Syria. There were also concerns about the position of Mosul, but his policy of “non-intervention” lasted after his death and into the 1939 world war. Prior to that there were factions in the Turkish bourgeoisie that wanted to align with Germany, and there was a "non-aggression" pact between the two countries but there were also secret agreements and pacts with the British. The Allies were generally satisfied with Turkish neutrality during the war and its position blocking German access to Middle Eastern oil. It also denied Germany access to its vast resources of chromium, which is vital for military production and which the Allies had plenty of access to elsewhere[viii].  In February 1945, Turkey declared war on the Axis forces.

1945 - 1990: Cold War, coups and continuity of sorts

Again, given the importance of Turkey's geostrategic position at the onset of capitalism's decadence, the same imperialist conditions applied even more so during the Cold War. Under US and British auspices, Turkey became one of the original members of the United Nations in 1945, fought for the West in Korea, and by 1952 was a member of NATO. Right after the war Russia was leaning heavily on Turkey for the establishment of military bases in Turkey and for free access for its navy through the Dardanelles and Bosporus Straits (the so-called "Straits Crisis"). This move was countered by the Truman Doctrine of 1947, where America guaranteed the security of Greece and Turkey against Russia. It was followed by massive US economic and military aid to Turkey which was now a secure part of the western bloc. Turkey was one of the first countries to take part in Operation Gladio, a clandestine NATO-based structure with links to the secret services, bourgeois elites and organised crime[ix] .

The merchant and small producer class in Turkey became flush with capital from the war and their interests came up against the state capitalist imperatives of the Kemalists. Their ability to invest and accumulate was hobbled by the restrictions imposed on them by the centralised grip of Kemalism. Thus arose the legal opposition force of the Democratic Party, unseating the Kemalist Republican People's Party which had ruled during the "single party period" from 1923 to 1945. The former was made up of some elements of the latter, and while it facilitated the rise of Islam, it did nothing to endanger Turkey's membership of NATO and even encouraged moves towards the West; nor did it encourage any attempt of Kurdish nationalism. The hardships and shortages of the war, along with the government's emergency measures, badly affected large sections of the peasantry. The new electoral process gave the rural vote a great weight. The one element of difference (there wasn't much else) between the Republican Peoples’ Party and the Democratic Party was the latter's attitude to religion, demanding greater respect for it and less interference from the state. This mobilised large numbers of the rural population including many Islamist elements. The RPP was forced to go after the rural/religious vote and this led to a relaxation of interference with religion.

The tenure of the DP came to an end in the 1960 coup, the first of several such "adjustments" by the Turkish state between 1960 and 1997. The coup was led by military elements set up for Operation Gladio. One of the legacies of the DP was to see the strengthening and expansion of Islamism in Turkey which was also related to increased agricultural output and the prosperity of the merchants and petty-bourgeoisie along with the weight of the rural vote. These latter elements used Islam as a rallying cry against the regime and they eventually coalesced in the National Salvation Party founded in 1972.

As the global economic crisis hit at the end of the 60's and US aid tailed off, rapid industrialisation and rural migration in Turkey led to rising waves of workers' militancy, peasant occupations and demonstrations.  Unofficial Islam grew alongside “official” Islam, producing madrasas, youth clubs, associations and a number of publications. Various religious brotherhoods flourished and armed street confrontations took place between them, the security forces and fascist and leftist groups. Around this time the Muslim Brotherhood[x] made its first appearance in Turkey. It was significant that the working class stayed well off this poisonous terrain, taking up its own means of struggle, strikes, demonstrations, etc., even if more or less controlled by the unions.

An event in the 1970's presaged the coming period of decomposition where the cement of the bloc structures was to become less stable and centrifugal tendencies were to prevail. Turkey invaded the Republic of Cyprus in 1974, giving rise to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus - recognised only by Turkey to this day. This was significant in that it was a war between two NATO countries. It was an indication of how the tendencies to "each for themselves" would be imposed with the collapse of the Russian bloc a decade and a half later. Another portent of decomposition, one that didn't come directly from the imperialist ambitions of the Turkish state, was the "third way" (between the two blocs) advocated by Turkish Maoist groups. These forces fought a "people's war" in the 70's and 80's, influenced the Kurdish PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) and, not for the last time, brought together elements of the capitalist left and Islamic fundamentalism[xi].

The 1971 military coup was aimed at dealing with a state of chaos that included both workers' unrest and the rise of aggressive fascist and Islamist movements. The military high command took effective power with the support of the US and pursued the class war against workers and enacted anti-leftist and anti-Kurdish separatist policies. Turkey became all the more important for the US in the region following the overthrow of its major pawn in the region, the Shah of Iran, in the late seventies, but it was itself nearing chaos with workers' strikes and demonstrations, three-digit inflation, Maoist agitation, and the rise of the fascist 'Grey Wolves' openly working with the state. In Taksim Square on Mayday 1977, half-a-million demonstrated and dozens were killed, many injured and thousands arrested in the state's repression. The upheavals eventually resulted in the 1980 military coup backed by the US and Britain and involving the CIA, the US ITT corporation and forces of the Gladio counter-guerrilla. Military order was restored. By 1997 the Turkish army was the second largest in NATO with over 700,000 soldiers.

The rest of the 80's saw the Turkish bourgeoisie in relative control, even applying for full membership of the EEC (of which it had been an associate member since 1963). The main event in this period, which is covered by us elsewhere, was the full-scale insurgency of the 1978-founded Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), whose terror the Turkish state responded to in spades.

The 1989 implosion of the Soviet Union: consequences for Turkey and NATO

The collapse of the Russian-led bloc in 1989 also signalled the end of the two-bloc constellation and this had profound consequences for Turkey given its geostrategic history and weight. All the factors of decomposition enter the scene and worsen the situation: militaristic chaos; imperialist ambitions in the context of each for themselves; the irrationality of rising religious fundamentalism; strengthening totalitarian tendencies; outright repression against impossible-to-fulfil nationalist ambitions; up and down relations with other nations; and the arrival of millions of refugees and the displaced, a consequence of all these developments, one that has been used as a weapon of imperialism. The "new", strong Turkey emerging is thus an illustration of capitalist weakness and decomposition. Instead of the "victory" of capitalism and its dominant superpower, the USA, we see the weakening of the latter in the face of the economic and political instability, irrationality and unpredictability, of which the Middle East, with Turkey at the centre of it, is a prime example.

During the Cold War Turkey was a main bastion of the West against Russia. Once Russia collapsed, once the threat against Turkey was gone, Turkey didn't have the same need for NATO. Even the recent annexation of Crimea in 2014 by Russia hasn't seemed to threaten Turkey. In fact the growing relationship between Turkey and Russia is of some concern to the West. Turkey benefited from the Russian invasion of Crimea to the extent that it managed to obtain cheap energy sanctioned by the West. Russia continues to rely on Turkey for keeping its straits open, giving access for its navy to the warm water seas. With Russia no longer threatening its eastern flank, and accommodations between the two countries on its western, Syrian flank (though these are certainly not written in stone), Turkey's need for NATO has shrunk. On its eastern flank Turkey has deepened its relations with Azerbaijan whose oil and gas are exactly what Turkey is lacking, its "missing link". Since the collapse of Russia, Turkey has developed close cultural, economic and military ties with Azerbaijan and supported it in its 2016 war with Russian-backed Armenia, whose "independent republic of Nargono-Karabakh" Turkey still refuses to recognise. But, overall, just as Turkey's need of NATO has declined so NATO's need of Turkey has increased.

Through the pursuance of its own, independent ambitions, which means it no longer submits itself to any military alliance, discipline or agreements, Turkey has not only become unreliable but unpredictable.  Already in 2003, when the US was facing problems in Iraq, the Turkish parliament refused the stationing of US troops in Eastern Anatolia that the latter hoped would be used as springboard. To be committed to confronting Russia becomes an unnecessary and unwanted burden for Turkey and instead of this we see tendencies the other way, towards rapprochement with Russia, which makes Turkey a force in itself undermining and weakening NATO. If Russia manages to pull Turkey into its orbit, along with Iran, it will strengthen the former enormously. In this direction Turkey has just finalised the deal to buy Russia's S-400 missile system and has had talks with Russia over Syria in mid-November, with further talks to come in Sochi with both Putin and Iran.

Given the large and concentrated numbers of Turkish and Kurdish emigrant workers around the world, and particularly those in Germany and the rest of Europe, there is a clear danger of these elements being mobilised behind nationalist interests. Turkish imperialism has the means for the propagation of its perceived interests to its Diaspora in the form of the Milli Gorus (national/religious vision) organisation, formed in 1969[xii].

It took some time, as it did with many western politicians, for the consequences of the collapse of Russia to sink in. The Turkish economy was performing relatively well even though debt was racking up. In the late 90's Turkey joined the EU customs union and in 2005 started negotiations around access to the EU. During this period the secular/Kemalist army coup of 1997, finally occasioned by an anti-Israeli demonstration festooned with images of Hamas and Hezbollah, removed the Islamist leader Erbakan and forced the ban on religious expressions and institutions. The Turkish army thus made another of its "balanced adjustments". Coming up on the wing at this time was former footballer and ex-mayor of Istanbul, Recip Erdogan who, though still banned from politics because of his Islamist affectations, helped set up the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001. He declared that the party would not have an Islamic axis.

The rise of Recip Tayyip Erdogan

The AKP came to power in Turkey in 2002 in a landslide victory after squabbling ruling class factions drove the country to near-bankruptcy, forcing an IMF bail-out in the previous year. Erdogan became prime minister in 2003 when emigration of Turkish workers, a powerful pressure-relief-valve for the Turkish economy, was slowing down and when, more generally in the Middle East, there was a weakening of the more secular powers and a rise of religious fundamentalism. Thanks to a network of mafia-type structures, corruption and clannism within the AKP, Erdogan became prime minister and immediately began putting forward strong nationalist ambitions and projects: modernising infrastructure, job creation (even if low-paid) through debt and foreign investment within a wider and more ambitious Islamic fundamentalism that was based on more backward elements. In order to weaken the grip of the military, which remained a threat to the AKP, Erdogan struck a tactical alliance with the powerful cleric Fethullah Gulen, the leader of a pragmatic, transnational Islamist Hizmet (service) movement that was strong in the Turkish police, education, journalism and the judiciary. Gulen served Erdogan well, weakening the military and its secularism through his grip on the courts and various other shady manoeuvres and intrigues. The two men, in a faction fight within the Turkish bourgeoisie, fell out over corruption charges made against Erdogan and issues over Turkish intelligence (MIT)[xiii]. The Turkish state under Erdogan has since designated Gulen and his organisation as "terrorist". Erdogan has demanded the extradition of Gulen from the United States for his supposed role in the 2016 coup attempt, but the Americans are unlikely to comply given the weight that the Gulen organisation has for US imperialism and the message it would send to any potential "exile" that was useful for the State Department.

Since the 1980s in particular, there has been a rise of Islamic influence and increasing Islamic fundamentalism throughout the whole Middle East. For example in the election campaign of 1987 the wearing of the headscarf by women in public places such as schools, hospitals and state buildings was a big issue. As one of many counter-actions the army in 1997 opposed the plans of Erbakan to give equal status to the Iman Hatip Lisesi (IHL) as state-run schools. As a result the number of students of IHL dropped from around 500,000 in 1996/7 to around 100,000 in 2004/5. In 1998 Erdogan was condemned to a prison sentence of ten months (released after four) for "inciting religious hatred" and barred from standing in elections and from holding political office. In March 2008 the General State Attorney with the backing of the army was planning to declare the AKP illegal because it was becoming a "point of crystallisation of anti-secular activities" following the ending of the ban on wearing the headscarf at universities. Shortly afterwards the Supreme Court rejected the plan of the State Attorney. Consequently, Erdogan's AKP became all the more determined to trim the power of the army. However, after the split between Gulen and Erdogan there are now even more divisions   between "white and black" Turks, the "Kemalites" and the "religious". In addition the Islamic groups are now divided into two wings. Since the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, all the attempts to "contain" the influence of Islamic forces and their penetration into the state structures have failed; in fact since the 1980's - as elsewhere (for example the rise of the Mujahedeen and Khomeini in Iran at the end of the 70's) - this rise of Islamic fundamentalism of different kinds reflects the more global flight towards an extremely reactionary religious militancy[xiv]. At the same time, with the army having exercised a decade-long iron fist against all oppositional groups (whether Islamic, Kurdish or other) this set up a false polarisation between an army presented as "undemocratic" and opposed to the true "democratic" forces, the AKP, who were no less authoritarian.

Today, the Erdogan clan is running the state as his own company with all the charges of corruption against them long since dropped and those involved in the judicial process around it purged. But behind the Erdogan clan lies a particular form of state totalitarianism, built on reactionary religious exclusion, rabid nationalist speeches and strong imperialist ambitions.

The refugee question manipulated by Turkish imperialism

Again, demonstrating the importance of its geostrategic position, Turkey is also a bridgehead for all the war-torn refugees from the Middle East. But the refugees are also used as a cynical exercise in blackmailing the EU. The EU has been paying large sums to Erdogan-AKP to hold the refugees back and Erdogan has often threatened to "let them go" and head towards Europe. To this end, Turkey has recently demanded another 3 billion euros from Europe by 2018 (Reuters, 16.11.17). The Turkish bourgeoisie has also been profiting from its people-smuggling organisation from Africa to Europe, which also throws a light on Turkey's imperialist aspirations towards the continent. Turkish embassies, consulates, companies and the like have spread across Africa, as have Turkish airlines.  Using cheap, subsidised flights, would-be emigrants can fly from northern and sub-Saharan Africa to Turkey from where they are taken to the borders of Europe with necessary advice[xv] from the organised crime networks that permeate the Turkish state. Several times Erdogan has proposed a visa-free zone for Muslim countries, a sort of "Islamic Schengen" that Europe would see as a serious threat.

Along with Milli Gorus mentioned above, Turkey has a number of "NGO's" that push its imperialist interests. Among these is the "International Humanitarian Organisation" (IHH) that has major health projects in many African countries and is now present in dozens more. Its strengthening has coincided with Erdogan's many trips to Africa and a general build-up of Turkey's "soft" power that goes beyond Africa. The IHH is structured along Muslim Brotherhood "charity work" lines and in fact it contains cadres of the Brotherhood. It was this organisation that, under Erdogan's direction, launched the "Gaza Freedom Flotilla" in 2010 which included elements of the left wing of capital that had no problem in cosying-up to their fellow Islamic fundamentalist crew[xvi]. Most of the medicines that the flotilla was carrying in this imperialist charade had expired before running into the subsequent Israeli blockade.

Turkey's use of soft power extends into its ally Pakistan, where its NGO, Kizilay, has built Ottoman-style mosques close to the Indian border. Erdogan has given his support to Pakistan over Kashmir, and in return the Pakistan regime has facilitated his purge of "Gulenist" elements in the Pak-Turk school chain. Both these countries need each other to stand up for their own interests against the US.

Erdogan strengthens his position and authority

After posing as a "friend" and "peace-maker" to the Kurds, soon after he became head of state Erdogan could no longer keep up the facade due to the electoral success of the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP) which threatened the AKP's parliamentary majority. But his about-face was mainly due to the success of the Kurdish YPG in gaining swathes of territory along the Syrian/Turkish border. Just as the Israeli bourgeoisie would like to be rid of the Palestinians then so too would Turkey with the Kurds. In July 2015 the Turkish military launched a virtual blitzkrieg against Kurdish separatist positions in the south-east, wiping out the wider civilian areas that were sheltering the Kurdish armed fighters.

Following the landslide victory with 49.8% votes for the AKP in 2011, in the June 2014 election this dropped to 40.9%. In addition, for the first time the Kurdish HDP got 13.1% and thus admission to the Turkish parliament. The result meant that Erdogan had not achieved the necessary two-thirds majority needed for changing the constitution. Obsessed with his goal of becoming the "new Sultan" of the neo-Ottoman Empire, Erdogan's AKP ordered the judicial apparatus to begin outlawing the Kurdish HDP. Under the combined effect of state-provoked terror, terrorist attacks from Isis and the PKK, an intimidated population ran into the arms of Erdogan and in the November 2015 election the AKP achieved its necessary majority. Once again repression against the Kurds was reinforced as the party increased its power.

Erdogan strengthened his position by winning the 2017 referendum, changing the Turkish constitution and consolidating broad powers in the hands of his Presidency. Given the loaded nature of the election by the ruling AKP, Erdogan only won by a narrow majority of 51%. It was significant that Turkey's three biggest cities, including Istanbul, voted against him but, according to the Washington Post (17.4.17), he did better than expected among Kurdish voters (most probably terrified by the turn of events). It's not the first narrow escape that Erdogan has had: he also had one during the attempted coup of 2016[xvii]. Erdogan survived the coup stronger and after a Stalinist-type purge that continues to this day: waves of propaganda against "plotters" and "terrorists" have continually emanated from the state while all and any dissent is squashed. In its particular fundamentalist-tinged development of state capitalism, Turkey has moved further away from the European Union; its already shaky role in NATO has become even shakier, unreliable even, and while involved in various diplomatic spats with the US and NATO to the extent of pulling out of exercises with the latter (Times of Israel, 17.11.17), it has moved, tentatively, towards friendlier, almost tactical but very erratic relations with Russia.

Even though presented by the media as the "new Sultan" and Erdogan himself as the architect of the new modern "Islamic Turkey" after Ataturk's "modern (secular) Turkey", and one which differs from the Iranian "model" of a theocratic state, this project is in no way just the ambition of a megalomaniac leader. As mentioned above, it represents the revival of the imperialist ambitions of a Turkey in a fragmenting and increasingly chaotic imperialist nexus. In fact all parts of the ruling class under the AKP have been engaged in these aspirations.

