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 [14].

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] [17]

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] [18], 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 [19],  Kim Jong-il [20], Kim Jong-un [21]) and forcing it to bow down to the most grotesque personality cult.[3] [22]

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] [23] 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] [24].

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] [25]. 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 [26].

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

[2] [28]  See “Theses on the economic and political crisis in the eastern countries”, https://en.internationalism.org/ir/60/collapse_eastern_bloc [29]

[3] [30]                The list of the titles of the leaders is endless. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Kim_Jong-il%27s_titles [31]

[4] [32]     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] [33] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/2012/5305/november/i... [34]

[6] [35]     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