An article from a close sympathiser showing that despite and even because of the omnipresence of war in the Middle East, the class struggle can still raise its head.
At the end of May this year a wave of strikes and protests by workers and unemployed in Jordan against tax increases, price rises and state corruption was widely reported in the media. In fact the movement by lower-paid workers against gas and electricity price increases began several months earlier in the provinces, building up to mass protests in the capital Amman that lasted for over a week, with the trade unions showing some difficulties in harnessing and controlling the movement. That this movement took place around the same time as the workers in Iran were striking and protesting against more or less the same conditions shows that, even in the imperialist cauldron of the Middle East, the working class is capable of raising its distinctive head and fighting back against the attacks of the state on its own ground. As in Iran, some of the attacks have been pushed back with price rises rescinded and tax increases withdrawn, although this can only be a slight and temporary relief until the attacks are renewed under other guises, with more force or a combination of both.
The leader of Jordan, King Abdullah, sacked some of his government in response to the protests and noises from the state blamed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the attacks, just as the left of capital always has its bogeymen - "greedy bankers", "the EU", "the World Bank", etc., in order to promote their own nationalist and "anti-imperialist" (i.e., usually anti-American) ideology[1] . But the problems of the Jordanian economy go far deeper than IMF loan repayments: there's a droll joke in Jordan along the lines that "we have less water than oil, and we haven't got any oil". And its problems pre-date the massive influx of refugees that it's taken in (two-thirds of its population is Palestinian and there are also Muslim and Christian refugees from across the region, not least Syria) and also pre-dates the withdrawal of "aid" from the major Gulf states. The Kingdom was a vital military outpost for British imperialism until the 1950's when the Americans took it over, continuing to work with their UK "junior partners". Jordan has a skilled working class but the country's war economy is integrated into the imperialist essentials of the Middle East, firstly by Britain, then America and also France and Germany. And there are the specific imperialist aspirations of the Jordanian state, even if subordinated to their masters: taking part in a secret war in Libya, troops in Afghanistan and other "peace-keeping" manoeuvres. Its war economy, the militarised nature of the Jordanian state directly gives rise to graft, nepotism and cronyism (Wasta, in Arabic), something that British and American imperialism has used to divide and rule over the Hashemite Kingdom.
On the imperialist level, the future of the Jordanian state becomes more uncertain as the team around Trump turn to a Saudi/UAE/Israeli axis, and this makes it all the more unlikely that there will be any sort of effective bail-out of the Jordanian economy, which spends 15.8% of its economy on military spending[2], by the wealthier but struggling Gulf States. This poses a possible turn towards Turkey or Iran by Jordan, fuelling more instability in the region; and if this is speculation at the moment what's certain is that Jordan's position will become more perilous within the regional imperialist free-for-all. On the economic level, university graduate unemployment is registered as 24.1% and unemployment overall around 18%, figures that are widely derided as substantial underestimations. In fact, across the whole of the Middle East, youth unemployment and unemployment generally is a major problem for all the states. Thus protests also took off again in Iran just over a week ago, this time focused on Tehran rather than in the provincial cities; but, as promised by them after the previous struggles, they were ruthlessly repressed by the Revolutionary Guards using the riot police, tear gas and mass arrests of "trouble-makers". Slogans were again raised against Iran's wars and the war economy. The involvement of the workers isn't clear here though the Iranian government immediately met with union bosses.[3]
The proletariat in Jordan is no stranger to class struggle, being involved in movements in 1989, 1996 and particularly from 2009 to 2012. In 2011 almost every sector in the Jordanian economy took part in strikes and protests including precarious expatriate workers.[4] Some new "independent" trade unions emerged from this, though their recent actions show them as bound to the Jordanian state as the old union structures. But for both capital and labour in Jordan, as elsewhere, the economic crisis and its consequent attacks have further deepened, presaging further attacks which are not just cyclical but ever more vicious.