What next for Turkey and the working class?

Erdogan is pressing ahead with his project with very openly defined ambitions to make Turkey a superpower in 20-30 years. That this appears a hare-brained scheme takes no account of the present irrationality of decomposing capitalism. For this new "Sultanate" to come about the "Kurdish question" needs settling once and for all and relations with Russia need to become closer. As his power has increased, Erdogan has moved away from NATO, distanced himself from the EU and Germany and sees the US as an unfriendly force. Turkey is not in a state of declared war but is engulfed in war operations outside of its own territory and is more and more the battleground with those groups which the Turkish army has attacked within or outside Turkey (PKK, Isis); the country itself now risks sliding into a spiral of militarist chaos while surrounded by millions of refugees and general imperialist instability.

There are some unpredictable factors in play though. Given the nature of present US foreign policy under Trump, the increasing tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran and its backlash against Lebanon, the possibility of Israeli military strikes in the region, all these are factors that are likely to have an effect on areas of fundamental Turkish interests: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon[xviii], Gaza, etc.

The impressive economic performance of the last years in Turkey, which underpins Erdogan's "popularity", looks to be short-term and under threat from geo-political instability, which means that this advantage will be petering out at the same time as the emigration safety-valve is closing and debt is rising. No amount of religious intoxication and delusions about a new "empire" will make up for that. The weight of the war economy, which swallows up enormous sums, is also likely to have an effect on the living conditions of the working class. The Gezi Park demonstrations in 2013 followed a wave of anti-war and anti-government demonstrations in the south that brought together protesters across ethnic, gender and religious divides in places. The working class was present in these protests but not with a strong sense of class identity. Is the proletariat prepared to slave and die for Erdogan's projects? The working class in Turkey has shown historically that it has a sound tradition of struggle and has pursued it with militancy. It needs to stay on its own terrain and develop autonomous struggle, refusing to be drawn into nationalist and pro or anti-Erdogan campaigns.

Boxer, 25.11.17

ICC DAY OF DISCUSSION ON THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

LONDON

11 NOVEMBER 2017

The following account consists of the presentations given by the CWO and the ICC, and the summaries of the discussion produced by two close sympathisers of the ICC. We hope it gives a clear enough picture of what was a very stimulating and positive meeting. Copies of the audio recording are available on request (write to [email protected] [127])

MORNING SESSION

INTRODUCTION

ICC: Welcome to one of a series of ICC meetings being held on this topic. Meetings are to be held in Berlin, Zurich, Antwerp, Paris and other places. One difference in this meeting is that one presentation will be made by the Communist Workers’ Organisation. Both organisations defend the proletarian character of 1917. 20 years ago there was a similar meeting defending the proletarian nature of 1917. There will be plenty of time for open discussion, we expect agreement and disagreements, but in a comradely manner.

PRESENTATION BY THE CWO:

On the Working Class Character of the Russian Revolution

“On the evening of October 24th [6 November new style] the Provisional Government had at its disposal little more than 25,000 men. On the evening of October 25th, when preparations were underway for the storming of the Winter Palace, the Bolsheviks assembled about 20,000 Red Guards, sailors and soldiers before that last refuge of the Provisional Government. But within the palace there were not more than 3000 defenders, and many of those left their posts during the night. Thanks to the Bolsheviks’ overwhelming superiority there were no serious battles in the capital from October 24th to October 26th, and the total number of those killed on both sides was no more than 15, with no more than 60 wounded.

During these critical hours, as all the main strategic points in the city passed under Bolshevik control (telephone and telegraph exchanges, bridges, railroad stations, the Winter Palace etc.), Petrograd continued on the whole to go about its normal business.  Most of the soldiers remained in the barracks, the plants and the factories continued to operate, and in the schools none of the classes were interrupted.  There were no strikes or mass demonstrations such had accompanied the February Revolution. The movie theatres (called cinematographias in those days) were filled, there were regular performances in all the theatres, and people strolled as usual on the Nevsky Prospect. The ordinary non-political person would not even have noticed the historic events taking place; even on the streetcar lines, the main form of public transportation in 1917, service remained normal. It was in one of those streetcars that Lenin, in disguise, and his bodyguard Eino Rahya travelled to Smolny late on the evening of the 24th.”

Such was the picture painted by the Soviet dissident historian Roy Medvedev and you can find similar accounts in Trotsky and John Reed.  The lack of drama and the apparently merely military takeover have fed a bourgeois lie which has now endured for a century that the October Revolution was simply a coup d’état by a band of ruthless adventurers who stole a democratic revolution from the working class.  Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the capitalist class, not to mention modern-day Mensheviks and some anarchists all over the world, still feel they have to perpetuate this myth.  And of course the final coda years later in Stalinism is also be put down as the logical outcome of the actions of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in October 1917.

Of course they all have their different ideological reasons for writing off the Russian Revolution.  For the defenders of the capitalist order, dismissing the only time the working class anywhere was in the saddle in any capitalist state for any length of time as a coup, is essential in order to maintain the idea that the working class can never successfully overthrow the capitalist system.

Before we go any further we need to state two premises on which the CWO and others in the Communist Left base their views.  The first is that socialism is not something that can be achieved by a minority but only by an active movement involving the mass of the people who alone can transform society by their own activity instead of being merely passive voters expecting someone else to rule them.  The second premise is that the Russian revolution cannot be explained only in Russian terms but as the first step in an international challenge to a capitalist system which had brought humanity to its knees in an imperialist war.  The Russian and other revolutionaries at the time like Rosa Luxemburg all saw that the problem of socialism could only be posed in Russia – it required revolutions everywhere else to answer the question.

As it is the tragedy of the Russian Revolution is that the force created by the working class in 1917 in the Bolshevik Party not only helped to bring it victory but that same force also later became the agent of the counter-revolution.  However, we will be looking at the errors of the Revolution and the mistakes of the Bolsheviks in this afternoon’s session.  We have been tasked in this session with looking at the facts of 1917 and establishing the proletarian nature of the Russia Revolution.

In this we will be addressing two basic lies:

1. That the October Revolution was just a coup; and
2. That the Bolsheviks were only in favour of the power of workers’ bodies like soviets and factory committees for their own ends and stifled them as soon as they came to power.

The first lie that bourgeois histories try to perpetuate about 1917 is that the February Revolution was good and democratic and the October Revolution was bad and dictatorial.  In fact we would argue that these were but two moments in the same process – the process of the Russian proletariat groping its way towards an entirely new political structure which they had discovered for themselves in their earlier revolution in 1905.  February was not a “democratic revolution” but a proletarian one which the bourgeoisie and their allies in the working class tried to steal from the workers.

February to April

The February Revolution arose out of the elemental struggle of the Russian working class.  It was as predicted as it was unexpected. 

The prediction was easily made since three years of war had revealed the complete inability of a reactionary monarchy to muster what resources the state had to even properly clothe and arm the millions they sent into battle.  The monarchy had been tottering under a crescendo of strikes from 1912 on.  The declaration of war brought a temporary halt to these for about a year but from July 1915 they were on the rise again.  Every workers’ anniversary brought more strikes and more and more strikes included political demands like “Down with the war”.  However it was the inability of the regime to feed the population that led to the patience of the working class finally snapping.

Then unexpected was that no-one thought that a women’s demonstration at that time would be the spark.  Women at first started bread riots and then on International Women’s Day came out on strike bringing hundreds of thousands of other workers out too in demonstrations attacked by the police with clubs.  No-one died the first day but as the movement continued political groups joined in and brought out more factories.  The regime suddenly realised the danger and now began firing on largely unarmed crowds.  For 36 hours the issue hung in the balance but as more and more were killed the workers (again most often women) began to talk to the troops and win over their neutrality to the point where several regiments mutinied and came over to the revolution.

After a week or so the Tsar abdicated but not before the landed aristocracy, the industrialists and the propertied in general had realised that they needed to try to cut this revolution off by announcing the formation of a Provisional Government.

Whilst they were deciding the fate of the revolution in gilded salons the workers were still fighting the “pharaohs” (police) on the streets.  In one demonstration the call went up for the formation of a soviet.  The takeover attempt of the bourgeoisie was about to be challenged by the workers’ memory of 1905.  However if one set of thieves is not enough Russia produced two in March 1917. The second were the left parties – the Mensheviks and SRs.  Because they had cooperated with the war effort they had more political influence at first and so it was they who set up the soviet in the same building as the PG and quickly called for delegates.  The most revolutionary workers were not even aware of it and in fact the first soviet was very unrepresentative as many more soldiers got in than workers.  In fact Shlyapnikov reckoned that there were no more than 50 workers in it when it was formed.

This is important.  In every proletarian revolution there is not just one enemy – the opposing class – but there is always within the working class itself anti-revolutionary elements who will insist that this is not the right time for the working class to take over.  They may even have a lot of influence inside the working class since their promise of reforms seems a practicable way to make life just a little better.  Unless there is an opposing voice inside the working class then the dominant ideas will be those for the preservation of the system. 

Inside the Russian working class there was already the makings of a real revolutionary opposition.  At the beginning it included anarchists, Inter-district committee (Mezhraionsty) members and even some radical SRs but the largest, best organised and most linked to the working class was the Bolsheviks.  Although a minority of about 8000 in March 1917 it was overwhelmingly working class.  Above all it was the one party which had a clear position on the war.

After February the class war intensified in the factories and in the villages. In the factories the class war intensified after February.  Unions were formed and demands for the eight hour day increased.   Organisationally though the unions were not the most significant new bodies.  The most striking feature was the increase in the number and self-confidence of the factory committees.  Many of these were based on an older tradition of stewards’ (starosty) committees and were mostly elected by the whole workforce with responsibility for “control” (which, except for the state’s war industry factories, meant supervision and inspection – at this point they did not aim to manage the factory).  S.A. Smith compares them to the shop stewards committees on Red Clydeside and Sheffield, the obleute (revolutionary shop stewards in Germany and the “internal commissions” in Italy.  (S.A. Smith Red Petrograd p.57-9). 

Food prices were doubling approximately every other month during 1917 and the fact that the Provisional Government was even worse at solving the transport question than Tsarism meant that bread rations were cut from 1lb a day to three quarters of a pound by April.  Worse was to come since only 230 rail wagons containing food reached St Petersburg/ Petrograd each day in April 1917, compared with a daily total of 351 a year earlier.  Only one third of coal needs were reaching the capital by May and works like Putilov were closed down for weeks on end in August and September. In addition to these temporary closures 568 factories went bankrupt leading to increased unemployment.  Not surprisingly this led to a massive increase in strikes as we saw in the previous chapter.  These radicalised the workers still further.  As the leading academic analyst of these strikes concluded:

“The strikes which swept Russia in the summer of 1917 had more than an economic significance.  They were a sign of political disillusionment – a reflection of the fact that workers felt cheated of the gains they had made as a result of the February Revolution”.  (S.A. Smith Red Petrograd p.119 – all figures here stem from this source or from M. Ferro The Bolshevik Revolution – A Social History p. 160ff)           

In addition the Provisional Government could not or would not solve the two other desperate problems of Russia – peace and land.

And this is what makes the Bolsheviks the class party in 1917. But it was not a given in March 1917.  Contrary to the myths of both Stalin and the capitalist historians the Bolsheviks were never a disciplined bunch who just blindly followed orders from on high.  They were always full of different factions who debated fiercely amongst themselves.  This was still true after February. At first Pravda (Truth) the Bolshevik paper under the control of the Petersburg committee campaigned against the war and was distinctly hostile to the Provisional Government as well as the Menshevik policy of cooperating with it. However when Stalin, Kameniev and Muranov returned from Siberian exile they took over the paper and suddenly it was talking like the Mensheviks in supporting the Provisional Government and even talking about carrying on the war.  But these Central Committee members were totally out of touch with the Petersburg Bolshevik Party members who were outraged and demanded their expulsion from the Party.

This was the background to Lenin’s famous return from Switzerland in April where he not only gave voice to the views of the Bolshevik workers but also put it in an internationalist framework by announcing that the Russian Revolution was the first step in an international revolution and that the first task of the workers was to establish soviet power in Russia.

It took several weeks for Lenin’s April Theses to win over the majority of the Party but it now was clear as to its perspectives for 1917.

The July Days

The number of strikes continued to increase despite the Provisional Government and the Menshevik/Essaire (SR) majority in the Soviet attempting to calm them.  However the political scene exploded once again when the leader of the bourgeois party the Kadets in the Provisional Government issued his Note to the Allied powers assuring them that Russia would stick to the imperialist bargain the Tsar had made with them and that the war would be fought to victory.  The uproar from the workers caused Milyukov to resign and it also emboldened the Bolsheviks to plan a demonstration against the Provisional Government in June.  The rest of the Soviet Executive protested at what they saw as a Bolshevik provocation and the Bolsheviks called the demonstration off. However the Mensheviks and SRs then thought to drive home their victory by calling their own demonstration in support of the Provisional Government and themselves.  It backfired magnificently.  The Menshevik Sukhanov tells us that of the banners carried in that demonstration 90% carried Bolshevik slogans like “Down with the Provisional Government” “All Power to the Soviets”.  The demonstration also coincided with the news that the offensive of General Brusilov after initial successes had collapsed into humiliating retreat.

These events led some in the First Machine Gun Regiment, amongst the anarchists, Kronstadt sailors and even in the Bosheviks’ Military Organisation to conclude that “All Power to the Soviets” was more than just a slogan of orientation but one whose time had come.

They decided that the time was now ripe for an armed demonstration in Petersburg which has gone down in history as the July Days.  This episode is often cited by reactionary historians like Pipes to show that the Bolsheviks were putschist and got it wrong; but in fact, it demonstrates that the Bolsheviks were neither putschists nor Blanquists because they refused to support a premature uprising which did not yet have the support of the majority.  Lenin was actually on holiday when the July Days started and hurried back to Petersburg – addressing the demonstrators from the Bolshevik HQ he basically told them not to be provoked and have a pleasant demonstration, but told the leader of the Bolshevik Military Organisation that he ought to be “thrashed” for not preventing the movement.   The demonstrators ignored Lenin and marched on the city centre only to be ambushed by soldiers loyal to the PG.  Hundreds died and the PG now spread the rumour that the Bolsheviks were in the pay of the Germans. The Bolsheviks were declared an illegal organisation.  It cost them at first because they accepted that those who demonstrated did so out of a mistaken reading of their policy (the Bolshevik press was smashed, some Bolsheviks were killed, others imprisoned and some fled to exile) but by remaining with the masses they held on to their base in the working class. Lenin justified it thus:

“Mistakes are inevitable when the masses are fighting but the communists remain with the masses, see these mistakes, explain them to the masses, try to get them rectified and strive perseveringly for the victory of class consciousness over spontaneity”. (Collected Works Volume 29, p. 396 emphasis in the original)

Remaining with the masses was to stand them in good stead a month later because by August society was splitting further and further into two class camps.  In July Kerensky, an SR, became Prime Minister, but after the outlawing of the Bolsheviks the bourgeois right were now becoming more confident and they looked for a strong man to not only wipe out the Bolsheviks but get rid of the Soviets as well.  They found this in General Lavr Kornilov who Kerensky appointed to be C-in-C after Brusilov.

August: the Kornilov Affair

“In previous crises, in April, June and July, the spontaneous initiatives of Bolshevik and anarchist soldiers had caused street demonstrations. The leading elements in the Bolshevik Party had been forced, in the end, to assume responsibility for a movement launched by the young men of the military organisation. As the cinema films show, there were considerably fewer workers than soldiers or sailors.

In the Kornilov affair, when the action was defensive, the reverse happened. The proletarian districts were the first to mobilise, recruiting 40,000 men and arming 25,000 from the factories through their committees or from weapons left by the Kronstadt sailors during the July Days ... Under the leadership of the Bolshevik Skorokhodov, this committee co-ordinated its actions with the other committees of the capital, planning for cars to go round to maintain communication, guarding factories, arranging information briefings at set times and the like ...  The people were mentally prepared, and the means for defence were made available, such that when the organisations appealed, every citizen, tree, house and stone was set to oppose the advance of Kornilov, whose telegrams failed to arrive and whose locomotives got no water. The ground crumbled under his feet.”

(Marc Ferro, The Bolshevik Revolution — A Social History (1980), p. 56)

What was clear was that the Kornilov Affair had led to an enormous leap forward in class consciousness:

“The soviets, now distinctly radical in outlook, emerged from the crisis with their popularity amongst the masses immensely enhanced. Revolutionary Russia was more widely saturated than ever before with competing grassroots political organisations and revolutionary committees. Workers had become more militant and better organized, and significant numbers of them had obtained weapons. At the same time, democratic committees in the army, by virtue of their leading role in organizing soldiers against the Kornilov movement, were rejuvenated. Within the Petrograd garrison, control of many regimental committees passed from more moderate elements into the hands of the Bolsheviks”. (A. Rabinowitch The Bolsheviks Come to Power p.166)

Far from taking advantage of this to assert the Bolsheviks right to power Lenin raised the possibility that there could still be a peaceful development of the revolution if the Mensheviks and SRs would lead the soviets in the process of taking power.  At the beginning of September he called for compromise.

“The Russian revolution is experiencing so abrupt and original a turn that we, as a party, may offer a voluntary compromise – true, not to our direct and main class enemy the bourgeoisie, but to our nearest adversaries, the ruling petty-bourgeois-democratic parties, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks.

We may offer a compromise to these parties only by way of exception, and only by virtue of the particular situation, which obviously last only a very short time.  And I think we should do so.  The compromise on our part is our return to the pre-July demand of all power to the Soviets and a government of SRs and Mensheviks responsible to the Soviets.

