Seventy years of the National Health Service, founded in 1948, has been celebrated on TV, by a service at Westminster Abbey, and by numerous events in hospitals. The NHS is, in its own words, “our country’s most trusted and respected social institution”[1]. Even those who protest at the way it is run do so because they are against “the assault on the NHS” (Socialist Worker 3/3/18).  People love the NHS, and want to protect it. It all seems too good to be true, a national institution loved by all from the Countess of Wessex at the service in Westminster Abbey (even if royalty invariably use private hospitals) to the poorest in the land, and from right to extreme left of the political spectrum. This ideology, supported by all the bourgeoisie’s political forces, is based on many falsehoods.

The NHS lends itself to this ideological celebration partly because it offers medical treatment, often free at the point of use. There are many who are alive today because of that medical treatment. Also most NHS employees love their jobs caring for patients. These reactions are often translated into the idea that “I love the NHS”, especially by workers on strike and those aiming to support them. This confuses the NHS as a capitalist institution carried out by the state on behalf of the economy, judged in terms of monetary value, and the work that goes on in health care judged according to the human needs it fulfils. It is also, no doubt, a better poster institution than sewage and waterworks which are equally necessary to our health and life expectancy.

The circumstances of the formation of the NHS

The NHS is often presented as a gain won by the working class through the Attlee Labour government of 1945. Or perhaps “I thought that after the war the bourgeoisie introduced [the NHS and the welfare state] because they were scared of the threat of revolution and the influence of communist ideas, and all the returning soldiers were a real threat to the “social order”.[2] However, the working class was still defeated at the end of the Second World War. The Great War of 1914-18 was characterised by fraternisation on both the Western and Eastern fronts and ended by the start of the German revolution 100 years ago, following the Russian revolution in 1917. However the revolutionary wave was defeated, ushering in a period of counter-revolution and freeing the bourgeoisie to unleash the barbarism of the 1930s and 1940s. Class struggles never completely stop in capitalism, and there were limited strike movements even in the dark days of the war, notably in Italy in 1943, but the fact that the whole war could be conducted and brought to a successful conclusion without a commensurate reaction by the working class showed that it remained defeated. Not only was the working class in no condition to force the ruling class to grant reforms, but capitalism had entered its phase of war and revolution, its decadence, when it was no longer in a position to grant meaningful, lasting reforms to the whole class.

It is true that the ruling class was well aware of the danger the working class had represented at the end of the previous war, and it certainly acted to head off undeniable discontent toward the end of the Second World War. One example is the carpet bombing of civilian areas during the war, the better to pre-emptively massacre proletarians. Another was for advancing Allied forces to hang back and allow the German army to put down any resistance before entering. This was the meaning of Churchill’s idea of letting the “Italians … stew in their own juice”, i.e. let Germany put down the workers in 1943, or the Russian Army standing aside to enable the crushing of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. To the extent that the establishment of the NHS and the welfare state responded to this fear of the working class they did so by making workers feel loyalty towards and dependence on the state rather than their own capacity for struggle and solidarity. Discontent was also channelled into support for the Labour Party, although the Conservative Manifesto of 1945 shows they were not backward in advocating a “comprehensive health service” where “no one will be denied the attention, the treatment or the appliances he requires because he cannot afford them.”

The introduction of the NHS was certainly related to war. The British state had first become aware of the need to improve the health of the working class at the time of the Boer War when so many volunteers were unfit for military service.[3] In fact the NHS and the welfare state were as much the product of the wartime coalition as the Labour government. The 1945 election was won by Attlee who had been the deputy Prime Minister in the Coalition which had overseen the preparation of these policies. The 1944 Education Act extending secondary education was carried out by the Coalition. The NHS and welfare state were based on the Beveridge Report, by a Liberal economist, harking back to ideas put forward by Lloyd George before the First World War, and another Liberal economist, Keynes, was responsible for the ideas of full employment and state stimulation of the economy.[4] It was also part of a process of nationalisation (Bank of England, mines, railways, iron and steel…) which, although not supported by the Tories, followed on from the years of state direction of the economy during the war.