There are signs from the proletariat in Jordan (and some from Iran) that the struggles are more profound than before: there is almost no mobilising role by the religious authorities (the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan's case), in contrast to events around the Arab Spring; there is a dearth in the protests of Jordanian flags or any sort of "coloured" flags denoting a nationalist movement; the appearance, numbers, diversity and solidarity of the working class is much more pronounced and the struggles better organised; the trade unions, 33 of them now, up from around 16 in 2011, have been sidelined and vocally criticised by the workers and the youth movement (mostly of the unemployed which the unions tried to separate the workers from) refused to get involved in pointless confrontations with the British-trained[5] security forces, the Darak, showing a certain consciousness and maturity.
Given their peripheral nature, their numerical weakness and the sea of imperialist atrocities that surrounds them, the struggles in Jordan further point to the centrality of the working class in the heartlands of capital to really push back against the attacks in the first place. But despite the evident difficulties that confront it, this was a clear expression of the proletariat and its attempts to unify its combat. And completely contrary to leftism's phoney "revolution" in Rojava, northern Syria, which strengthens imperialism, the class struggle in Jordan is an example of the beginnings of a potential blow against it.
Baboon, 1.7.2018
[1] This is the sort of ideology propagated by the British Socialist Worker's Party and the left wing of Corbyn's Labour Party.
[2] Middle East Eye, 7.6.2018. With 15.8% of government spending and 4.8% of GDP, Jordan is proportionally among the highest military spenders in the Middle East and the world.
[3] The latest protests are not just in Tehran but in the provinces with, for example, protests against water shortages in Khorramshahr in the southwest province of Khuzestan, July 1st where banks and public buildings were attacked and where the slogan "the enemy is here" was reported, leading to shots being fired at protesters: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/01/videos-show-gunfire-amid-iran-protests-o... [2].
An important point to make here in respect of Iran is that its economic crisis has been greatly exacerbated by US imperialism and that National Security Advisor John Bolton has just met with the ex-terrorist Iranian group MEK, giving a strong signal of "regime change".
[4] https://www.merip.org/mer/mer264/emergence-new-labor-movement-jordan [3]. Middle East Research, Spring 2018.
[5] Britain has well-established forces and "training" programmes in Jordan. It constantly conducts large-scale manoeuvres and Jordan is a platform for its involvement in Syria and the wider Middle East. Just recently the British military pressure group, the United Kingdom Defence Association (UKNDA), called for Britain to send an entire armoured brigade, 5000 men and their support, to Jordan.
In The State and Revolution, Lenin wrote: “During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”
During the life of Marx, the bourgeoisie did everything to prevent him from operating by demonising him and persecuting him through the apparatus of the police.[1] After his death they did everything to distort his fight to destroy capitalism and open up the future to communism.
An infamous propaganda
All of the publications, radio and television programmes produced on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Marx stuck by these rules. A number of academics salute the work of Marx on the economy, philosophy or sociology, while presenting him as "out of touch with reality", totally overtaken or completely mistaken on the political terrain: it's nothing less than blunting the edge of this trenchant and militant revolutionary! One of the arguments put forward today is that Marx was only a "nineteenth century thinker"[2] , his work incomprehensible for the future evolution of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Following this reasoning, a revolutionary perspective has no validity today. The working class doesn't exist and, moreover, its political project can only lead to a Stalinist horror. Every political aspect of the works of Marx is finally thrown into the dustbin of history.
But a more subtle aspect of this propaganda affirms that it's necessary to draw from Marx, the "real" Marx, elements which in the final analysis could validate the defence of democracy and liberalism and the critique of alienation. Fundamentally, this is a question of presenting Marx not as the revolutionary that he was, but as a sort of great thinker of whom certain aspects of his work allow us to understand and ameliorate an "unregulated" capitalism which, without the control of the state, engenders inequalities and economic crises. Within the bourgeoisie, there are many who like to paint Marx as an "economic genius" who foresaw the crisis of capitalism, predicted globalisation, the growth of inequality, etc.
Numerous among the flatterers of Marx are his so-called heirs for more than a century, from the Stalinists to the leftists, including the Trotskyists who have never ceased, in the same sense, to disfigure, distort and tarnish the revolutionary Marx by transforming him, as Lenin justly denounced above, into a semi-religious icon, canonising him and putting him up on a pedestal. All this in order to untruthfully present socialism or communism as the domination of state capitalism along the models built up in the USSR, the countries of the eastern bloc and China –forms assumed by capitalism in its epoch of decadence and as a product of the counter-revolution.