Now, and only now, perhaps during only a few days or a week or two, such a government could be set up and consolidated in a perfectly peaceful way.  In all probability it could secure the peaceful advance of the whole Russian revolution, and provide exceptionally good chances for great strides in the world movement towards peace and the victory of socialism”.  (On Compromises in Collected Works Vol. 25 p. 206 emphasis in the original)

This is hardly the picture of the power-mad vanguard partyist that bourgeois and anarchist histories paint.  Lenin does not demand Bolshevik party power but soviet power even if they are headed by the Mensheviks and SRs.  It was no isolated offer. He repeated the idea of a peaceful development of the revolution a fortnight later.

“Power to the Soviets – this is the only way to make further progress gradual, peaceful and smooth keeping perfect pace with the political awareness and resolve of the majority of the people and with their own experience.  Power to the Soviets means the complete transfer of the country’s administration and economic control into the hands of the workers and peasants, to whom nobody dare offer resistance, and who, through practice, through their own experience, would soon learn how to distribute the land, products and grain properly”. (One of the Fundamental Questions of the Revolution in Collected Works Vol 25 pp 373 emphases in the original)

But the Mensheviks and SRs not only rejected any compromise - they rejected the whole idea of soviet power and did all they could to undermine it after Kornilov.  They always regarded the soviets as temporary until the Constituent Assembly (which would then liquidate them). In fact they delayed the calling of the Second Soviet Congress (they were supposed to be called every 3 months) by nearly two months to avoid the Bolshevik majority replacing them as the EC.

By September the Bolsheviks are winning elections in most soviets and even in city dumas where other classes also can vote.  They were now some 350,000 spread across Russia.  Why were they so successful? They answered to the working class demand for soviet power and the promised that they would end the war.  They were the only organisation to coherently offer this. This wasn’t just fancy theory dreamed up by intellectuals but responded to the evolution of the class consciousness of the Russian working class. John Reed tells us that in a Obukhovsky factory a meeting was discussing the seizure of power and a soldier from the Rumanian front shouted out: “We will hold on with all our might until the peoples of the whole world rise to help us”. And Rosa Luxemburg from her prison cell could also write: “The fact that the Bolsheviks in their policy have steered their course entirely towards the world revolution of the proletariat is precisely the most brilliant testimony to their political far-sightedness, their principled firmness and the bold scope of their policy”. This internationalist perspective continued even after the October Revolution. Trotsky, Bukharin, and Lenin all said on numerous occasions that without a European or at least a German revolution the Soviet republic was doomed. The final accusation against the Bolsheviks is that they only pretended that they supported the working class but as soon as they got in power they began to build up party power at the expense of the workers.  This is a travesty of the facts.  Obviously in the end we all know that the Bolsheviks became the agents of the counter-revolution but this was neither premeditated nor inevitable and the process of degeneration really only began in the early summer of 1918. Let’s look at their record in that first “heroic period” (Kritsman) of the revolution before March 1918. The Second Soviet Congress overwhelmingly accepted the power presented to it by the Bolsheviks and the Executive Committee approved the setting up of a Council of Peoples’ Commissars (Sovnarkom), made up of Bolsheviks and Left SRs (although the latter did not take up their seats until December.  All other parties walked out of the Soviet and refused to accept anything other than a return to a coalition with the bourgeoisie. The new government announced Russia’s withdrawal from the war.  It legalised peasant land seizures and workers’ control in the factories.  Officials were paid only the average wage of a skilled industrial worker.  Laws brought in equal pay for women, divorce at the request of either partner, abortion and equal status for children of unmarried parents. Homosexuality was decriminalised.  Church and State were separated and freedom of religion was established (thus ending the legal oppression of Jews). Other social achievements were the introduction of free education (alongside a mass literacy campaign), free maternity homes and nurseries. And “Soviet Russia was the first nation in history to witness the birth across its land of thousands of communal organizations spontaneously engaging in collective life” (R, Stites Revolutionary Dreams) Nationalities of the old Russian empire were given the right to self-determination. Most of this took place in the first six months of the revolution.  During this time the soviet principle was extended.  400 or so more soviets were established across Russia, the principle of immediate recall of delegates was established and Congresses of Soviets were taking place every three months.  In this same period the Bolsheviks (soon to take the name Communists) understood that the party can lead but it cannot make a revolution.  This is the task of the working class itself.  Lenin told the Seventh Congress of the RCP(B) “… socialism cannot be implemented by a minority, by the Party.  It can be implemented only by tens of millions when they have learned to do it for themselves”. (Collected Works Volume 27 p. 135)

At the time Lenin was equally adamant:

“Creative activity at the grassroots is the basic factor of the new public life.  Let the workers’ control at their factories. Let them supply the villages with manufactures in exchange for grain… Socialism cannot be decreed from above.  Its spirit rejects the mechanical bureaucratic approach: living creative socialism is the product of the masses themselves.” (Collected Works Vol. 26 p.288) To sum up, the Bolshevik Party of 1917 did not spring from the pages of What is to be Done?, a document forgotten by everyone including its author as belonging to a past period and no longer valid, but from the process of revolution itself starting with that in 1905. In the course of this revolutionary process the Bolsheviks were always the closest to the working class, both in Russia and internationally, and in the course of it, they alone of all the social democratic factions, abandoned dogma to become the authentic voice of the working class.  And this was not in just a Russian revolution but in the international working class revolution.  We know that this revolution will not be repeated in the same form again but October 1917 remains a great inspiration for anyone who can see that only world-wide workers’ revolution can save humanity from the even greater horrors which capitalism is preparing for us. Jock for the CWO

DISCUSSION

Was October a soviet revolution or a coup by the Bolsheviks?

This was posed by a comrade from the SPGB which defends the latter position.

In response, firstly the Russian Revolution is the entry of the masses onto the stage of history; revolutionaries had to run to catch up. The presentation showed clearly that the Russian revolution was not a coup d'etat. This simply doesn’t correspond to reality; there was a massive development of the movement from February to October, which is what enabled the seizure of power through the actions of a relative minority, but one organised by the soviets. 

All the bourgeois propaganda pushes the idea of a coup by Bolsheviks and we have to challenge this; there was a huge development of self-organisation, much more directed and focused than in February. The fact is the Bolsheviks were the most experienced militants – otherwise the leadership would have been taken by others like the Mensheviks, and the provisional government was already extremely unrepresentative.

It was emphasised that we’re not required to defend everything that happened in Russia, or everything the Bolsheviks did, but at least to begin with they were representative of the working class, the rank and file Bolsheviks being the most militant. The Bolsheviks took up slogans raised by the class as a whole. The ability of Lenin in particular to learn from the masses, and to learn from mistakes, was crucial.

We also have to challenge the idea that the Russian Revolution is in the past and has nothing to do with today. Today people don’t think a revolt is possible and we need to stress that the working class is capable of organising and envisaging a new world. Despite the treason of social democracy in 1914 which caused a temporary crisis in the workers’ movement, the fact is the war meant the working class had to react, just as it is forced to react by the crisis today.

There was some discussion about the extent of enthusiasm for war in1914; it was argued that many militant workers remained anti-war, like the French syndicalists, Rosa Luxemburg and the future Spartacists in Germany. Other comrades stressed the extent of the patriotic orgy, described vividly by Rosa Luxemburg in the Junius Pamphlet. But despite the defeat the working class quickly recovered, with strikes and opposition movements less than a year after war began.

So the events in Russia were the culmination of the growth of resistance to the war internationally, which the Bolsheviks were able to recognise as a first step towards a world revolution. The war itself was brought to an end by the working class.

In 1914 the effects of defeat were short-lived. Bourgeois propaganda was simplistic and workers still had a clear sense of their class identity, whereas World War 2 was only possible because the working class was already defeated and bourgeois ideology was more sophisticated.

Today the conditions are very difficult for the working class, with demoralisation and widespread ideas that the working class doesn’t exist anymore. There are widespread ideas that communism has already failed and only leads to the gulag and Stalinism. This is a very strong factor in today’s situation.

But for us Russia is still the only example in history when the working class seized political power on a national scale, only three years after workers were drowned in nationalism and war. For us today, and for the Third International at the time, the war and the revolutionary wave were proof that capitalism was obsolete and in decline. As Rosa Luxemburg warned, capitalism had become not only a fetter but a clear and present danger to the future of humanity. The Russian Revolution is proof the working class can respond to this.

How the bourgeoisie is covering the events

It is significant that the bourgeoisie is not making a big campaign today about the Russian Revolution. It shows despite the difficulties of today’s situation the bourgeoisie does not feel confident about the whole idea of revolution.

There is also clear attempt to portray the Russian Revolution as particular to Russia. We need to challenge this. Capitalism today is still a decadent system.

Most bourgeois histories abandon all objectivity when it comes to the events of October; it was a ‘coup’. Today many in the proletarian camp, who want a social change, also accept this bourgeois narrative of the ‘alien’ Bolsheviks. TV ‘reconstructions’ show key figures but with little or no mention of the masses. Everything is personalised, eg. the July Days is explained as Lenin ‘bottling it’. This is the level of understanding, whereas in fact Trotsky had a whole analysis of why the workers weren’t ready, which allowed the Bolsheviks to avoid bourgeois provocations – thus disproving the myth that they were simply ‘power hungry’, whereas in Germany the Spartacists fell into the trap and suffered a terrible defeat. The lesson for us is the necessity for a party that can speak truth to the workers.

The question of the war – defeat for the working class and the internationalism of the Bolsheviks

A Trotskyist sympathiser raised two questions: on the role of the peasantry, which the presentation had not dealt with, and on the role the Bolsheviks were able to play which supports the idea that there must be at least a nucleus of experienced militants before the revolution; the massive growth of the Bolsheviks during summer 1917 of inexperienced members and the later ‘Lenin levy’ helped to destroy the Party.

On the role of the peasantry; the peasants deserted the front and slowly took over the land, often collectively, and with Bolshevik support when the Socialist Revolutionaries still in government opposed it.

There was no disagreement with the need for a nucleus of the party in the class if the workers are to make the revolution. The Bolsheviks had a solid mass of workers in Petrograd able to survive arrests.

The Bolsheviks were able to play a leading role in 1917 partly because of position they took against the war; ‘turn imperialist war into civil war’…  Their loyalty to internationalism was key and ‘Socialism in one country’ was the death of this. The Bolshevik position was ‘Down with the war’; revolutionary defeatism was not active until 1917 when defencism was seen to be the key issue.

It was pointed out also that the bourgeois parties in Russia were pro-war because Russian capitalism was in hock to French and British capitalism. The factories in Russia were run under foreign contracts, while the factory committees were key to the political opposition to the factory owners, the Czar and the war.  

The February Revolution – bourgeois or proletarian?

Were the workers simply used as a battering ram to get rid of the Czar and put the bourgeoisie in power? This was the view of the comrade from the SPGB

In response, the reality was that the bourgeoisie had no power – it passed to the Petrograd soviet. The fiction of a bourgeois revolution was pushed by the Mensheviks and SRs. It was the workers who made the February revolution but it remained unfinished business. We have to see the Russian Revolution as a process rather than isolate events as the bourgeoisie does in its propaganda; the return of Lenin, April Theses, July Days, October.

The anarchist interpretation of events – the role of the Bolsheviks and the factory committees

A comrade from a class struggle anarchist background said he regretted the absence of more from this political current at the meeting to put up a robust argument against the Bolsheviks.

He personally agreed with the ICC manifesto and the CWO presentation and with the discussion. But while the Bolsheviks were the most popular organisation within the working class he also felt they were also inherently authoritarian and statist.

The factory committees were the most important and militant expressions of the revolution in Russia. Re: the book by Maurice Brinton (The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, 1975), isn’t he right when he says that the Bolsheviks tried to crush factory committees?

In response it was pointed out that the Bolsheviks were divided over the factory committees – in fact the factory committees themselves were divided about their role! Some wanted workers control or workers’ self-management while others said there is no point: we should wait for the world revolution. Lenin thought the factory committees should run the economy on the principle that that socialism cannot be controlled from above. But he later changed his mind.

With hindsight we know how the story ends but we can’t draw a straight line from What Is To Be Done to Stalin. The Bolsheviks and Lenin changed their views due to the events of 1905 and, most importantly, the First World War. The Bolsheviks were from October 1917 to June 1918 were about as good as the working class can get. They were made by the working class and not something imposed from above.  

END OF MORNING SESSION

AFTERNOON SESSION

PRESENTATION BY THE ICC

On the degeneration of the revolution

This presentation will be based mainly on the section in the Manifesto which deals with the degeneration of the revolution and the errors of the Bolsheviks. This section begins as a polemic with other currents in the revolutionary movement: internationalist anarchists and councilists, whose ancestors may have supported the revolution in the beginning, but who later decided that October 1917 had been no more than a bourgeois revolution – in which they are joined by the Socialist Party of Great Britain. For us it is necessary to face a reality of proletarian life under capitalism: the constant tendency towards degeneration and betrayal under the weight of the dominant ideas. Those who portray the Russian revolution as bourgeois evade this question. It is perhaps more ‘consistent’ on the part of the anarchists, some of whom have always rejected Marxism and trace their origins to the likes of Bakunin, but with marxist currents like the council communists or the ‘Impossibilists’ of the SPGB, it skirts round the obvious fact that they, like the Bolsheviks, have the same origins in international social democracy.  Our method is that of Rosa Luxemburg, and later of the Italian Communist left, who were able to make profound criticisms of the Bolshevik party from a position of total solidarity with the Russian revolution and the Bolsheviks, and who understood that the errors of the latter could only be understood in the context of the isolation of the revolution. Situating the October revolution and its degeneration in the framework of isolation and the terrible siege mounted by the world bourgeoisie is not, as many anarchists claim, an ‘excuse’ for the errors of the Bolsheviks, but it does enable us to understand why a proletarian party could make such errors and why they were to prove so fatal.  The key thing for us is to draw the lessons of these mistakes so that they are not repeated, even if the conditions of any future revolution will be very far from a carbon copy of the Russian experience. These are lessons that could only be drawn in the light of the whole experience, and could not have been fully grasped beforehand. Thus, for example, in State and Revolution Lenin was able to overcome the ‘amnesia’ of the socialist movement regarding the lessons of the Commune – the necessity to dismantle the existing bourgeois state – but he could not yet clearly see why the new Commune state would itself present a danger to the progress of the revolution.  The Manifesto points to the following essential lessons:  

·         The absolute necessity for the extension of the revolution. This of course was understood already by the Bolsheviks who knew that without the world revolution they were doomed, but they couldn’t know entirely the manner in which this doom would take place. The Bolsheviks’ main fear was that they would be overthrown by invading (and homegrown) counter-revolutionary armies: they didn’t sufficiently grasp the danger of an internal counter-revolution. Furthermore, recognising the impossibility of ‘socialism in one country’ was necessary but not sufficient. Contrary to the later views of the Trotskyists, even when they were still a proletarian current, there could not be ‘workers’ states’, albeit degenerated, surviving in a capitalist world for decades. Isolation meant not only that you couldn’t construct socialism: it also meant that you could not sustain the political rule of the working class.

·          What was definitively clarified by the Russian experience was that the role of the party is not to take political power on behalf of the workers, and not to get entangled with the state apparatus. This idea of the party as a “government in waiting” was to a greater or lesser extent held by the Marxist movement in general, not just by the Bolsheviks: Luxemburg for example declared that the Spartacists would only take power on the basis of a clear majority will in the working class. But even this idea shows the weight of parliamentary ideas on the workers’ movement: the council system, with the possibility of instant recall of delegates, is incompatible with the idea of the party holding power for a given period since a majority one day could turn into a minority the next. The Bolsheviks were themselves ambiguous on this question: Trotsky, for example, saw why the October insurrection should be carried out in the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee, a soviet organ, and not the party, as Lenin had at one point suggested. But with the isolation of the revolution and the disintegration of any idea of a “coalition” with other revolutionary parties, the Bolsheviks began to make a virtue out of a necessity and argue for the inevitability of the proletarian dictatorship being exerted by the communist party alone. These conceptions reinforced the gulf between the party and the class, while at the same time the attempt to run the machinery of state prohibited the party from playing its true role as the most radical fraction of the class movement and culminated in the bureaucratic death of the party.

·          This idea of the party dictatorship is closely linked to the question of violence, terror, and, in the end, the problem of morality: the revolution cannot be advanced by using methods that contradict its goals. For the working class, the end cannot justify the means. Socialism cannot be carried out by a minority – as Lenin constantly emphasised in the early phase of the revolution – and still less can it be imposed on the majority by force. We are with Luxemburg who argued that the idea of the Red Terror, understood as generalised state violence against all sectors of the population, was incompatible with the revolutionary project, and with Miasnikov who understood that the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt in 1921 opened the door to “the abyss”. In the wake of Kronstadt, the rejection of the use of violence to settle disputes within the working class must be seen as a principle. The idea that the revolution can use any means at hand to further its ends is most often associated with counter-revolutionary Stalinism – for whom the methods of terror are perfectly compatible with its real aim: the consolidation of a brutal capitalist regime.  But the notion that the party must exert its dictatorship on behalf of and if necessary against the class as a whole lives on in the proletarian camp: it is defended by the Bordigists above all. But present day Bordigism has only arrived at this position by burying the real contribution of the Italian communist left from which it claims descent, since the latter’s investigations led it to recognise first that the party cannot use violence against the class and must not become enmeshed in the transitional state; and second, particularly through the work of its successors in the French communist left, to explicitly reject the identification between the proletarian dictatorship and the dictatorship of the party;

·          The work of these fractions has led the ICC to a position which is controversial even within those parts of the communist left which reject the Bordigist idea of the party’s role: that the transitional state, though a necessary evil, does not have a proletarian character and is most vulnerable to the pressures of the counter-revolution. The experience of Russia showed that it may be necessary to create instruments (such as a standing army) which have a definitely statist function and which contain an inherent threat to the autonomous organs of the working class. In Russia, the Red Army not only quickly began to reproduce the hierarchical norms of bourgeois armies, but even more crucially, was accompanied by the dissolution of the workers’ militias, which meant that the factory committees and workers’ councils no longer embodied the armament of the working class. At the same time, the Soviet state was not only made up of proletarian organs, but also by the representative bodies of other classes, which, although allied to the working class, nevertheless had their own interests to defend. These problems will not appear in exactly the same form in the future, given the changes that have come about in the composition of the global working class, but in essence they will continue to be posed in any revolutionary situation.