Even before privatisation

One of the ideas given for defending the NHS is that the real problem is privatisation. After all we don’t see people going round saying “I love BUPA”, even when some people have private health as part of their pay, nor even “I love Medicaid”. However, we should see what Beveridge said was intended by the welfare state: “The plan is not one for giving to everybody something for nothing and without trouble, or something that will free the recipients for ever thereafter from personal responsibilities. The plan is one to secure income for subsistence on condition of service and contribution and in order to make and keep men fit for service.” From the horse’s mouth you have it, the NHS is to keep workers “fit for service”, in work or in the military.

It was always the proud boast that in the UK we do not look for evidence of insurance before giving treatment, like they do in the USA. But the NHS has always been a compulsory, universal, National Insurance. Long before ‘privatisation’ this was demonstrated by a British national living in the USA without health insurance who returned in the hope of getting treatment for terminal cancer, only to be faced with a bill for her treatment in an NHS hospital because she was not insured here. She returned to the USA where she was entitled to Medicaid. This kind of thing has become much more systematic with campaigns against “health tourism”, guidelines about who can and cannot be treated on the NHS, and the “hostile environment” for immigrants which requires health services to scrutinise each patient’s right to treatment, or otherwise. But the principle remains.

Before ‘privatisation’ money was already a major concern in running the NHS, in particular a concern to keep costs down. There was always a long waiting list for treatment. The number of beds was steadily reduced. GP surgeries, always run as small businesses, were often in an atrocious condition. It was no golden age. ‘Privatisation’, integrating more private money and private health facilities into the NHS, has gone along with greater state control: targets, regular inspections, pressure to amalgamate small GP premises into more cost-effective businesses, guidelines to direct which medications and treatments can be used, all in the interest of moving more care out of hospitals, which are expensive, into “the community”.

State capitalism and the social wage

We have seen that the NHS was part of a wave of nationalisation by the post-war Attlee government, and that this followed on from the state direction of the economy, including health services, during the war. We have also seen that the need to have men fit for military service was what first prompted the ruling class to take an interest in improving the health of the working class. This is no accident, state capitalism itself is an aspect of the adaptation to a system of imperialism and war, or at least preparation for war. Left to itself and the control of the market, capital concentrates, often into huge multinational concerns that dwarf many small nations. State capitalism concentrates at a state level for political and military reasons, typically supporting or taking over loss-making industries necessary to the national economy, and typically this has been developed particularly around a war effort.

“The wage itself has been integrated into the state. Fixing wages at their capitalist value has devolved upon the state organs. Part of the workers’ wages is directly levied and administered by the state. Thus the state ‘takes charge’ of the life of the worker, controls his health (as part of the struggle against absenteeism) and directs his leisure (for purposes of ideological repression).”[5] The unions have been integrated into the state, and the state regulates minimum wages, and also takes over paying an aspect of wages, for instance with tax credit (or the universal credit to be brought in) and housing benefit that subsidise the wages paid by capital. The NHS is also an aspect of this.

The ideology of the NHS and welfare state as taking care of its citizens is very dangerous. Workers are encouraged to identify with those parts of the state that appear to benefit them, such as the NHS, and through this to humanise the state and identify with it as a good citizen. We should forget that it is imperialist, forget its involvement in various military adventures, forget its repressive role. This identification can also be used to sow divisions in the working class, the idea that the benefits are for the good citizens that have already contributed and should be denied to immigrants who have only recently arrived.

With this identification with the NHS, and through that with the state, we would be led to imagine that it can be induced to act in our interests if only we campaign hard enough or vote for the right people. In reality the state belongs to the ruling class and runs its imperialist war machine.  Alex 8/9/18

Ever since the UK’s Referendum of June 2016 the British bourgeoisie has been in a turmoil of division and instability. For generations identified as an experienced and skilful manipulator of the social situation, the British bourgeoisie, in the form of the Cameron government, made a fundamental mistake when, in trying to take the steam out of increasing populism, it called a referendum which resulted in a vote to leave the EU.