Marx was a fighter first of all
Straightaway, it's necessary to say, along with Engels, that Marx was first of all a revolutionary; a fighter, in other words. His theoretical work is incomprehensible without this point of departure. Some want to turn Marx into a pure savant, surrounded by books and cut off from the world, but only a revolutionary militant can be a marxist. From his participation in the group of Young Hegelians in Berlin, 1842, the life of Marx was a combat against Prussian absolutism. This turned into a fight for communism when he tried to understand the misery of a considerable part of society and when he saw the potentialities of the working class in his discussions with the workers of Paris. It's this fight which made him an exile chased from one country to the other, pushing him into an extreme poverty which led to the death of his son. In this regard it's really obscene to attribute this poverty to Marx himself, hinting that neither he nor his wife could manage a household budget because of their well-to-do origins, which is what the French TV "culture" programme Arte did recently. In reality, Marx was totally impregnated with proletarian solidarity and regularly used his small income for the cause of the revolution!
Moreover, and contrary to what Jonathon Spencer says, Marx wasn't a "journalist", but a militant who knew that the struggle, first of all against the authoritarian Prussian monarchy then against the bourgeoisie, demanded a work of propaganda that he took on in Rheinische Zeitung, then in Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung and Les Annales franco-allemande and finally in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. As a fighter Marx was fully involved in the combat of the Communist League and responded to a mandate from it to write a major text of the workers' movement: the Manifesto of the Communist Party. It is also because he was a fighter (as indicated in the title of his biography written by Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen, Marx, Man and Fighter) that the regroupment and organisation of revolutionaries was at the heart of his activities. In the same way, the whole of his theoretical work was a driving force for the struggle for clarity going on within the working class.
The theoretical work of Marx
Marx developed an immense theoretical elaboration since he started off from a working class point of view, a class which had nothing to defend within capitalism and had "nothing to lose but its chains" through its struggle against exploitation. It was in going on from this postulate that he understood that this combat potentially contained the end of the exploitation of man by man, a condition in which humanity had floundered since the appearance of social classes, and that the liberation of the working class would bring about the reunification of humanity through communism. When Jaques Attali affirms that Marx is a "founding father of modern democracy", it is just a lie in the service of the bourgeoisie, a lie which claims that the present society is the best there is. The aim of this propaganda is to prevent the working class from understanding that the sole perspective possible for emerging from the horror of a dying capitalism is communism.
It is also by proceeding from the needs of the working class that Marx established a scientific method, historical materialism, allowing the working class to direct its combat. This method criticises and goes beyond the philosophy of Hegel while "turning on its head" what the latter had discovered, which was that the transformation of reality was always a dialectical process. This method allowed Marx to draw the lessons from the great workers' struggles, such as 1848 and the Paris Commune. The transmission of this same method to subsequent generations of revolutionaries, like those of the communist left, also made it possible for the lessons to be drawn from the failure of the revolutionary wave of 1917. Marx's approach is effective: it's by examining reality with his method and confronting it with the results obtained that revolutionaries are able to enrich the theory.
Starting off from the point of view of the working class also facilitates the essential understanding of what the working class was up against and what it had to destroy in order to free itself from its chains. Marx was thus engaged in a study of the economic fundamentals of society in order to make a critique of it. This study allowed him to show that the basis of capitalism was commodity exchange and that it's this exchange which is at the basis of wage labour, that's to say the form taken by the exploitation of man by man in capitalism. It is interesting to compare this fundamental result with what Liberation says in its celebration of the anniversary of his birth: "Karl Marx shows that the purchase of labor power by the capitalist raises a problem of uncertainty as to the reality of the effort made by the wage earners"; in other words, if one could measure the labour of the worker so that their effort is endurable, the exploitation of man by man would be a good thing. Here's an example of the way in which Marx is used to justify capitalism! Whereas for Marx, "the purchase of labour power" signifies "production of surplus value" and thus exploitation!