·          Regarding the economic and social measures to be carried out by the proletarian power, the Russian revolution has demonstrated that state capitalism is not a step towards socialism, as some of the Bolsheviks believed, but is always a means for strengthening the capitalist relationship. At the same time, the programme of self-management, the creation of a federation of ‘independent’ production units linked by commodity exchange, as advocated by the anarcho-syndicalists of the time and further theorised by the likes of Cornelius Castoriadis, also fails to transcend the horizon of capitalist relations and, like state capitalism, is seen as being achievable within the context of a single nation state. Again, the economic measures the proletariat takes in the first phases of the revolution must be compatible with the ultimate goal of communism, but at the same time they cannot be confused with the true communist transformation which can only be achieved when the revolution has triumphed on a world scale. For this reason our polemic is also directed against another current which is critical of both the state capitalist and self-management models: the “communisers”, who tend to revive old anarchist conceptions by arguing that you can by-pass the problem of political power and proceed to an immediate communisation of social life. This again tends to evade the problem of the international extension of the revolution. But above all, it inverses the real process of the communist transformation by insisting that the proletariat must immediately negate itself and merge into humanity, whereas the new human community starts with the self-affirmation of the proletariat and is completed when the whole of humanity has been integrated into the proletarian condition. This is the only abolition of the proletariat that communists can advocate.

In many ways, the problem of the self-affirmation of the proletariat is the central problem of the revolution, above all after a series of traumas and changes in the life of capital have undermined the old sense of class identity but not replaced it with a new one. This problem was in many ways posed during the Indignados movement in Spain in 2011,  a movement which was predominantly proletarian in composition, and proletarian in many of its methods (assemblies,  affirmation of internationalism, etc), but in which most of its protagonists saw themselves not as part of the working class but as “citizens” demanding a “real democracy”.   The class struggle of the future will only become explicitly revolutionary and communist by resolving this paradox.

Alf, for the ICC

DISCUSSION

The essential content of the discussion on the disintegration of the Russian Revolution (RR) is in fact embedded in the presentation on this issue: the isolation of the RR due to the defeat of attempts to extend it through revolutionary action in other countries (notably Germany) and the exhaustion of the workers, soldiers and revolutionary layers of the peasantry through invasion and civil war, leading to a real decimation of revolutionary forces and a political degeneration accelerated by errors and erroneous conceptions held by the class as a whole and the Bolshevik Party in particular. Similarly the present-day conceptions of the ‘communisers’, also raised in the discussion, are dealt with in the presentation (and continued in the discussion thread on this site https://en.internationalism.org/forum/1056/mark/14433/working-class-identity [161]

Other issues raised included:

Was the very conception of a communist bastion or beacon a hangover from the bourgeois revolution? Absolutely not. ‘History will not forgive us if we don’t act’ said Lenin, in 1917 understanding (and even under-estimating) the international extent and depth of revolt against war, privation and the ruling classes held responsible. The revolution was indeed an inspiration to the subsequent uprisings in Germany, Hungary, Italy; the massive strikes in Britain, the US and elsewhere. It was the defeat of these revolts – the failure of the revolution to extend internationally – and the subsequent attempt by the party to ‘hold on at all costs’, to make virtues out of perceived necessities (the dictatorship of the party; the Red Terror; War Communism/requisitioning; the militarisation of labour, the Cheka, etc) – which wrecked the soviet project from within.

There was a desperate need to defend the revolution from invasion by the imperialist powers (armies from the US, GB, Canada, Germany, Poland, Estonia, China, Japan, France, etc) and from the White armies backed by these powers in the civil war that followed the October revolution. This was a life or death issue. And what the soviets and the Red Army achieved in militarily repulsing these hostile forces while awaiting the eruption of the world revolution was quite remarkable. But the political price - in terms of the dissolution of the workers’ own autonomous armed militias incorporated into the Red Army – coupled with the physical decimation of the urban working class and the wrecking of production in the cities and countryside, proved to be too high in the absence of revolution elsewhere.

The Red Army, the Red Terror, the banning of fractions in the Party, War Communism and the subservience of the Party and Soviets to the state remained while the working class itself retreated in Russia and internationally. Most comrades at the meeting agreed would have been better if the revolution had ‘gone down fighting’ with a clear defeat from ‘outside’, just as it would have been better for the health of the revolution if the Bolsheviks had acquiesced to the 1921 programme of the Kronstadt ‘rebels’ whose demands were similar to those raised by fractions within the Bolshevik Party at its 10th Congress the same year.

As it was and remains, the nature of the defeat of the RR was the worst possible outcome for the proletariat: the fact that it was a communist party that was ‘in charge’ as the revolution degenerated; that it was in the name of the international proletariat that the notion of ‘socialism in one country’ was developed in contradiction to Marxist internationalism – all this allowed for the dreadful legacy that equates Stalinism with communism.

Given criticisms raised of the Bolsheviks, a sympathiser of Trotskyism asked ‘What should they have done, then?”

There were various aspects given in response:

a)    The question is based on the incorrect idea that the revolution was for the Bolsheviks to save if only they made the right decisions, rather than understanding that it’s what the working class in its entirety could accomplish under the circumstances and given the international and historical balance of class forces;

b)    The Bolshevik Party was not some homogeneous bloc but had many political currents within it which ebbed and flowed, some of whom opposed specific policies and actions (such as the militarisation of labour or the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt), others of which put forward correct critiques but incorrect ‘solutions’. Such oppositions – in general appearing earlier and seeing clearer than Trotsky’s Left Opposition - exemplified the fact that the Bolshevik Party was still a living organism of the working class.

c)    It’s not a question of understanding of what they should have done rather than one of analysing what they did and did not do and learning from it. The conceptions they held – i.e. of the party taking power – were widespread within the entire working class at the time, a hangover from bourgeois parliamentarianism. It’s as a result of what actually happened – something which could not have been known in advance – that subsequent critiques can and must be made. However the rejection of ‘the ends justify the means’, of taking actions incompatible with the goals of communism, is certainly a notion which predates the event, even if it had not been posed concretely.

The dreadful legacy of the defeat would/could have been avoided if the class as a whole and the Bolshevik Party in particular had been able understand that the party does not take power and (for the ICC) that the state after the revolution is not simply an expression of the working class – more of which below. The same individual from Trotskyism criticised the absence of reference to the enemy Stalin as the main focal point of and for the counter-revolution. For the rest of the meeting, the counter-revolution was a process and Stalin – including the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’ – was the result, not the cause. However: perhaps this is a wake-up call for the present revolutionary milieu not to take the standing of Stalin in the minds of the present generation for granted...

Two further elements in the discussion:

The Third Communist International was formed late (1919) and was overly-influenced by the Bolshevik Party and the needs of the Russian state. Indeed it evolved into a tool for the imperialist interests of that state. The lessons of this are the need for an international organisation of revolutionaries in advance of the revolution itself;
 For the SPGB, the degeneration of the RR proved Marx correct: the workers could not establish communism in a backward country. Lenin’s last articles were full of disillusionment – he realised he’d made a big mistake. Other comrades replied that a) The aim was never to establish communism in a single country but to provide a spark for the world revolution; b) Russia was relatively well-developed at the time with giant factories housing a concentrated working class – some of the biggest in the world - and extensive rail networks; c) That even if the revolution had broken out in the most advanced country like Germany, with the most educated working class, it would still have been defeated if it was isolated. There’s no sense in blaming Lenin nor looking for any Russian ‘particularism’. Finally, the meeting was marked by a high degree of homogeneity: between the CWO and the ICC, their sympathisers (and even a lone internationalist anarchist) on the main issues under debate and on the ICC Manifesto and the CWO presentation. The two currents agree that one of the main lessons of the RR is that the party of the working class does not seek to take power, which must be exercised by the masses themselves, but that without the influence of revolutionaries within the very bowels of the working class – and certainly within its self-organised expressions such as the factory committees and workers’ councils (or soviets) - the revolution will be robbed of vital historical, political and above all visionary elements of the goal of communism and cannot therefore progress.

However ... there was no fundamental agreement between the CWO and the ICC on the question of violence within the working class which in turn masked different attitudes to the state in the period of transition between capitalism and communism, of which our only ‘real-time’ experience is the Russian Revolution.

For the CWO, the question of violence within the working class, while something to be avoided, obviously, is not something that can be proscribed or wished away. There will be disagreements within the working class itself and some of these will be settled forcibly. It depends on the material circumstances.

For the ICC, it’s not a question of this or that disagreement on a picket line or struggle committee that’s at stake here but a generalised attitude that the means can’t be separated from the end – a society of freely associated producers can’t be achieved through coercion but only resolved consciously. Behind this unexplored disagreement lies a difference of appreciation on the crucial question of what is the state in general and the nature of the state in the period of transition in particular.

For the CWO, Lenin’s State and Revolution is clear enough: the workers’ councils wield statist functions including military power and having some kind of organs removed from this nexus of power is building castles in the air. For the ICC, the state is an unavoidable excrescence – symptom of the fact that different classes still exist – and will indeed have to form organs of coercion and violence to defend the revolution... Which is precisely why the working class can’t simply identify with the ‘workers’ state’ or such organs dealing with the ‘here and now’ but above all must wield political and armed control over them, armed with a consciousness of where the revolution is heading, of what it must become....

CONCLUSION

In the ‘common sense’ view (the bourgeois view – history is written by the victors) the Russian Revolution succeeded and the result was ‘communist rule’ by Stalin and the Gulag. For the majority at the ICC meeting, this was not the case.

The Russian Revolution failed. True, the working class, through its soviets, through its party, smashed the bourgeois state and established, for a short time, a dictatorship of the proletariat (only the Socialist Party of GB regarded this as a bourgeois revolution and a Bolshevik coup). However in the view of other participants at the meeting, an indisputably proletarian revolution – the first at the level of an entire nation state - degenerated. Relatively rapidly.

Thus it is that the real issues of the Russian Revolution are largely unknown within the populace at large and the working class in particular, a working class which has tended at the present moment to lose its sense of identity, its sense of history, its sense of itself as a historic class with a past and a future. This meeting was in truth a very small one even if it did provide a focus for a number of elements interested in the positions of the communist left, and even if it saw a high level of agreement amongst the majority of individuals and groups attending.

There was also agreement that revolutionaries were still finding an echo for their positions and that such meetings were valuable. The ICC was holding similar events in France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and further afield, while the CWO was holding a meeting in the North of England. This was the first coordinated meeting of the ICC and CWO for 20 years – and the previous meeting was also on the subject of the Russian Revolution  And the real differences of historical appreciation, of theory about attitudes towards regroupment past, present and future – about how to build the party in practice - remain to be further developed beyond past, bitter polemics.

In order to understand the significance of the escalation of events following the September 2017 referendum about Kurdish independence on the territory of the present Iraqi State and the reactions of the governments in the region and worldwide, we have to go back to historical developments that took place more than a century ago. This article is published at the same time as "Erdogan’s ‘New Turkey’: a prime illustration of capitalism’s senility" and we recommend reading the two articles together[1].

The point of departure of Kurdish nationalism

As we have developed in the above-mentioned article and in an article on imperialist conflict in the Middle East in International Review 117[2], at the end of the 19th century the Ottoman Empire had entered a long process of decline and fragmentation. Already before World War 1, in the Balkan wars, Bulgaria, Albania, Western Thracia (and Salonika) split from the Ottoman Empire. The second phase of fragmentation occurred after the Ottoman Empire joined the German side in WW1: the European powers France, Britain and Russia worked out a plan of dividing up the remaining components of the Ottoman empire amongst themselves. In 1916, on the basis of the secret Sykes-Picot treaty, France was to receive what later became Lebanon and Syria, Britain was to gain control over Iraq (except Mosul), Jordan, Palestine and Egypt – as well as the Arab peninsula (today's Saudi Arabia). Czarist Russia was to lay its hands on most parts of northern Kurdistan and the Czar was also hoping to use the Armenians for his ambitions. However, following the Russian revolution in 1917 the Soviet power renounced any imperialist ambitions. In 1920, in the peace treaty of Sevres (Paris), the remaining Turkish heartland was to be divided amongst the colonial powers France and Britain. Large areas of Turkey were to be handed over to Greece, an independent state of Armenia was planned for Eastern Turkey, and the Kurds were to receive an autonomous status in the south-east. Only a small part of the heartland of Turkey was to remain Turkish. The army general Mustafa Kemal refused to recognize the treaty and began to organise military resistance. The Armenians and Greeks were quickly defeated, the sultanate abolished, and Kemal became the leader of the new Turkish “rump” state. After the division of the booty of the former Ottoman Empire and the setting up of new “national” units – Syria, Jordan, Iraq - by the colonial powers, the Kurdish population which had been living in one Ottoman Kurdistan for several centuries was then divided into the territory of 5 states (Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Armenia/Russia). Today, almost one century later, the Kurdish population still lives on around a third of Turkish territory, in the northern part of Iraq (Mosul, Kirkuk, Erbil, etc.), in the Iranian Western part, in Syria's north-east and a smaller number in Armenia. [3]  The way the residues of the former Ottoman empire were partitioned by the two co-winners of WW1, France and Britain, meant that no space was left for the formation of a Kurdish state proper. At the same time the seeds for the ambitions of Kurdish nationalism were laid by these “partitioning” powers themselves. At the same time Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran have always feared and combated Kurdish aspirations for the formation of a separate Kurdish state. This spectre has haunted Turkish and Iraqi governments in particular, because any separate Kurdish state would have meant a large secession of territory from these countries (in the case of Turkey 30%). During the past century every Turkish government has warned they would never tolerate the formation of a Kurdish state outside of Turkish territory. 

Historically, the Kurdish populated areas have been more backward in comparison to the rest of the region. Large parts of the population live in mountain areas, where economic development has been much slower. The social structure has been dominated by tribal leaders and clans. Apart from oil, which was discovered in the early 1920s, there are hardly any raw materials, and for more than a century there has not been any real industrialisation. As a consequence large parts of the population either survive through agriculture or by migrating within the larger area or looking for jobs in Europe or elsewhere. While the four Kurdish populated countries Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran all have one common interest - preventing the formation of an autonomous separate Kurdish state - the situation of the Kurds and the intensity of conflicts between the Kurds and these countries has never been the same. And within each Kurdish populated zone, the factions of the Kurdish bourgeoisie fighting for Kurdish interests have constantly been strongly divided, either due to their social dominance by some clan/tribe or because of different social and economic interests. In particular, the land-owning factions have shown no sympathy for the poorer populations and their economic and social demands. During this whole period Kurdish nationalist forces have repeatedly resorted to violence – against other Kurdish groups or against Armenians[4] And Kurdish nationalist groups have repeatedly tried to impose Kurdish identity on minorities living in Kurdish dominated areas. The entire Kurdish area is "surrounded" by other countries and it has no access to ports, making the Kurds entirely dependent on “good will” and negotiations with other countries. These can in turn blackmail the Kurds and extort high taxes for letting Kurdish oil transit through pipelines or trucks through Turkish territory. On an economic level a separate Kurdish state could never be viable.

First aspirations for Kurdish independence

The first aspirations for Kurdish independence, which were voiced when the Ottoman Empire began to show its first cracks, were those of Ubeydullah in 1880, who demanded political autonomy or outright independence for Kurds and the recognition of a Kurdistan state. This was quickly and easily crushed by the Ottoman rulers. Before the Turkish Republic was proclaimed in 1923, in the wake of WW1, the British and French colonial powers pretended to offer the Kurds help in their striving for independence, while in reality they had divided the region in such a way that there was no place for a Kurdish state. In 1925, barely two years after the formation of the Turkish Republic, the first significant Kurdish rising was organised by Sheik Said; it had a strong religious tinge. The Turkish state, which had gained experience in expelling and deporting Armenians and Greek populations, launched a severe repression and massive deportations of Kurds. Between 1927-1930 there were again repeated Kurdish risings in Ararat. The Kemal regime denounced these risings mainly because of their religious cloak in order to justify its “secularist” policy. In 1930 Iran and Turkey signed a deal in which Iran agreed to close its borders, preventing the exodus of refugees and armed Kurdish fighters. After the risings in the province of Dersim between 1936 -38 – all of which were crushed with many massacres – for more than 20 years there were almost no Kurdish armed attemps to achieve more independence from Turkey.  Yet in 1960 when the army staged a coup d'état in Turkey, one of the justifications for the coup was the danger posed by Kurdish secessionist attempts. Once again the use of the Kurdish language, dress, folklore, and names was prohibited. The continued repression led to the reemergence of Kurdish nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1970s Kurdish nationalist ambitions were propagated by a new group – the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK), or Kurdistan Workers Party founded in 1978. The PKK claimed to oppose the local authorities and landlords who were mostly dominated by clans and chieftains. The PKK has been financing its activities through voluntary payments, donations and, despite its leftist verbiage, through blackmail, extortion, income through drugs and arms trafficking and more recently through human trafficking of refugees. In 1984 the PKK started a guerrilla insurgency until the ceasefire of 1999[5]. In 1999 its leader Öcalan was arrested and sentenced to death[6]. Following Öcalan's appeal to the PKK to stop its military fight in Turkey, the PKK ceased its military activities until 2004. This in turn led to repeated military attacks by the Turkish army against PKK hold-outs in Northern Iraq until 2011. As we shall see, it was only in 2012 that a short spell of relative calm began in the Kurdish areas in Turkey because of strategic moves by Erdogan! Looking back, we can see that the Turkish governments practiced a policy of alternating between very limited concessions and, more often, heavy repression – with waves of increasing military resistance by armed Kurdish militias, namely the PKK.