This was followed by a further error in 2017 when Theresa May called an election to strengthen the government’s position which ended with the Tories in a weaker position, dependent on the loyalist DUP. Since then negotiations with the EU, in as much as it’s possible to read between the lines, have, unsurprisingly, not appeared to have favoured the UK. And when, in July 2018, the Cabinet agreed the Chequers statement on the UK’s future relationship with the EU, it led to the resignations of Boris Johnson and David Davies, and general acknowledgement that divisions continued throughout the Conservative Party.

While May’s version of Brexit is not acclaimed, with even her Chancellor, Philip Hammond, disagreeing on the implications of ‘no deal’ for the British economy, there is not any coherent ‘hard Brexit’ alternative being offered, except the perspective of crashing out of the EU without an agreed deal. Jacob Rees-Mogg says it might be 50 years for the benefits of Brexit to be felt. Nigel Farage insisted that “I never said it would be a beneficial thing to leave and everyone would be better off,” – which, of course, he did - “just that we would be self-governing.” Boris Johnson is reported to have said “Fuck business”, a rather nihilistic response for a leading figure in a major capitalist party. To be fair to Johnson and Davies, they have both, since before the Referendum, been advocates of establishing the same sort of relationship with the EU as Canada has. The EU/Canada negotiations took 7 years or more and produced a 1600-page text of agreement. Whatever its merits, it’s not an option that’s currently on the table. In reality the Brexiters can only offer ‘no deal’.

At a time when a government is in disarray you would normally expect the opposition to be profiting from the situation. This is far from the case as the Labour Party has little to offer on the question of leaving EU while it expends increasing energy on accusations of antisemitism in its ranks. These accusations, based on the real racism and antisemitism in the Labour Party (not unusual in what is after all a party of capital) might have first been used as a means of putting pressure on Jeremy Corbyn, but have escalated into a cycle of claim and counter-claim which show the intensity of the divisions in the Labour Party and make it look a lot less likely prospect for government.

The option offered by Tony Blair and other Remainers of a second referendum appears to be based on a hopeless desire to turn back the clock to the time before the last referendum. A 4-million-signature petition has already been rejected by parliament, and the campaign seems to be based mainly on alarm at all the varieties of Brexit on offer. Labour says it would prefer a general election, which is what opposition parties are supposed to say.

Different responses to the growth of populism

Populism is an international phenomenon. Across the globe, with the experience of the effects of the economic crisis and a sense of powerlessness in the face of the impersonal force of globalised capitalism, the expression of anger and despair takes many forms. Dissatisfied by what mainstream parties offer there is a turning against potential scapegoats. “It’s all the fault of a metropolitan elite”. “Blame the bankers”. “Things wouldn’t be the way they are if it wasn’t for immigrants/refugees/Muslims”. “It’s all down to the Brussels bureaucrats”.  This is a product of the decomposition of capitalism. The major bourgeois parties have nothing to offer. On the other hand, with a historically low level of workers’ struggle, the proletarian alternative appears absent. This is the basis for the growth of populism.

There is not a specific policy or set of policies that characterises populism and in different countries the bourgeoisie’s established parties have responded in a number of ways to the development of populism. In the US, Trump was a candidate for a traditional party but with a populist agenda. He has criticised NATO and the CIA despite them being cornerstones of American imperialist policy, criticised the World Trade Organisation despite the role it plays for American capitalism, and flirts with Putin regardless of the machinations of Russian imperialism. Against this, his bourgeois opponents are finding that conventional politicking has little effect. They can call Trump a liar, investigate Russia’s role in the 2016 Presidential Election, look at the implications of hush money paid to various women, and speculate on the possibilities of an eventual impeachment. Trump is criticised by his bourgeois rivals for acting irresponsibly, but the introduction of trade tariffs, expulsion or barring of immigrants, and increased investment in US militarism, are all policies that have been pursued by others in defence of the interests of American national capital. They obey a definite logic in a world where “every man for himself” has been the dominant tendency since the break up of the blocs at the end of the 1980s.

In France the response to populism took a different form. Marine Le Pen’s Front National was a known force in French politics, but none of the established parties could produce a candidate who could have convincingly have taken her on. Investment banker Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche was created in 2016 in order to confront the populist forces represented by Le Pen. Macron’s victory in the May 2017 election for the French Presidency was a success for the French bourgeoisie. However, it is not clear how long-term this success will be sustained as the social situation that gives rise to populism still persists.