It is also through the profoundly militant aspects of his theoretical works that Marx was able to conclude that capitalism wasn't an eternal system and that, like other modes or production which preceded it, this system would come up against its limits and historically fall into crisis because: "At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution." (Contribution to a Critique of the Political Economy). On the other hand Marx demonstrated that capitalism gave rise to its own gravedigger: the proletariat, which is both the last exploited class in history, dispossessed of everything, and the only social class with revolutionary potential because of the associated character of its labour. It is a class which, by unifying across frontiers, is the sole force capable of overthrowing capitalism at the world level in order to establish a society without classes and without exploitation.
At the end of the day, the "great analyses" of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries pretend either that Marx has been overtaken, is a thing of the past, or that he is still valid by virtue of his "economics" or as a "great prophet" in the current theory of the anti-globalists who aim to "correct the excesses" of capitalism. All of this ideological confusion has the function of obscuring the struggle for proletarian revolution.
Marx’s concern for the organisation of revolutionaries and the working class
For Karl Marx, the identification of the working class as the sole actor able to overthrow capitalism and bring about the arrival of communism went hand-in-hand with the necessity for the proletariat to organise itself. On this level, as on others, the contribution of Marx is essential. He was involved in the "Correspondence Committee" in order to put German, French and English socialists in touch with one another because, according to him: "at the time of action, it is certainly of great interest for everyone to be educated about the state of affairs abroad as well as at home". The necessity for self-organisation is concretised in his constant participation in struggles for the defence and constitution for an international revolutionary organisation within the proletariat. The fight for communism and the most profound understanding of what this represented pushed him to fight for the transformation of the League of the Just into the Communist League in 1847. It's because they had an acute understanding of role of revolutionaries that Marx and Engels defended the necessity for the Communist League to adopt a programme, which resulted in the writing of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848.
The Communist League couldn't withstand the blows of the repression after the defeat of the revolutions of 1848. But after that the struggles took off again at the beginning of the 1860's and other efforts of organisation appeared. From its beginnings Marx involved himself in the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), formed in 1864. He had a major role in writing up its statutes and was the author of its Inaugural Address. His conviction about the importance of the organisation and his theoretical clarity made him central to the organisation. In the IWA as in the Communist League he undertook a determined struggle for the organisation to fulfil its function. His theoretical preoccupations were never separated from the needs of the struggle. It's for this reason that in the Communist League he said, when faced with Weitling, "up to now ignorance has been of no use to anyone" because of the latter's utopian and idealist vision of communism. It's for the same fundamental reasons that he fought in the IWA against Mazzini who wanted the organisation to be focused on the defence of national interests, and against Bakunin who plotted to take control of the IWA and got involved in conspiratorial adventures substituting himself for the mass action of the proletariat.
The theoretical elaboration undertaken by Marx shines a formidable light on bourgeois society as much in the nineteenth century as in the following two. But if one considers this elaboration merely as a means of "understanding the world", like the pseudo-experts of the bourgeoisie celebrating his year of birth, his work remains surrounded in a fog of mystery. On the contrary, while the bourgeoisie cultivates the idea of "no future" the working class must free itself of its chains. In order to do that it must not only make use of the theoretical studies of Marx, but take inspiration from his life of struggle, his life as a militant. The means that he was able to develop were always in accord with the very aim of proletarian struggle: "to transform the world"!
Vitaz, June 1, 2018
[1] Thus, Engels declared at Marx's funeral: "Marx was the man most hated and the most lied about of his time. Absolutist and Republican governments deported him. Democratic and conservative bourgeois were united against him".
[2] Notably in the recent biography of the American academic Jonathon Spencer who benefited from a wide-scale promotion throughout the media. This book is precisely called Karl Marx, a Man of the Nineteenth Century
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/jordan_protest002.jpg
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/01/videos-show-gunfire-amid-iran-protests-over-water-scarcity.html
[3] https://www.merip.org/mer/mer264/emergence-new-labor-movement-jordan
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/meeting_of_the_first_international.jpg