The Kurds in Iraq – 100 years of displacement and massacres

In the territory of Iraq the conditions for the Kurdish population were different.

Following their experience in India and in other colonies, the Britsh conceded the northern Kurdish region in Iraq some autonomy and recognized their nationalist claims in the hope of pre-empting Kurdish nationalist strivings on Iraqi soil. As an adjunct to their "divide and rule" policy and their backing of reactionary Kurdish elements, the British, in the face of large-scale resistance also developed terror bombing from the air with Churchill sanctioning the use of poison gas. In the meantime the Provisional Iraqi Constitution of 1921 even granted two ethnic groups (Arabs and Kurds) equal rights, and towards the Kurds the British applied a similar “divide and rule” policy: Kurdish tribes in the countryside received special legal jurisdiction and tax benefits. They were informally guaranteed seats in parliament and were outside the jurisdiction of the national courts. The Kurdish landlords in turn had to collect taxes for the British rulers.

In 1932 Iraq became an independent state. All through the 1950s Baghdad repressed Kurdish political rights, banned nationalist political parties, destroyed Kurdish villages, forcibly militarised the area  and imposed resettlement (especially in petroleum-rich areas. In 1961 Iraqi Kurds began an insurgency against Baghdad. The Ba'ath party which came to power in 1963 launched a severe repression. In 1970 the Iraqi government and Kurdish leaders signed a Peace Agreement. None of the promises – Kurdish self-rule, recognition of the bi-national character of Iraq, political representation in the central government, extensive official language rights, the freedom of association and organisation - were ever implemented. During the 1970s, Iraqi Kurds pursued the goal of greater autonomy and even outright independence against the Ba'ath Party regime; but at the same time the two main Iraqi Kurdish groups around Talabani and Barzani repeatedly fought against each other. The two groups were part of the same ruling class and never divided by any class frontiers. Both could one day fight each other – with the support from one of the governments in Baghdad or Teheran – and the next day they could be allies against the governments they had been supported by. Already in the 1960s Iran had become an important force in the Kurdish autonomy movements in Iraq. Teheran and Baghdad were at odds over a border conflict in the Shat al-Arab. Iran supplied the Iraqi Kurdish group around Barzani with weapons and money. Following a rapprochement between Baghdad and Moscow in 1972 and the nationalisation of the oil industry, the USA tried to use the Iraqi Kurds to destabilise Iraq. In the next military clash in 1974-1975 in northern Iraq, between Barzani-led Kurdish troops and the Iraqi army, Iranian aviation destroyed Iraqi aircraft. Following a deal over the border question between Iran and Iraq, Iran ceased its military support to the Kurds. Again, a wave of repression and displacement began – Peshmergas withdrew to Iran, scores of Kurdish villages were destroyed. Between 1979-1982 the clashes amongst the Kurdish organisations reached a peak.

During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) Iran tried to instigate Iraqi Kurds against Baghdad. The latter retaliated in 1988: in the struggle against Kurdish combattants of the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) and Iranian troops in March 1988, Baghdad ordered a massacre of Kurds in the city of Halabja, where chemical weapons were used indiscriminately. Between 1986 and 1989, Iraqi troops and militias killed between 50,000 and 180,000 Kurds, many of them civilians. About 1.5 million people were displaced.

After the first Gulf War 1991 and the rapid victory of the US-led troops against Saddam Hussein, the Kurds hoped for more independence. It was in this process, entirely dominated by imperialism, that certain groups, most notably the International Communist Group (GCI) saw a "revolutionary" and proletarian uprising. Like Rojava today, these were completely non-existent and rather showed the GCI's weakness for supporting nationalist movements and imperialist pawns[7].

During this time, NATO-enforced no-fly zones were established over the Kurdish areas, which gave them some protection against Baghdad and compelled Saddam to accept some level of self-government. The Kurdish Kurdish Regional Government was founded in 1992. Yet again between 1994-98, Kurdish groups in Northern Iraq clashed repeatedly, while Baghdad and Ankara intervened militarily as well. 

Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the area was declared autonomous with some levels of self-governance.  This limited autonomy (bigger than in comparison to Turkey or Iran however) would have been unthinkable without the US-led invasion of 2003. These Kurdish-controlled state structures have continued until today.

100 years of the Kurdish population's history shows that the Kurds in Iraq have been the most subjected to massacre and displacement, the most caught up in fights between rival bourgeois factions, who took sides with or were used by Baghdad or Teheran. And Turkey also used Iraqi Kurdish influence in Turkey to undermine the position of PKK. 

The constellation in Iran

Although in 1920 Britain “snatched” a mandate for Iran from the League of Nations, Iran unlike Iraq or Syria was not a “new” unit set up in the area. Following the convulsions after WW1, a Kurdish tribal leader, Ismail Agas (called Simko), managed to rally Kurdish nationalists from the Turkey-Iraq-Iran  triangle around him. He received the support of Kemal from Turkey, and in 1920 he fought under the Turkish flag with Kemal's support against Teheran's troops[8]. Until the 1930s Teheran had managed to tie the Kurdish population with its still persisting tribal structures to the Iranian state. Despite  combined attempts by Iraq, Turkey and Iran to quell Kurdish nationalist activities in the region, Kurdish nationalists began to mobilise in the small town of Mahabad. As in the other countries, the nationalist aspirations were carried above all by tribal leaders, who had no interest in “social reforms”. In 1942 Russia tried to infiltrate the Kurdish milieu in Iran. In December 1945 the Azeri Peoples' Republic of Tabriz was proclaimed with Russian support. In Mahabad in Jan. 1946 a “Kurdish Republic”,was proclaimed, which was crushed by Teheran in December 1946, after Russia had dropped its support in exchange for concessions in oil drilling. Unlike other countries the Kurds were free to publish cultural and historical information in their own language.However, in the 1960s the Iranian regime began to clamp down on many civil rights. As showed earlier, Iran has repeatedly intervened in Iraq either to stir up or to “contain” the Iraqi Kurds according to its own interests. After the proclamation of the Islamic Republic on 1 April 1979 Kurdish and Shia militia (Pasdaran) clashed. The emphasis on Shia religion in the Iranian constitution is seen as a bone of contention for the Sunni Kurdish population. The Iranian government has been facing a low-level guerrilla warfare against the ethnic secessionist Kurdish guerrilla group Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK) since 2004. PJAK is closely affiliated with the PKK operating against Turkey. Faced with the existence of several ethnic groups within Iran, Tehran is no less determined to prevent any Kurdish move towards autonomy.

These nationalist movements and imperialist maneuvers are often wolves dressed up in the sheep's clothing of workers' or "revolutionary" interests. This radical imagery adopted by Iranian/Kurdish elements was in fact based on a convergence of Iranian Stalinism and Kurdish nationalism, both subservient to the needs of the bourgeoisie. The guerilla group Komala, linked to the Communist Party if Iran, appeared sufficiently "radical" to fool the revolutionary group the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party for a while[9]. On the background of almost a century of failed attempts to gain more autonomy or to set up an independent Kurdish state the recently held referendum in Iraq was organised in a context of intensifying and increasingly complex and intertwined imperialist rivalries in the region.

We will look closer at three factors which sparked the renewed claims of Kurdish independence in the region – the development in Iraq, Syria and Turkey itself.

Iraq sinks into the abyss

We have shown in other articles how the whole spiral of imperialist chaos was already triggered in the 1980s following the collapse of the Shah's regime in 1979, which until then together with Turkey had been a strong outpost for the Western bloc against Russia. The US reacted amongst others by fostering the war between Iran and Iraq (1980-1988), which in turn led to rising tensions between Iran and Saudi-Arabia. In the Middle East, during the 1980s the conflicts were no longer marked by the confrontation between the two blocs, but increasingly expressed a plunge into an imperialist “every man for himself”. From Lebanon in the 1980s to Afghanistan, several zones of conflict emerged, where local guerrilla and terrorist forces fought against Russian imperialism (with US backing) or against the US with Iranian backing. And conflicts and fronts emerged in which regional rivals and terrorists became active with the backing of some other state. The initial attempt of US policy to “fight the flames of war with war” did not extinguish the fire, but only poured more oil onto it.

At the time of the 1st Gulf War in 1991 the US wanted and managed to avoid a fragmentation of Iraq – even at the price of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. In the 2nd Gulf War in 2003 the US claimed Saddam Hussein had acquired nuclear weapons capabilities. Following the quick US victory and the elimination of Saddam, a far- reaching reshuffle of power unfolded.

After the occupation of Iraq the US imposed a direct administration and they disarmed most of Saddam Hussein's supporters. Many of them belonged to the military and police forces and played a key role in setting up ISIS). Instead of integrating them into the US-led repressive apparatus, they excluded them and thus nurtured the seeds of ISIS.

The Sunni-dominated clan around Saddam Hussein was ousted and replaced by Shia-dominated governments, which in turn helped to increase Iranian influence in Iraq. In addition, a repressive policy against the Sunni population sharpened the division amongst the Iraqi population, an additional factor which drove some people into the arms of ISIS.

At the same time the Kurds in Northern Iraq were granted some sort of special relationship with Baghdad while terrorist violence spread throughout other parts of Iraq.

When ISIS conquered large areas of Iraq in July 2014, in particular the second biggest city, Mosul, the Kurdish peshmergas, who had been acting more or less like a state army force within Northern Iraq, were the first to mobilise against ISIS, while large parts of the Iraqi army had run away. The US and other western countries increased their military support both towards Baghdad and the Kurdish peshmergas[10]. In short, the US (and other western countries) supplied arms and training. Above all US planes bombed ISIS positions, and Peshmergas were used as cannon fodder.[11] Neither the US nor the other western countries wanted to have large numbers of boots on the ground because of their previous fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq and the general unpopularity of war.

The global failure of the US to stabilise the situation in Iraq (and in Afghanistan) had allowed Kurdish nationalist ambitions to revive in Iraq. And it was the need for the US-led coalition to support and arm the Kurdish peshmergas which drove them into conflict with all the governments in the region.

War in Syria – another factor compelling Turkey to attack the Kurds

The war in Syria which began in 2011 became another factor nurturing Kurdish nationalist ambitions in Syria. The Turkish strategy of increasing Turkish influence in the region required stronger ties with Syria. Up until 2011 Syria and Turkey had managed to improve their relationship. But soon after the beginning of the war in Syria, Assad, more and more under siege, responded by making a cunning strategic move. The Syrian army “abandoned” the Kurdish territory in Syria in 2012 to the Kurds, knowing that this would put Turkey under pressure to thwart any Kurdish advances. At the same time Turkey had been tolerating the forerunners of ISIS running recruitment agencies in Turkey, and Erdogan wanted to capitalise on the struggle of ISIS against the Kurds in Syria.  Because of Western pressure, and following the release of footage by journalists showing the secret Turkish toleration of the smuggling of weapons, or Turkish state agencies directly delivering them and accepting the passage of terrorists from Turkey to Syria, Erdogan was forced to proclaim his opposition to Assad and promise to engage in a determined struggle against ISIS. As a consequence, ISIS began hitting targets in Turkey itself where previously ISIS had enjoyed “freedom of movement”.

At the same time the more ISIS conquered territory in Iraq and Syria, the more the Kurds began to gain importance as a tool serving the interests of the Western countries intervening in some way or other in Iraq and Syria.  Towards the end of 2013 the Syrian Kurds had managed to establish a “free zone” (free of Assad's control and free of ISIS as well) named the autonomous area of Rojava. When ISIS forces began to lay siege to the Kurdish dominated border town Kobane on 15 September 2014, Turkey’s determination to block moves towards Kurdish autonomy left no doubts about Turkish priorities. Although the Turkish army was heavily present along the Turkish border within reach of Kobane, the Turkish army did not intervene to protect the Kurds against ISIS. It was only following heavy US bombardment and massive losses of Kurdish lives (civilian and militias) that ISIS was defeated at Kobane in February 2015 by YPG, PKK, other militias and Northern Iraqi Kurdish peshmergas. This episode illustrated the fate of the Kurds: their town Kobane in Kurdish hands, but in ruins, and Kurdish forces entirely dependent on US support against a ruthlessly determined Turkey. For the Kurds in Syria the question will be how the US will position themselves towards them, because without any military assistance for the Kurds in the area, they will not be able to hold out. Kobane and the idea of a "Rojava revolution" is causing big problems for the anarchist milieu today linked to PKK's "libertarian" turn. We have already written about this in some depth[12].

In order to “contain” and attack Kurdish enclaves on Syrian territory, Turkey began occupying parts of Western Syrian territory between August 2016 and March 2017(Operation Euphrates Shield [164]). These Turkish military operations work against the interests of Assad, Russia and Iran. In response, despite the improvement of ties between Russia and Turkey, Russia has been offering some kind of “protection” to the Kurds, in order to prevent them being smashed by the Turkish army and to defend Assad's interests.

In Western Syria, Russian troops [165] have moved into another area along the Syrian-Turkish border, acting as a barrier to Turkish and American forces in the area. In August 2017, the Kurdish People's Protection Units, or YPG, struck a deal with Russian forces [166], aimed at provide a buffer between them and Turkish troops in and around the north-western city of Afrin. The fact that the Turkish army, in their fervor to eliminate Kurdish enclaves, “goes it alone” against the interests of all other sharks in the region, means that zones of friction between the US and Turkey have also grown stronger[13]. Some Kurdish groups in Syria have become suspicious about the US-led coalition's plans.

The next round of conflicts has begun – that of staking the claims now that the ISIS “Caliphate” has finally broken down in the region and will only be able to launch terrorist attacks here and there without any control over territory. While the US still need the Kurds as cannon fodder to fight against whatever is left of ISIS in the region, after the expulsion of ISIS from Iraq, the Kurds in Iraq felt the moment had come to claim full independence.

Fanning the flames of war in Turkey

As for the development in Turkey itself we can see some important changes, which we have explained in more detail in the above-mentioned article. Erdogan’s efforts to scale down the conflict with the Kurds by making minimum concessions, which he began in 2004-2005 following a deal with the PKK, helped him to keep the country “free” from any military confrontations with the Kurds for several years. This tactical step by Erdogan was in stark contrast to decades of a very determined policy of the Kemalist regimes in Turkey which had practiced zero tolerance towards Kurdish nationalism. And despite regular intervals of minor concessions to the Kurds, all the Turkish parties distinguished themselves by their strong anti-Kurdish position, by their agreement on the need for ferocious repression against Kurdish aspirations. Erdogan's calculation of limited concessions was successful for some time. In 2012, following negotiations with the PKK, the latter gave up claims for an autonomous Kurdistan. But the war in Syria and Erdogan’s own ambitions for a “greater Turkey” with a new emperor at its head, thwarted his plans. The fact that the Kurdish HDP scored more than 10% (13%) and for the first time had a presence in parliament strengthened the credibility of parliamentarianism in Turkey. At the same time, Erdogan's project of handing over more power to the president was blocked by the Kurdish HDP in parliament after the June 2015 elections. Erdogan's thirst for revenge and his determination to brush aside Kurdish resistance both within Turkey as well as in Syria and Iraq meant that he began declaring many HDP MPs and leaders of the Kurdish party to be terrorists. And a new military offensive against PKK began in the south-eastern part of Turkey with the occupation, bombing and deportation of Kurdish populations from the area. Thus, the war in Syria and Iraq has spilled over into a two-front war within Turkey- with ISIS terrorist attacks and with the intensification of combats between the Turkish army and PKK.

The history of the past century shows that in their obsession to contain Kurdish demands for independence all Turkish regimes, irrespective of the differences between them, whether secular or more Islamist, whether headed by the army or a civilian government, have attacked and displaced the Kurds – both within Turkey as well as in Syria and Iraq. And all Turkish regimes have been ready to come into conflict with any other country, no matter how close they have been to them in the past.

The “unwanted” Kurdish state

When the defeat and expulsion of ISIS in northern and western parts of Iraq became clear, the Kurdish nationalists announced a new referendum on independence in September 2017 – leading to the formation of something like a common front of all states against this project[14].

The reaction of Baghdad was immediate: it sent troops to seal off the area, snatched Kurdish-held oil fields and reconquered Kirkus.

Tehran's response was to offer support to Baghdad - political, economic and military. Because Kurdish territory both in Iraq and in Syria constitutes a “lifeline” for Iranian logistics supplying weapons, troops and anything else to Hezbollah in Lebanon, it is a crucial “overland connection” for Iran and its capacity to defend the vital strategic positions of its allies on the Mediterranean shores. The more Iran expands its influence into the West the more important Kurdish territory has become for Iran. Given the intensifying tensions around Lebanon between Saudi Arabia and Iran the Kurdish transit route is all the more strategically important for Tehran. And being threatened by the Trump administration over the Nuke deal, it is all the more willing to gain advantages out of the weakened position of Baghdad.

In reaction, the US have declared their opposition to a separate Kurdish state, knowing that such a state would accelerate the fragmentation of Iraq, the country they “liberated” in 2003, and that the Peshmerga fighters are still needed (even if less than before) as cannon fodder for the US. But the Baghdad counter-offensive against the Kurds has also strengthened the position of Iran, the USA’s main enemy, vis a vis Baghdad. The Peshmergas were useful for the US-led coalition in their readiness to push back ISIS – but the Peshmergas are in contradiction to the US interest if they claim a state of their own[15]. The Kurdish factions in power in Northern Iraq cannot survive without US help, but if Washington weakened or dropped its support this would make the US (even more) unreliable and unpredictable.