In Italy this year, after three months of negotiations following inconclusive elections, there emerged a coalition government of the League and 5-Star movement. Both of these populist parties, with very different policies, had made much of their opposition to the main established political parties. The League was for the expulsion of immigrants and more police on the streets. 5-Star, with more following in the poorer South of Italy, proposed reductions in the cost of living and a “minimum payment for the citizen”. In government they have followed up on their promises to attack migrants and immigration, but not so much on economic promises so far. With a certain scepticism towards the EU there is evidence that they will add further instability to the situation in Europe.

This is the global context for what’s happening with the British bourgeoisie. Specifically, the 2016 Referendum was an attempt to head off populism that failed. This failure has meant that Tories have had to pursue Brexit, which, along with anti-immigrant policies, is one of the centrepieces of populism, despite many of them having campaigned to stay in the EU. All the predictions of economic disaster remain in place, to which have been added talk of the need to stockpile food and medicines, warnings of the possibilities of social unrest, and forecasts of the implications for travel, trade, security and terrorism. If there have been some exaggerations in these prognostications – and predictions of doom have characterised the Remain camp –its aim has been to put pressure on the Brexiters to compromise. Two years after the Referendum the UK bourgeoisie is in a weaker position, more divided, and the possibility of a neat, orderly departure from the EU seems remote.

Divisions in the British bourgeoisie over Europe are nothing new. Back in the 1950s and 60s, before the UK joined the EEC in 1972, there were opponents of European integration in both Labour and Tory parties. The Referendum of 1975 strengthened the position of the pro-Europeans, but it did not mean that the divisions had gone away. The removal of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1990, for example, despite her agreement to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and the single European market, demonstrated that the dominant faction of the British bourgeoisie could tolerate only so many anti-European harangues. But, while the length and depth of divisions over Europe should not be underestimated, they have been exacerbated within decomposing capitalism by the rise of populism. This is an active factor in the situation that has contributed to the growing disarray in the British bourgeoisie. It’s a mess that doesn’t serve the interests of the British national capital.

At the Europe-wide level the threat of fragmentation is also growing. It’s not only in Italy that there are, to put it mildly, calls to re-assess national relations with the EU – there is also scepticism in Greece, Hungary and elsewhere in eastern Europe. For US capitalism there are economic advantages in a fragmented Europe: it’s a logical consequence of the end of imperialist blocs, and a part of the bourgeoisie around Trump is convinced that the US can make deals with countries separately. Russian imperialism is definitely in favour of undermining the unity of the EU, principally for military-strategic reasons. On the other hand, German economic interests are not served at all by the fragmentation of the European market, and as for Chinese capitalism, its globalisation policy requires a more open world market rather than a return to national protectionism.

So, the problems of the British bourgeoisie, whether the UK leaves with a deal that will satisfy no one, or, in the case of no deal, falls off a cliff into uncharted waters, have to be seen in the international context of decomposing capitalism. None of the capitalist options on offer, whether by traditional parties or populist parties, whether in or out of the EU, can benefit the working class in any way. For the international working class the path of conscious struggle is the only route out of the horrors and deprivations of capitalism.  Car 8/9/18

The summer of 2018 has produced the hottest ever recorded temperatures across the northern hemisphere, and across 4 continents with an untold number of people dead as a consequence. Canada had an all-time record of 36℃ and 18 days that exceeded 30℃ with many deaths reported, Texas had 10 continual days of between 39-44℃, Algeria recorded 51℃, said to be a record for the continent of Africa. Tokyo, Japan had 41 ℃ with over one hundred people dead and many hospitalised; South Korea had its hottest temperatures too. In Europe Stockholm had it hottest July since records began and Sodankyla, a town in Finnish Lapland just north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 32.1℃, 12℃ warmer than typical for the month. Quriyat in Oman baked under a minimum temperature of 42.6℃ for a whole 24 hours at the beginning of July. In the southern hemisphere parts of Australia have experienced serious drought for a couple of months. There has been disruption to industry and farming.