For the US and other Western countries, the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds have become more or less “superfluous” after their bloody but voluntary efforts to help weaken ISIS. However, since Russia and Turkey have been strengthening ties, the US and other western powers may want to keep the Kurdish card up their sleeve to be able to put pressure on Erdogan's rather unpredictable regime[16].

Turkey has already threatened a full-blown occupation of Northern Iraq if the Kurds go ahead with their proclamation of independence. And it has threatened to block the pipelines and oil transports by trucks from the oil fields in Northern Iraq via Turkey, cutting off any financial resources for the Kurdish areas. Moscow, which has gained considerable weight in Baghdad at the expense of the US, has also declared its opposition.

Following the strong reactions by Baghdad and other countries, the Kurdish nationalists at the moment seem to have backtracked – and the divisions within their ranks have once again become bigger as well.

As experience from history has shown, the present common front by all neighbouring countries and the “big guns” (US, Russia) will not last long. No sooner the Kurdish forces are weakened (or even massacred as in the past) will the divisions amongst the anti-Kurdish front become sharper. The unity of the ruling regimes in neighbouring countries does not originate in some genetic hatred of the Kurds as people, but expresses the impossibility of the system to allow for more states. It expresses the impasse of a whole system and this can only lead to more conflicts.

The history of the Kurds during the past century shows that they have been used as pawns on the imperialist chessboard by all the regional and global regimes against their respective rivals. And more than 100 years of Kurdish nationalist ambitions shows that all different factions within the Kurdish nationalist camp have been ready to act as tools in the interests of these regimes. Without the consequences of the failed US policy to try to contain chaos in the Middle East, the Kurds would not have been able to claim their independence so strongly in the recent period.

The fragmentation of the former Ottoman Empire into different units and the prevention of a separate Kurdish state has now reached a new phase, where two countries – Iraq and Syria – are faced with separatist tendencies and even break-up. Iraq has been torn by war since 1980, i.e. almost four decades. Iran has been engaged in military confrontations since 1980 with all its neighbours, in particular Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and Israel at a longer distance.  Having become a regional shark, the expansion of Iranian influence has driven it into stronger cooperation with Russia in their common defence of the Assad regime in Syria[17]. And of course, Afghanistan has been engulfed in a chain of wars since 1979.

In the midst of all this the Kurdish nationalists are now claiming once again a new piece of territory in the midst of all these battlefields and graveyards.

However, this is not just an ordinary repetition of the previous conflicts. The number of sharks – smaller and bigger – has risen sharply. The weakened US are faced with a more direct presence of Russian troops in the area; US troops are active on the ground in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan – even if the US have had to admit that their intervention in these countries has ended in fiasco, and every presidential candidate in the election campaigns promised a withdrawal of troops, in reality they hide the scope of their real engagement and have had to increase their presence. Particularly significant is the presence of Turkey on different fronts – its direct presence in Syria, Iraq, Qatar – with clashes of interests with the Russians and the Americans on Syrian territory.

Now that it is becoming apparent that ISIS is no longer the force which mobilised some kind of temporary united front, as with all previous spirals of war, once the common enemy becomes weakened or is decimated, the tendency towards each for himself, the war of each against all, will take on new proportions. 

In the same way as the formation of new states such as Israel was only possible through the displacement of the local Palestinian population, leading to the formation of gigantic refugee camps and repeated military conflict, the formation of a separate Kurdish state could not have any other destiny. The way out for a displaced, massacred, repressed Kurdish population can only be through the abolition of all frontiers and states.

The Middle East was once the cradle of human civilisation. Today it highlights the drive towards its collapse. It is not by fighting for new nations that humanity will be liberated from this threat, but by fighting for a world where the nation state has become a thing of the past.

No faction of Kurdish nationalism has ever been progressive; none of them have ever deserved the support of the workers or the poor peasants, or of genuine communists. And yet the Kurdish national struggle continues to be presented as something that is compatible with the proletarian revolution. The image of bold, egalitarian Kurdish fighters depicted in parts of the media has even attracted significant numbers of anarchists into directly supporting imperialist war. Kurdish national liberation was reactionary in the 1920s, as was that of Turkey and everyone else. The times of a progressive bourgeoisie have long passed and imperialism, particularly the major imperialisms, dominate the globe, and nowhere more so than in the Middle East. It was one of the great mistakes and regressions that led the Bolsheviks to support national liberation struggles which were then and now inimical to working class interests.

This means the exploited parts of the Kurdish population, workers and poor peasants, have nothing to gain from mobilising behind the nationalists. For them more than ever the workers have no fatherland.

Enver, 23.11.2017

This article, written by a close sympathiser of the ICC in the US, is a further contribution to our effort to follow the evolution of the situation in the US after the election of Trump. It follows on from an article written by the same comrade in April[1]

One year after the shocking election of Donald Trump as President, the US bourgeoisie continues to struggle with a new constellation of political forces that threatens to undermine both major political parties and the traditional left-right division of ideological labor between them. The political tremors unleashed during the Presidential campaign of 2016 continue to reverberate under the Trump administration with the US political “establishment” now forced to deal with a rogue outsider occupying the highest office in the land, entrusted with the nuclear codes.[2]

In previous articles, we have argued that Trump’s election—along with similar political events in other countries, such as the 2016 Brexit Referendum in the UK—marks a qualitative step forward in the process of social decomposition, in which the historic crisis of global capitalism is exerting a centrifugal effect on the political apparatus of the bourgeois state—especially its “democratic” apparatus in those states that employ them. The evolution of the political situation in the year since Trump’s election has in our view confirmed this analysis and revealed a deepening crisis of bourgeois governance that the establishment, or main factions of the bourgeoisie, have yet to bring under control. The crisis is particularly pronounced in the US, where Trump was able to win the White House due to a complex set of circumstances including the effects of the antiquated Electoral College and the inability of an already compromised Republican Party to contain its more extreme factions, but also the degradation of the Democratic Party itself, which in an apparent act of hubris nominated a particularly ill-suited establishment candidate with ethical, legal and political challenges (Clinton) to face Trump, against the more popular Bernie Sanders or other more electable candidates.

Therefore, Trump’s victory, while an “accident” in the sense of occurring against the wishes of the main factions of the bourgeoisie, did not come from nowhere. It was prepared by a process of political degeneration that has its origin at least as far back as the contested election of 2000, when George W. Bush won the Presidency despite losing the popular vote, but only after the intervention of the Supreme Court. While the eight years of the ensuing Obama Presidency initially did much to repair the “democratic” image of the US state, underneath the glowing approval of the bourgeois media the Obama years were marked by political and social fallout from the 2008 financial crisis. The  working class would pay heavily for this in the form of layoffs, protracted unemployed, evictions and the repossession of their homes, exploding student debt and the expansion of various forms of “precarious” employment, while the Wall Street “Banksters”—who most saw as responsible for the disaster—escaped any serious repercussions. The period 2008-2016 witnessed a growing anger in the population about the overall state of the economy, the lack of stable jobs and the declining life opportunities for the younger generations. At the same time, in certain sectors of the populace—especially the so-called “white working class”[3]—there was increasing concern about the pace of social and cultural change brought about by the forces of so-called “neo-liberalism” or “globalization,” which many saw Obama’s Presidency symbolizing. Consequently, the growing anger in the population took multiple and diverse forms and was influenced by both left and right bourgeois ideology.

While Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party appeared to share few ideological features, they nevertheless each manifested a growing “grassroots” frustration with the establishment parties and even the institutions of the state itself. On the left, there was a growing realization that establishment Democratic politicians like Obama—whatever their progressive image—would never adequately address the deepening economic troubles of the younger generations, while on the right elements associated with the Tea Party began to turn their anger against establishment Republican politicians, who they felt would always sell them out on issues like immigration, global trade deals, etc. While emanating from different ideological places and reflecting different social constituencies, there was nevertheless a broader “populist” fervor bubbling up during the Obama years that exploded in unpredictable ways during the 2016 Presidential campaign, fueling the candidacies of both Bernie Sanders and Trump.

Now that Trump is President, the main factions of the US bourgeoisie have had a very difficult time figuring out how to respond to the reality that the social and political upheaval unleashed by their favoured approach to managing capitalism’s historic crisis (neo-liberal globalization) has led to the election of a rogue element to the Presidency whose commitment to this consensus, as well as to the imperialist strategy of the main factions of the bourgeois class, is still not entirely clear.

The Democrats’ dilemma and the problems of the “Resistance.”

The Democrats, the faction of the bourgeoisie that one would expect to lead a political campaign of opposition to Trump and Trumpism, have in fact launched a fierce “resistance” effort, unleashing an intense political and media barrage around the President’s ties to Russia, and the possibility that his campaign colluded with the Russian state to manipulate the election results. They have also vigorously denounced the President’s flirtation with extreme right-wing and racist elements, especially in the aftermath of the turmoil in Charlottesville around the “alt-right”/neo-Nazi march that resulted in the killing of an anti-fascist counter-protestor[4].

However, despite the fervor of these campaigns, the Democrats are not in a particularly strong institutional or ideological position to oppose Trump at this juncture. Despite holding the Presidency for eight years under Obama, and Clinton actually having won the popular vote against Trump, the Democrats are at their lowest point in terms of number of elected offices nationwide since 1928, i.e. the last Presidential election before Roosevelt’s victory in 1932 would usher in the  “New Deal.” They control no part of the federal government (save for perhaps elements of the “permanent bureaucracy” and the so-called “deep state”) and most state governments are under Republican control. With the Republicans’ blocking of Obama’s appointment of the moderate Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court and Trump’s subsequent successful insertion of the conservative Neil Gorsuch to the high court, the Democrats cannot confidently rely on the judiciary’s court of final say to back them up, should they take the legal route to obstruct Trump’s agenda.

Moreover, the Democrats are themselves experiencing a profound inner turmoil in the aftermath of the Bernie Sanders insurgency, which nearly upended the establishment’s choice for President even before the general election. The establishment neo-liberal factions in the Democratic Party are thus having to fight a two-front battle: on the one hand to oppose Trump and the other to not give up too much ground to the leftist insurgent forces in their own party, who openly call the neo-liberal consensus into question. Many establishment Democrats (including Hillary herself) continue to blame Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign against Clinton for Trump’s subsequent victory. They often disparage Sanders’ supporters as juvenile idealists on the one hand, while at the same time they imply that many of his white working-class supporters are really Trumpian racists and xenophobes at heart.

The reality of the division of the Democratic Party between establishment neo-liberals—heavily backed by Wall Street—who are committed to a version of the status quo—and the “Sandernistas” who eschew corporate funding and increasingly adopt a kind of populist intransigence in their political rhetoric, complicates the ability of the Democratic Party to operate as an effective opposition to Trump. The massive levels of distrust between the establishment Democrats—who see the Sanders faction as irresponsible populists not much different from the Trumpists—and the “progressive” wing of the party who accuse their establishment foes of having “sold out the working class” to court Wall Street money, have rendered the Democrats a divided force, with an incoherent message and competing loyalties to different social constituencies. Where the establishment Democrats have their electoral base in the so-called “professional managerial class” and (older) minority voters, the progressives around Sanders court the younger generations and elements of the white working class who have not succumbed to Trumpism. While Obama, with his rock star like demographic appeal, was able to cement these diverse constituencies into a winning electoral coalition, Clinton was not—hemorrhaging white working class voters by seemingly referring to them as “deplorables” and alienating younger voters with a political track record that stunk of entitlement, opportunism and broken promises.

In the months since Trump’s election, the Democratic Party’s institutions—including the newly reconstituted Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the party’s elected officials on Capitol Hill—have mostly avoided going in a populist direction and have instead decided to focus their opposition to Trump on his supposed collusion with Russia and the threat the President poses for US national security. At times, the rhetoric around Trump’s Russian connections have reached such a level of intensity that the Democrats have themselves fallen into a kind of anti-Russian xenophobic mania, seeing Vladimir Putin as a puppet master manipulating the US democratic apparatus for his own ends. The meme of Trump as a Kremlin puppet—whatever his actual connections to Russian interests—represents an ideological attack on the legitimacy of President (and the Presidency itself) many times more severe than the so-called “birther” conspiracy theories that some Republicans floated against Obama.

In their zeal to push the Russia narrative and to paint themselves as the party of American sovereignty and the national (imperialist) interest, the Democrats increasingly abandon their traditional ideological position as the party of liberal internationalism, rational diplomacy and respect for the US’s democratic institutions. While much of their campaign about Russian interference in the election is carried out in the name of restoring the integrity of American democracy, the result of this exercise is to call into question the intelligence of the American voters, many of whom they suggest can’t tell the difference between real campaign information and Russian propagated “fake news.” For the Democrats, it is not far from this conclusion to flirtation with the idea of censoring the internet. For the defeated Democrats, who purport to speak in the name of democracy itself, voters’ choices only appears to count when they make the right choice and ratify the main factions of the bourgeoisie’s preferred candidates (in  2016, Clinton), not when they choose an outsider who questions the prevailing consensus in Washington. In their eyes, Trump’s election must therefore be illegitimate and should possibly be overturned. It is in this sense that the Russia narrative undercuts the very democratic ideology the Democratic Party purportedly seeks to defend.

In choosing to focus their opposition to Trump around the theme of Russian interference, the Democrats have themselves called into question the US’s democratic image. The very meaning of democracy itself becomes unclear for large swathes of the population, not limited to Trump’s base voters. Part of this attack is actually aimed not at Trump, but at Sanders’ supporters, many of whom were supposedly duped into foolishly not voting for Clinton by an aggressive left-themed Russian backed propaganda campaign on social media and the Russia Today (RT) network that painted Clinton as a neo-liberal hag no better than Trump. For the establishment Democrats, it is not just Trumpian “deplorables” who cannot be trusted with the democratic franchise, but also the so-called “Bernie bros” and like-minded fellow-travelers whose juvenile purity ethic led many to irresponsibly risk a Trump victory by abstaining from the vote or supporting some destined- to- lose third party candidate.

Whether they realize it or not, the Democrats’ seemingly incessant campaigns about Russian interference in the election paint a picture of “democracy” as something like a technical process, whereby voters merely ratify the rational consensus choice of the main factions of the bourgeoisie. Any other outcome is by its very nature flawed and therefore illegitimate. This attitude only fuels the populist suspicion of the establishment elites who purport to know what is in the voters’ real interests, even more so than the voters themselves!

While the Russia campaigns may have stoked a certain fervor among constituencies already loyal to the Democratic Party, they likely haven’t helped the party mitigate the appeal of populism, whether from the left or the right. To many of Trump’s voters the campaigns look like an undemocratic attempt to overturn a legitimate election result. They fuel speculation about so-called “deep state” conspiracies against Trump and reinforce the image of the Democrats—and the political establishment as a whole—as dismissive and judgmental, as out of touch with the values and ethics of the “common man.”

For many of Sanders’ supporters, the Russia campaigns have only increased their alienation from the Democratic Party’s institutions. They view these campaigns as a sleight of hand to distract from the Democrats’ (and the Clinton campaign in particular) failure to connect with the working class and the economically distressed younger generations by offering real policy alternatives to the neo-liberal status quo. They are also seen as a dangerous rhetoric which threatens to escalate the US’s very real tensions with Russia to the brink of war—by proxy or otherwise. In this sense, the Democrats’ Russia campaigns, while somewhat effective in constraining Trump’s ability to maneuver on the terrain of foreign policy and preventing whatever rapprochement the Trumpists had planned with Putin from taking full shape, have nevertheless only served to deepen a certain populist contempt for the Democrats among wide swaths of the electorate.

Of course, it is also the case that the concerns over Russian interference in the election are not entirely motivated by an ideological need to delegitimize Trump. The main factions of the bourgeoisie from both major parties are understandably infuriated by what does appear to be some very real attempts by the Russian state to engage in an “active measures” campaign to either increase support for Trump or drive down Clinton’s vote (probably mostly the latter). From the point of view of the main factions of the US bourgeoisie, this interference by a foreign state in its “democratic” apparatus is wholly unacceptable. It is for this reason that many establishment Republicans have joined the Democrats in pushing the Russia narrative and calling for retaliation against Putin. John McCain, Marco Rubio and Lindsay Graham have all called out the Russian interference, while McCain has often been more vociferous in his denunciations of Trump than even the Democrats.

In any event, the unanimity among the main factions of the bourgeoisie on the question of Russian interference in the election underscores the near universal contempt for Trump and what he represents among key figures from both parties, even if the Republicans are more politically constrained in their ability to connect Trump personally to the interference. While the claims by some of the more radical Democratic back-benchers that Trump is a “Russian hoax” or “Putin’s Puppet” may be irresponsible from the point of view of maintaining the democratic façade and the legitimacy of the existing institutions, there is nevertheless a consensus among the main factions of the bourgeoisie that Trump represents a dangerous and unpredictable element whose loyalty to the consensus goals of US imperialist policy cannot be assumed.

Ideological disintegration and the fight to control the media

But more than this general concern about Russian interference in the election, the entire controversy about “fake news”—which is not limited to Russian planted stories online, but has as many American authors as foreign ones—reveals a growing panic in the bourgeoisie that it is increasingly losing its ability to control the political media narrative and therefore manipulate the outcome of its electoral process to ensure its consensus candidates win elections. The growth of the Internet in recent decades, the deregulation of the media and the spread of new social media technologies have in retrospect not been positive on these accounts. More and more, the populace is separated from any common media driven political narrative—getting their news and information from a variety of online sources, the veracity and responsibility of which cannot be guaranteed or easily vetted.

For the bourgeoisie, it was already a problem when the sources of these competing narrative “bubbles” were mostly domestic (Fox News, right-wing radio, conspiracy websites, leftist alternative media, etc.), but it has become a full-blown national security crisis now that foreign intelligence agencies are able to penetrate the online space and exert some level of influence on US public opinion. While it is likely that the actual import of the Russian “active measures” campaign in the 2016 US election has been grossly exaggerated (the toxic effects of home grown media buffoonery, probably put Russian fake news to shame), it is clear that from the point of view of the US bourgeoisie any foreign influence is simply unacceptable. The problem for the main factions of the bourgeoisie is that the technological development of various Internet and social media technologies have reached such a point that any attempt to rein in the forces of ideological disintegration they foster would likely require some kind of state censorship—something which would further put into question the American “democratic” façade.

While the state appears to have won some cooperation from entities like Facebook and Twitter in cracking down on suspected Russian backed or other fake news sites, this has already been denounced by civil liberties and free speech advocates as counter to the spirit of US democratic values—and tough questions are beginning to be posed about the relationship of the Internet (still dominated by private companies) and the integrity of the free exchange of ideas in the public sphere that democratic societies are supposedly based upon. For now, the US bourgeoisie appears to prefer not to open the Pandora’s Box on this subject, instead attempting to override the ideological splintering of society with a new patriotic campaign against Russian interference, carried out primarily through the mechanisms of the Democratic Party. However, the dangers that such a campaign will itself get out of control and further discredit the US democratic apparatus remain real and it is in the end unlikely to prevent further questioning about the reality of American “democracy” from emerging. In fact, it may only accelerate this process.

Trump’s flirtations with the alt-right and the perils of “identity politics”

The second prong of the Democratic Party’s resistance to Trump focuses around a campaign to denounce his flirtations with some of the more extreme right-wing and racist forces in US society. This campaign reached a certain apex in the aftermath of the Charlottesville demonstrations when Trump rather ham-fistedly blamed the violence on “both sides,” drawing a moral equivalence between the neo-Nazis and “alt-right” elements that marched in defense of Confederate statues and the anti-fascist and anti-racist protestors who opposed them.

While the Democrats are on stronger ground in terms of public opinion with this line of attack against Trump, the fervor with which the Democrats have in recent times become the “party of minorities and immigrants” nevertheless now functions as a double-edged sword in electoral politics. While much of the population and nearly the entire bourgeoisie was incensed by Trump’s reaction to the events in Charlottesville (including many prominent Republicans—even some associated with the Tea Party) and loudly denounced the President’s bumbling false equivalencies around the responsibility for the violence, the same level of unanimity does not exist in regards to the ideologically intransigent position of most Democrats about removing the Confederate statues, with most polls showing a majority of the population against removing these symbols of “southern pride.”

But beyond the specific issues of the Confederate statutes, this episode highlights another key dilemma facing the Democratic Party going forward. Buoyed by Obama’s successful campaigns, the Democrats have increasingly relied on the so-called “demographic strategy” to win elections, banking on assembling a coalition of professionals with progressive social values, younger voters, minorities and immigrants to defeat a Republican party whose demographic base among downscale whites was supposedly doomed to shrink with the increasing “browning of America.” On one level, this strategy only recognizes the reality of powerful historical, social and demographic trends resulting from the neo-liberal globalization of capitalism, but when the Democrats take the next step and are seen openly “cheerleading” this process (with even one Washington Post columnist recently seeming to root for white working class communities to die)[5], they run afoul of a white working-class “backlash.”

While this backlash was not yet powerful enough to pose problems for Obama’s re-election in 2012, it has nevertheless had disastrous effects for Democrats in congressional, state and local elections, where during Obama’s Presidency the Democrats racked up loss after loss in election after election. While some of this is clearly due to the incompetent management of the party under the reign of disgraced former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, it is also the case that the so-called demographic strategy is much less effective in lower turnout elections, which are usually dominated by demographics less favorable to the Democrats’ increasingly open attempts to court minority and immigrant voters. Losing elections in off years might be acceptable as long as Democrats could retain control of the Presidency by assembling the “Obama coalition” once every four years.  However, it apparently never occurred to anyone of strategic import in the Democratic Party that in the absence of a rock-star candidate on the ticket the demographic strategy could fail in a Presidential election as well.[6] The triumph of the Obama campaigns, in which the Democrats were constructed as the political vehicle of the dawning of a new age of historical progress and social/racial justice, crashed down to earth in the disaster of the Clinton campaign, where speaking for the interests of minorities and immigrants often came off more like opportunist pandering than genuine concern for their condition.[7]

Having sworn off the white working class to appeal to minorities and immigrants, the Democrats have now given themselves very little room for political maneuvering. In the absence of demographic change delivering them a permanent electoral majority in the near future, the Democratic Party appears to have no real political strategy other than to point out that  they are not Trump. While it is possible they may be able to ride popular disgust with Trump to victory in the 2018 midterms and/or 2020 Presidential election, it seems likely that the problems associated with pursuing minorities and immigrants as an electoral base will not attenuate anytime soon and will continue to complicate the Democratic Party’s ability to function as an effective party of either opposition or future governance.[8]

Of course, all of these problems facing the establishment Democrats would only seem to open the door for some kind of “progressive” make-over of the party under the forces associated with Bernie Sanders. If the establishment Democrats are now too closely tied with Wall Street donors, too compromised by their support for the neo-liberal consensus than it seems only logical that the main factions of the bourgeoisie would see the necessity to give the supposed “left” party in their political apparatus a new appearance by legitimating the Sanders’ wing and refashioning the Democrats’ message around the economic plight of the working class and the younger generations. Nevertheless, several barriers appear to stand in the way of this happening at this juncture.

First, although the Bernie Sanders campaign captured the imagination of much of the younger generation and Sanders’ own social democratic vision, which includes such ambitious projects as establishing a universal single payer healthcare system and tuition-free college, is popular with the public, Sanders himself is an aging political figure who would be 78 years old at the next Presidential election. Moreover, although his campaign appeared to find a successful new model of financing that eschewed corporate donors in favor of Internet based small donations, this has not translated well into institutional politics in the post-electoral period. Sanders’ own pick to head the DNC, Keith Ellison, was defeated in an internal party election by a more centrist figure, Tom Perez, who was essentially parachuted into the campaign late in the season by Obama and his loyalists to make sure the controversial Ellison did not win. While Perez initially promised unity with Ellison, there are recent reports of an internal party purge that saw several Sanders’ supporters lose their seats at the DNC table. [9]

While Sanders remains a very popular political figure nationwide, a reality that has prevented establishment Democrats from completely snubbing him, his supporters have not yet figured out how to unseat entrenched establishment figures from internal party positions. Moreover, as an “outsider” figure, Sanders has won few friends in the Washington based consultant-pundit-media complex, who remain more or less openly hostile to him and his supporters, seeking to discredit them as part of the same populist forces represented by Trump. Simply put, the Democratic establishment does not want to relinquish control of the party to the Sanders forces, who may put the neo-liberal consensus into question and whose commitment to consensus imperialist goals is as questionable as Trump’s. They would rather lose elections than give over the party to these “populists.”

Nevertheless, the Sanders movement faces other problems based on its own internal political contradictions. On the one hand, Sanders’ political base is clearly in the younger generations, who are attracted to his unabashed critique of neo-liberalism and Wall Street and are generally sympathetic to his old-school social democratic policy commitments. But to the extent to which the Sanders movement has to construct itself as a political as opposed to a demographic movement, it must seek support outside of this base. In the 2016 campaign, this took the form of appealing to those downscale whites still registered as Democrats and thus able to vote in Democratic primaries (or registered as independents in states with open primaries) in rustbelt and otherwise predominantly white states. It was no secret that Sanders performed rather poorly among minority voters, whose votes mostly went to Hillary Clinton. The electoral coalition that would be necessary to transform the Sanders movement from an opposition campaign to a real contender for power would be very difficult to assemble in a stable fashion. Any attempt to appeal to white working class voters by compromising on issues of race and immigration would alienate many of Sanders’ younger supporters, while conversely placating his millennial base on identity issues risks driving white working class voters further into the Trumpist orbit.

Already, Sanders has come in for attack on just this point from the Democratic establishment who have always suspected that deep down the left-wing populist has harbored anti-immigrant sentiment and never really understood issues of racial oppression. Sanders’ past flirtations with a kind of nationalist-protectionism (he even appeared on the Lou Dobbs show once to denounce an immigration reform proposal, because in his words it would create a class of “slave laborers”) has already been used by establishment Democrats to drive down his credibility among minority voters. Moreover, Sanders’ post-election criticism of “identity politics” and his endorsement of a red-state “progressive” politician with a questionable history on abortion rights have all given ammunition to the establishment Democrats’ suspicions that he is not really a social progressive and will sell out minorities and immigrants to court the white working class. In other words, for establishment Democrats, Sanders is really just Trump in disguise.

While such accusations are certainly overstated, they nevertheless highlight the problems facing the Democratic Party in the current period. On the one hand, it has increasingly been discredited as a party of the working class at precisely the time when the interests of the national capital call for an effective opposition party to keep Trump in check. However, any attempt to change the image of the Democrats from a party of monied elites who cow tow to minorities for electoral purposes to a more traditional party of the working class would seem likely to flounder on the rocks of American racial and identity politics in the era of neo-liberal globalization.[10]

If Jeremy Corbyn has momentarily rescued the UK Labour Party from a similar dilemma[11], the chances of a “Sandersization” of the Democratic Party in the US seem more remote. Nevertheless, this only fuels the instability in the political system as a whole and furthers the possibility that the Democrats will eventually split (against the counsel of Sanders himself perhaps) at some point in the future, as it will prove incapable of containing the increasingly anti-neo-liberal (when not outright anti-capitalist) sentiments of the millennial generations within its ranks.[12] In this sense, it is possible that the “demographic strategy” the establishment Democrats are banking on will backfire on them, as the divisions of race, ethnicity and immigrant status are not as strong among the younger generations and they are not as easily manipulated by racist ideology and are more and more able to recognize identity politics as a distraction from underlying structural-economic problems with the capitalist economy as a whole. [13]

The Republican Party unravels under the pressure of decomposition

If the Democratic Party is racked by what appear to be some rather insoluble contradictions, the Republican Party has for all intents and purposes already come apart. This may sound ironic given that Republicans control nearly the entire federal government and a majority of the states, but in reality this apparent strength mask an underlying disintegration that prevents the Republicans from serving as an effective party of national governance.

In previous articles, we have already done much to analyze the origins of the Republican Party’s degeneration from a party of governance under Regan and the first Bush to an increasingly ideologically driven force more and more incapable of acting in the overall interest of the national capital.  While the origins of the Republicans’ transition from a rational business-friendly party and capable defender of the US imperialist interests in the Cold War to the extremist right-wing force it is today go back at least to the Civil Rights movement and Nixon’s adoption of the so-called “Southern Strategy,” the current trend appeared to start during the first Clinton administration. Having ended 12 years of Republican hegemony under Regan-Bush1, mostly by moving the Democratic Party to the right on social issues and endorsing the neo-liberal economic consensus, Clinton effectively pushed the Republicans even further to the right, as they sought to outdo the “Great Triangulator” by “drowning the government baby in the bathtub.”

Clinton’s Presidency infuriated many Republicans, who were incensed that the cool and affable Southern good old boy was able to build what was increasingly looking like an unassailable electoral coalition of minorities and many downscale whites (The media often referred to Clinton as the first “Black President,” at the same time he was affectionately known by many downscale whites as “Bubba.”) Still, the Republicans were able to gain control of Congress in 1994 by exploiting the failure of the Clinton administration’s overreach on healthcare reform (“Hillarycare”) and general concern about the growth of federal government power. Under the direction of increasingly hostile and belligerent elements like Newt Gingrich, they quickly went to work irresponsibly shutting down the government—a political disaster for them they compounded with the bizarre decision to impeach Clinton ostensibly for lying to a grand jury about his sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky.

At the end of the Clinton Presidency, the Republicans looked a spent force, with Al Gore predicted to succeed to the Presidency over the intellectually inferior Republican nominee George W. Bush.  Nevertheless, public disgust with Clinton’s personal antics and a rather poor campaign by Gore allowed Bush to get within striking distance. A contested outcome in Florida threw the election to the Supreme Court, which decided in Bush’s favor, at which time Gore—in the interests of the national capital to avoid any further threats of a “constitutional crisis”—conceded.

The ensuing eight years of the Bush Presidency were nothing short of a total disaster for the US national capital. While his administration exploited the 9/11 terrorist attacks to launch a major imperialist offensive in the Middle East, his decision to invade Iraq a second time, turned global opinion against the United States squandering the international political capital it had gained out of sympathy for the victims on 9/11. Domestically, the Bush administration’s embrace of the so-called “Casino economy” (which had actually begun under Clinton) to prop up growth led to a major economic catastrophe at the end of his Presidency in 2007, when the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market nearly tanked the entire global economy. Forced by circumstances to adopt a positively Keynesian trajectory, Bush acquiesced to a giant bailout of Wall Street on the taxpayers’ dime—earning the ire of many of the free market ideologues and libertarians in his own party, as well as much of the populace disgusted that the “Banksters” were going to get bailed out while their homes values plummeted, credit ratings were ruined and mortgage default and eviction loomed. In the years ahead, many of the right wing ideologues under the Republican Party banner would blame Bush’s penchant for “crony capitalism” (symbolized by his bailing out of the Wall Street financiers) as much for the problems facing the country as his successor’s supposed “socialism.”

Nevertheless, while the Republican Party had been going through a process of ideological degeneration for some time prior to Obama’s election in 2008, it was really under his Presidency that the GOP took a turn towards the abyss. Whatever the media’s triumphalism about the election of the first African-American President, something that would supposedly usher in a new “post-racial” society where meritocracy was perfected, a dark reaction was taking shape within the bosom of the Republican Party. The emergence of the Tea Party in the first two years of Obama’s Presidency signaled a qualitative step forward in the unraveling of the GOP. Partly an “Astroturf” phenomenon funded by vulgar corporate interests like the Koch Brothers to further their deregulatory agenda, but also in part a grassroots backlash reaction to the first African-American President, changing demographics and mass immigration, the Tea Party phenomenon grouped together a diverse—often incoherent—set of grievances against establishment Washington.

In the 2010 mid-term elections, a new crop of right-wing extremist Republican candidates rode the backlash fervor to control of the House Representatives, where they set about not only obstructing Obama’s agenda, but also making life incredibly miserable for establishment Republicans like Speaker of the Houser John Boehner. A vicious cycle emerged, in which fear of a primary challenge from a Tea Party opponent, pushed the Republican party ever further to the right, as more responsible members of the GOP struggled to maintain control of their caucus. The process reached something of a climax in the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis, in which Tea Party back-benchers came close to provoking another major economic catastrophe by threatening to refuse service on the ever-increasing national debt.[14]

Although Obama easily won re-election in 2012, mostly by successfully painting his Republican opponent Mitt Romney as a greedy agent of the one-percent, the Republicans would maintain control of Congress for the rest of his Presidency, winning control of the Senate in the 2014 mid-term elections. Nevertheless, now trusted with a “share in governance”, the Republican Party fell flat on its face. In an effort to demonstrate that their party could act like adults and actually help solve pressing national issues, several establishment Republicans in the Senate attempted to craft a comprehensive immigration reform package with Democrats. However, this effort was stymied in the House of Representatives as Tea Party Republicans, together with their allies in conservative media, led a vicious campaign to block any attempt at granting “amnesty” to illegal aliens. Eventually, the turmoil within the Republican caucus would force House Speaker John Boehner to resign, replaced by Romney’s 2012 running mate and intellectual heavyweight of the conservative movement Paul Ryan. Nevertheless, even Ryan himself was regarded with suspicion by many Tea Party activists as too close to the establishment with soft views on immigration.

Such was the state of the Republican Party at the opening of the 2016 Presidential campaign. It had long since ceased to be a unified conservative movement, split into several competing, but still somewhat loosely defined ideological currents: business-friendly establishment Republicans looking to rehabilitate the image of the party as a contender for national governance, Christian fundamentalists, free market libertarian-extremists and a somewhat new and still not fully politically articulated “nation-state populist” wing that was becoming increasingly energized around opposition to immigration and the establishment wing of the Republican Party’s seeming willingness to compromise on this issue.

If for much of the Obama years, this latter faction was subsumed under a broader anti-establishment Tea Party movement, it would become clear in the context of the 2016 presidential election that it was not quite the same thing. In storming the Republican primaries to win the GOP’s nomination for Presidency in 2016, the insurgent outsider Donald Trump exploited this difference to build an electoral juggernaut that saw him take down all the establishment Republican candidates like Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Marco Rubio, as well as vanquish Tea Party stalwart Ted Cruz, all in convincing fashion.

Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 Republican primary revealed that grassroots electoral support for the Tea Party in prior elections was somewhat of a proxy for a deeper populist revulsion at establishment Washington. Trump did not run a campaign based on conservative economic principles. While he exploited popular resentment at mass immigration, demographic change and shifting cultural values, he also defended Social Security and Medicare, denounced crony capitalism (the fact that Trump himself was a master crony capitalist notwithstanding), signaled his support for socialized medicine and denounced the Iraq War. While there was space for Trump to make common cause with some Republican factions on cultural issues, his economic policies and views on foreign affairs were wholly outside the Republican fold—indeed outside the purview of the main factions of the bourgeoisie itself.

The fact that the main factions of the bourgeoisie—including many establishment Republicans—viewed Trump as a clear and present danger to the interests of the national capital, spawning a last-ditch ”Never Trump” movement in advance of the Republican convention, did not stop him from winning the Republican nomination. Republicans realized the bind they now found themselves in: having stoked popular anger over immigration and disdain for establishment Washington in pursuing their short-term electoral interests, they now found themselves the target of the very forces they had encouraged. They could not deny Trump the nomination, without angering his millions of supporters, openly splitting the Republican Party and shattering the democratic illusion by overturning the will of the Republican voters with backroom party machinations.[15] It wasn’t worth completely dooming one of the nation’s major political parties, when everyone expected Trump to lose to Clinton in the general election anyway.