There have been some horrendous fires. There were said to be at one time as many as 16 individual fires burning on the west coast of the US, with several people, including 4 firemen killed; the holiday resort of Mati, near Athens, was almost completely destroyed by wildfires where at least 80 people died, trapped in homes and cars, unable to escape to the sea. Wildfires in Sweden devastated land as far north as the Arctic Circle, said to be an area the equivalent of 900 football pitches; some 80,000 hectares of forest were burning in Siberia. In Britain too, the hot dry weather which started back in the Spring, as in several other European countries, has given rise to parched gardens and grasslands with farmers using their winter food stocks to feed their animals. There have also been fires across some of the peat-filled moorlands in the north of the country that have been difficult to bring under control because they continued burning to a depth of one metre or more.

A strong factor in this heatwave has been the weak and unusual course of the Jet Stream, which is normally a key agent in steering the weather patterns across the globe. The recent Jet Stream has been extremely weak and has been in a position well to the north of the UK; this allowed widespread high pressure to persist for longer over many places. In addition there have been substantial changes to sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic. “These are part of a phenomenon known as the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation,” said Professor Adam Scaife, of the Met Office, “in fact, the situation is very like the one we had in 1976, when we had similar ocean temperatures in the Atlantic and an unchanging jet stream that left great areas of high pressure over many areas for long periods, and of course, that year we had one of the driest, sunniest and warmest summers in the UK in the 20th century.” (Guardian, 22/7/18). But since 1976 there have been several decades of global warming - caused by the rising volumes of carbon emissions - adding to global temperatures. Consequently there is more residual heat absorbed in land and sea. We are also seeing a warming of the ice-caps. On August 22nd, the Guardian reported “The oldest and thickest sea ice in the Arctic has started to break up, opening waters north of Greenland that are normally frozen, even in summer. This phenomenon - which has never been recorded before - has occurred twice this year owing to warm winds and a climate-change driven heatwave in the northern hemisphere”.

The extreme weather isn’t just a case of excessive temperatures. There have been some storms and flash flooding too. On August 3rd across parts of America’s east coast 49 million people “were under flash flood watch” from Maine to the Carolinas; Japan had heavy flooding on its west coast, prior to its heatwave; in the Indian state of Kerala the worse monsoon floods in a century have killed 341 people since May, 191 of them since August 8th, mainly through landslides; 220,000 people were forced to flee their homes.

While the evidence of rising global temperatures and increased global warming is increasingly beyond dispute, the climatic characteristics do not follow a linear pattern. There are certain variables like the effect of El Nino, a strong weather front that brings extreme weather from the source of the Pacific Ocean. It was largely due to El Nino that 2016 was the hottest year on record at the time but the previous El Nino of a similar intensity was back in 1998. However, of the top ten hottest years on record, nine were this century, the other is 1998. According to Sybren Drifhout, professor of physical geography and climate physics at Southampton University, there has been a lapse in global warming at the beginning of the 21st century, a phenomenon known as “global warming hiatus” (despite this, the summer heatwave of 2003 across Europe was responsible for thousands of deaths, mainly the elderly), while agreeing the evidence points to an increased likelihood of a recurrence of hot summers. His predictions are that heatwaves will now become more frequent: “if (our) new predictions are correct, we are heading for a less benign phase where natural forces amplify the affects of man-made climate change.” (The Times, 15/08/18). The new forecast from an international team including the researchers of Southampton University suggests there is “a 58% chance that the Earth’s overall temperature from 2018 through 2022 would be anomalously warm, and a 69% chance that the oceans would be” (ibid).

Nasa (the US space agency) says that the past four years have been the four warmest years on record. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in its 2017 annual report on environment statistics said that it was the warmest ‘non El Nino’ year on record, that sea levels reached an all-time high, that both poles saw a record low ice and it was the most active hurricane season since 2005, with the US suffering 16 major disasters with a total combined financial losses of over $300 billion. Much of this is the result of the three powerful hurricanes, Harvey, Irma and Maria that inflicted heavy damage on various parts of the US, Houston, Florida and Puerto Rico respectively. And it is warmer oceans that trigger more violent hurricanes. Previously 64 lives were said to have been lost on Puerto Rico, but a recent report from the University of Washington said it was almost 3,000, more than the lives lost with Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. The figures were made worse owing to the US government’s lack of response to the needs of the islanders.