In effect, Trump had executed a kind of coup in the Republican Party, elevating the nascent “nation-state” populist currents in the Republican base into a distinct and now dominant faction separate from the “movement-conservatism’ to which it was previously subsumed. Under Trump, the Republican Party had been transformed from a peculiarly American form of conservatism to something more akin to a European populist party preaching something resembling their “welfare chauvinism,” symbolized when he elevated the incisive Steve Bannon— the populist editor of Breitbart News—to his chief campaign strategist and then special advisor once arriving in the White House. 

On the eve of the 2016 Presidential Election, the Republican Party was an entity in complete chaos. Nobody expected Trump to win and one got the sense that most establishment Republicans were actually rooting for him to lose. Nobody had any idea how the Republican Party would reconstitute itself in the wake of the crushing defeat it was expected to suffer. Even in defeat, “Trumpism” would have emerged as a distinct and powerful current in its own right that all Republicans would have to respect and fear, even if many of its precepts went against their principles and instincts. When Trump shocked the world by winning the Presidency against the odds, some Republicans shouted triumphantly about an era of “united Republican government” ahead, but underneath these public pronouncements fears mounted about what a Trump presidency would mean for the party and the national interest itself.

In the year since Trump’s victory, it is clear that while the Republican Party survives as an institutional edifice, it has for all intents of purposes ceased to function as a coherent political expression. While the Trumpists find themselves sitting in the oval office and they possess a powerful electoral base with which to threaten establishment Republican candidates (a base Trump continues to stoke with campaign like rallies on something like a monthly basis), they have not been able to consolidate institutional power in Washington. In addition to facing intense push back from the structures of the so-called “deep state” in the intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies who are mostly aligned with centrist Democrats, the Trumpists face dissensions within their own party over their alleged ties to Russia and the overall tone and trajectory of public discourse and policy under Trump. Establishment Republican Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Jeff Flake and Bob Corker have all at one time or another loudly denounced the President, with John McCain even casting the decisive vote in derailing Trump’s attempts to claim a legislative victory in his quest to acquiesce to Republican talking points about “repealing and replacing” Obamacare.

Moreover, the Trumpists face opposition within their own party not only from establishment Republicans concerned about Trump’s erosion of “democratic norms,” but also from movement-conservatives and the rump of the Tea Party now organized as the so-called “Freedom Caucus” in the House of Representatives[16] that held up the Republican healthcare repeal proposal because the austerity it imposed was not dramatic enough! While the Republican party seems more united on the issue of pending tax reform legislation, similar complications could emerge either from establishment Republicans who worry about the political optics of its disproportionate benefits for the rich or from Freedom Caucus members concerned about the possible expansion of the national deficit (or some combination thereof).

It has been said that the worst thing that can happen for a populist movement is to actually win power, as it is then subject to the necessities of governing. We can already see the effects of this paradox on the Trump administration. Having run an unabashedly populist campaign, almost one year into his Presidency Trump has been unable to deliver on any of his major campaign promises. Forced to deal with the realities of institutional Washington, Trump has had to toe a more traditional Republican line focusing on repealing Obamacare (a near total failure) and cutting taxes. There has been no massive remaking of the institutional environment or the culture of Washington. Having run on “draining the swamp” in DC, each day that passes reveals Trump and his cronies to be themselves immersed in it.

Similarly, Trump has failed to deliver on most of his ethno-nationalist promises: While there has been some uptick in deportations of “non-criminal aliens” from the interior of the country and Trump has tried time and again to fashion some kind of travel ban against citizens of certain Muslim-majority countries that passes court muster, there have been no mass deportations of millions of immigrants in cattle cars as some feared and others hoped for. Moreover, the architect of much of Trump’s nation-state populist ideology, Steve Bannon, has already been forced to resign and Trump appears to be relying on his entourage of retired generals to formulate most of his foreign policy agenda, while domestically he has been forced by political reality to stay rather close to the Republican Party.[17] Whatever his ties to Russian interests and his kind words for Putin, there has as yet been no open rapprochement with the Russian state (often portrayed by Trumpists as a strong state committed to the defense of Western-Christian civilization from Islamic radicalism). Trump has even attempted to make a deal with Democrats on immigration by signaling he would agree to allow childhood arrivals (the so-called “Dreamers”) to stay in the country in exchange for tougher border security (if not the actual wall he promised his base). Revelations of this deal moved Bannon’s Breitbart News to label Trump “Amnesty Don,” signaling that his populist base will not take any attempt to sell them out on amnesty for illegal immigrants lightly.

While for the moment Trump retains the support of his fervent base, there are signs that even that is beginning to slip away. Trump now enjoys the lowest approval ratings of any modern President after his first year in office.[18] While the Republican Party may enjoy the advantage of gerrymandered districts in the upcoming 2018 midterm elections, there is nevertheless growing concern that Trump will hopelessly compromise the Republican brand going forward and that a “wave election” similar to 2006 when the public was fed-up with Bush’s war follies in Iraq, might just sweep the Republicans from power in Congress regardless—something which would open the door for the Democrats to possibly impeach the President.[19]

At this stage, it is not possible to say what the future direction of the Republican Party will take, but it is clearly unfavorable for the erstwhile establishment factions to retain control of the party’s political direction. Even if they maintain a hold on certain Republican Party institutions (or regain them once Trump is swept from power) Trumpism has nevertheless emerged as a powerful force that must be acknowledged and either conceded to or managed politically. The specter of a “Trump minus the baggage” type figure emerging in the future remains a constant concern for the entire political establishment of both parties. [20]

In any event, the Republicans—like the Democrats—remain a house divided, racked by internal contradictions, reflecting the centrifugal forces of social decomposition resulting from the bourgeoisie’s inability to solve the historic crisis of capitalism and the increasing difficulty of a two-party political system to contain the ideological and political fall-out. The perspective ahead then is not for the return of some kind of stable two-party normalcy, but increasing political turbulence as the bourgeois political apparatus attempts to adapt (perhaps unsuccessfully?) to the new social, political and ideological landscape created by social decomposition and their own neo-liberal mode of regulating capitalism’s historic crisis.

The ideological campaigns around the defense of democracy

Today, bourgeois officialdom is quite concerned about Trump’s ascendancy to the Presidency and the social and political forces this represents. There are many facets to the Trump phenomenon for them to be concerned about: his lack of a commitment to the consensus goals of US imperialism, his putting into question consensus neo-liberal policies, his vulgar and offensive rhetoric and personality that compromises US prestige around the world. There are even possibly legitimate concerns about his mental health. However, perhaps the most threatening aspect of Trump’s Presidency for the main factions of the bourgeoisie is his attacks on so-called “democratic norms”—his aggressive rhetoric flouting the courts, his attacks on the press, his lack of a commitment to the basic and fundamental rights of democratic citizenship, etc. It is therefore not a coincidence that the main theme of the so-called resistance to Trump has not been a traditional “left in opposition” campaign around economic issues, but has instead focused around the defense of democratic norms and democratic institutions in the face of the neo-barbarian assault on them launched by the forces of Trumpism.

From the point of view of revolutionaries, we have to reject any call to join in such campaigns as a gross diversion from the goal of intervening in the class struggle of the proletariat on its own class terrain to defend its living and working conditions under threat from capitalism’s crisis and the politicians of all political parties. We do not subscribe to the view that bourgeois democracy has always been “fake” or “staged” as some leftist and conspiracy-obsessed groups do. On the contrary, the development of democratic institutions in the period of capitalism’s ascendance was something the working class could take advantage of in that period:  by putting pressure on these institutions  the workers’ parties of the period won important structural reforms from the capitalists allowing the proletariat to consolidate itself as a class.

Nevertheless, in our view bourgeois democracy experienced a qualitative change with the entry of capitalism into its period of historical decadence early in the last century. Since then, with no truly durable reforms possible to win from a decadent capitalism, the entry of the working class into the parliamentary terrain could only lead to distraction, diversion and political defeat on the terrain of the enemy class. Moreover, in the period of decadence—marked by the progressive statification of society and the decline of the public sphere—bourgeois elections themselves progressively changed from real campaign contests to affairs of state managed by the state’s media apparatus to ensure the victory of a consensus favorite candidate. While electoral mistakes were still possible, it was generally the case over the course of the 20th century that elections were structured such that even the less preferred candidate/party would still pursue the consensus policies of the main factions of the bourgeoisie if they won.

If the forces unleashed in the last several decades by social decomposition have made this process of political management less effective and have returned some level of reality to electoral contests as open campaigns where the winner is uncertain before the votes are actually counted, we do not think that this means we are back in a period when the working class can advance its interests through the electoral arena. On the contrary, the putrefaction of the entire bourgeois political apparatus renders elections an even greater trap for the proletariat today. This is true even when there are “New Left” candidates on offer, such as Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, who—whatever their sincerity—are nevertheless bourgeois politicians like any other. As the experience of Syriza in Greece (and even to some extent Trump in the US) show, should they ever win power (by accident or design) the necessities of bourgeois governance will tend to override their policy commitments very quickly.

Therefore, revolutionaries and the working class more broadly should reject the call to join in the grand coalition to defend “democratic norms” and values against Trump’s transgressions and instead work to locate their specific class interests and develop their own independent struggles against capitalism’s attacks on their working and living conditions. If the concept of “democratic norms” retains some value for certain factions of the bourgeoisie today as a set of principles for regulating that class’s own internal conflicts, we must be clear that the working class—a class that depends on developing a unity of consciousness regarding its distinct class interests—has no position to take in internal bourgeois conflicts today.

Taking the road of searching for the working class’ own autonomous organs will, in our view, necessitate identifying forms of struggle outside of the bourgeoisie’s electoral arena. In pursuing this path, we can look back in history at the struggles of the period of 1917-1927 when the working class developed its own class organs—the workers’ councils—that embodied a spirit of class-consciousness and collective action truly distinct from that of the isolated monad who pulls the lever in the booth on Election Day. We can also look back more recently to the struggles of the period of 2010-2012, when the working class began to take steps to recover this more distant past, albeit imperfectly, during the mobilizations in Wisconsin and the Occupy Movement in the US and the Indignados protests in Spain. It is in taking these examples to their logical conclusion in a proletarian revolution that a future beyond the deprivations and injuries of capitalism in all its forms lies.

--Henk

11/7/2017

"Even by the standards of the Middle East, its irrationality, the wanton destruction, the constant, intensifying imperialist machinations and wars, then the Saudi-led attack on Yemen earlier this week reaches new levels of surrealist absurdity: the Saudis are leading a Sunni Muslim coalition of ten nations including non-Arab, nuclear-armed Pakistan in an attack on Yemen. Local gangsters like the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar are involved but also the Egyptian dictator al-Sisi and the genocidal clique of Sudan’s al-Bashir. All these despots are backed by the USA and Britain, which has offered the coalition ‘logistical and intelligence’ support". This is what we wrote in April 2015 in an article called 'Militarism and decomposition in the Middle East' just after the launch of what the Saudis optimistically called "Operation Decisive Storm". The war in Yemen has since become much worse, much more dangerous and, after Syria, possibly pivotal for imperialist developments in the Middle East, not least the stakes in the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia, their respective "allies" and the major powers.

In one of the poorest countries in the world, with a population of some 23 million, the Saudi "coalition" (which Pakistan has quietly ducked out of) has poured US and British-made bombs into what is essentially a confrontation with Iran for regional power. A glance at the map of the Middle East shows the general geostrategic importance of Yemen and the factor that it now plays in local and global rivalries. Ten thousand have been killed by the shelling and air-strikes during which hospitals, schools, residential areas and mosques have been hit. Three million homes have been destroyed and ancient buildings reduced to dust, in what the Romans called "Blessed Arabia". In addition to the bombing the Saudis have imposed a blockade on both emergency aid and commercial imports, which the Red Cross has called a "medieval siege", causing tens of thousands more deaths. Fourteen million people have no access to sanitation and clean water, and cholera cases have reached a million. The spread of famine and malnutrition is also accompanied by the spread of the easily-preventable ancient disease of diphtheria as well as increases in Dengue fever and malaria. In thirty long months since its declaration of war the Saudi coalition, with the assistance of the US and Britain, has pummelled the life out of an ever-greater number of civilians, reducing them to living like animals and surely feeding the next wave of refugees fleeing from this hell across the Arab Peninsula or via the African route towards Europe.

Iran increases its spread and influence in Yemen and beyond

What the Saudis and their backers are most fearful of, and what, in the "logic" of imperialism they have contributed to bringing about, is an increase of Iranian influence, not only in Yemen, but via a "pincer" movement around Saudi territory through the land connection between Iran-Syria-Iraq-Lebanon, along the Turkish border and the Gulf of Aden into Yemen and, ominously, building up its interests and forces in Africai. Iranian regional influence has never been more widespread and powerful than it is today, and this is despite the recent US attempts to thwart it at every turn. Iran now effectively controls a land corridor that runs from Tehran to Tartus in Syria on the Mediterranean coast "giving it access to a sea-port a long way to its west, and far from the heavily patrolled waters of the Persian Gulf" (Guardian, 8.10.16). The more the US has weakened and is weakening in the Middle East the more Iran has strengthened. The position of Russia has also strengthened on the back of it, but Iran is no simple pawn of Russiaii.

The Yemeni Houti forces currently fighting the Saudi-backed militias in Yemen took over and dominated the wave of anti-government and anti-corruption demonstrations that emerged in Yemen as part of the "Arab Spring" of 2011. It started as an obscure revivalist Shia movement in the 1990s called "Believing Youth", was radicalised by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and has wider support among many Sunnis showing that, though the irrationality of religion plays a role, this is no simple Sunni/Shia division (there's been no serious history of ethnic or religious divides in Yemen except what the major powers, including Britain, have stirred up). The Iranians call it the "Ansarullah" movement and despite its links with Iran its history is again not one of a simple pawn. By late 2014 large parts of the country were taken by the Houtis and as the war has gone on so the Houti-Iranian-Hezbollah links, forged in the conflict, have strengthened. In December, when the Yemeni leader and warlord Saleh turned away from the Iran/Houtis and towards Saudi, he was killed with a ruthlessness that was reminiscent of the CIA assassinations of the 60s, which is something Hezbollah is also familiar with.

There are recent reports of Iran sending advanced weapons and military advisers to the Houtis, including its battle-hardened Afghan mercenaries (New York Times, 18.9.17). These are probably overestimated by the west but the Iranians think in the long-term as they did with their build-up of Hezbollah, which has now become Iran's arrowhead against Israel and part of its general strengthening and build-up throughout the Middle East. The ballistic missiles aimed at Saudi targets do suggest a Hezbollah involvement. These are perfect weapons for the Houtis aimed at high value Saudi targets and only one has to get through eventually; in the meantime they sow terror and uncertainty among the Saudis in the same way as the Nazi V2's did for London. At any rate, the Houti leader, Abdul Malik Badreddine al Houti, addressing Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrullah in the summer, said: "Your bet on the Yemenis is proper" and he went on to talk about joint forces against Israel bringing in the Palestinian questioniii. These moves will only be bolstered by the foreign policy of Trump and his Saudi-Israeli embrace.

It's worth stepping back a bit to see how things have changed regarding the Middle Eastern imperialist snake-pit: just a short while ago US and Iranian forces were acting together in Iraq at high military levels up to and including coordinated and joint military actions against Isis, but it was clear to everyone that once the latter was defeated new tensions would break out. Again, even in Yemen, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) preferred to work with the Houtis in the fight against al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) and Isis; and US generals said Saudi action in Yemen was "a bad idea" (al-Jazeera, 15.4.17) given the involvement of the Saudi-supported Yemeni secret service (PSO) being deeply connected to the terrorists. While Washington showered the Yemeni government with political and financial support, former president Saleh, an ally of the Saudis, was manipulating the terrorists’ activity in order to get Washington's supportiv courtesy of the "War on Terror".

Washington finds it difficult to cope with the quagmire of the Middle East and its attempts to do so can only make the situation worse

Trump's National Security Adviser, H. R. McMaster, said in October: "What is most important for all nations is to confront the scourge of Hezbollah, the Iranians and the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guards)" (Patrick Cockburn in the Independent, 9.12.17). How the Americans plan to do this without further inflaming and destabilising the Middle East is anyone's guess. The US de-certification of the Iranian nuclear deal has, amongst other things, caused a serious rift with Europe (and won't encourage the North Koreans "to come to the table"), in particular the three major countries active in the region - France, Britain and Germany. Trump's incendiary recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel - a totally stupid and unnecessary move which will mainly please his evangelical base - can only rebound on US imperialist interests. It will fan the flames of Palestinian/Arab nationalism and, despite the theatrics of the UN, particularly from Turkey's Erdogan, arouse more global protests against the US from both Shia and Sunni wings of Islam. It also gives the jihadis of Isis and al-Nusra a life-line (one of Bin Laden's strongest recruiting drives was the oppression of the Palestinians) and makes it harder for Saudi Arabia and its allies to work with Israel and the US, while furthering the interests of Tehran.

The situation of the Saudi regime is more fragile, from its embrace of Trump which was followed by a major falling out with Qatar, gangster-like purges of its enemies, including those hostile to Trump, and bizarre summonses of Lebanon's President Hariri and Palestinian leader Abbas to Riyadh. The Saudi prince, the effective ruler of the country said in April last, that he "wanted out" of the war in Yemen and had no objections to the American interceding with Iran to this endv. Whatever his wishes, or those of any individuals involved, imperialism, decomposition and irrationality are the driving forces behind the Yemeni disaster and, with Iran, these forces are only going to strengthen.

Boxer, 22.12.17