Capitalism doesn’t have the answer

For the last 30 years there have been reports and international conferences on global warming, expressing the growing concern of the ruling class, but at the same time designed to make us believe that something is being done to deflect the planet from the catastrophic course ahead. An Intergovernmental Commission on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1990 by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organisation with a brief to monitor the ongoing situation and to come up with strategies. It helped draw up the Kyoto Protocol which set the developed countries targets in reducing their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; this process of monitoring continued up to 2012 with the USA and Australia opting out. ‘Developing’ countries, such as India or China, were not expected to comply since they needed time to grow their economies; the issue of the environment was secondary. So it was full speed ahead for China: “In 2007 China overtook the US as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases because it was so dependent on this fossil fuel (i.e. coal). For each unit of energy, coal produces 80 per cent more carbon dioxide than natural gas, and 20 per cent more than oil. This does not even include the methane released from mines, for which China accounts for almost half the global total, or spontaneous combustion of coal seams, which burns 100 megatons of coal each year..(...) For another two decades China would be trapped in a coal-dependent economy (...) ‘Even if China utilises every kind of energy to the maximum level, it is difficult for us to produce enough energy for economic development. It is not a case of choosing coal or renewables. We need both’, the senior scientist said.”  (Jonathan Watts, When a billion Chinese jump, 2010)

This apparent “half-hearted” approach in response to climate change, even from politicians who recognise the danger of climate change, shows that demanding that capitalism limit global warming in effect means demanding that capitalism cease to be capitalism. While the Stern report in 2006 points to the ‘economic sense’ of cutting GHGs, capitalism is not a unified system based on what makes sense for humanity as a whole, but a system of competing national interests where the only economic sense is based on the short-term and short-sighted interests of the national capital. In fact Stern demonstrated precisely why capitalism is failing to respond to the problem: he is all for recommending constrains on GHG emissions “except where such restraints would lead to a significant decline in economic growth (capital accumulation)” (quoted in The Ecological Rift, John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York). For capital, and its political representatives, sustainable development means sustainable capital accumulation in terms of profit, regardless of whether this is harmful or dangerous to human beings in the short (air pollution), medium or long term (climate change).

Global warming is considered to have increased temperatures by over 1℃ over the last 100 years of industrialisation. Realistic predictions for future global temperatures talk of an increase by as much as 5℃ by the end of the century, with the full knowledge of the horrors this would bring. We should stress that the most harm in the future will be inflicted on the poorest countries and their citizens. They are the most vulnerable to climate change. They have fewer resources to combat the devastating storms, the floods, the rising sea levels, the heat and the droughts, the occurrence of these extreme weather conditions. Back in 2009 we highlighted this: “A report made public by the World Humanitarian Forum’, (...) re-evaluates the effects of climate change. Because it’s not only a very serious threat for the future, with 250 million ‘climate refugees’ predicted by 2050, but also a major contemporary crisis which is already killing 300,000 people a year around the world. More than half of the 300,000 deaths are the result of malnutrition. Then come the health problems, because global warming serves to propagate numerous diseases. Thus, 10 million new cases of malaria, resulting in 55,000 deaths, have been identified. These victims join the 3 million people who die each year from this disease. Here again the populations of the poorer countries are the most affected because they are the last to have access to the necessary medicines. The rise in temperatures attested by all serious scientists has a direct impact on agricultural yields and access to water, and this again hits the poor first and foremost. (see WR 326, ‘Global warming: capitalism kills’). So the countries with the lowest GHG emissions that will suffer the most from climate change are those with least capacity to affect any change at a global, international level.

The Economist magazine has produced its own despondent assessment: “Three years after countries vowed in Paris to keep warming ‘well below’ 2℃ relative to pre-industrial levels, greenhouse gas emissions are up again. So are investments in oil and gas. In 2017 for the first time in 4 years, demand for coal rose. Subsidies for renewables such as wind and solar power are dwindling in many places and investment has stalled; climate-friendly nuclear power is expensive and unpopular. It is tempting to think that these are temporary set-backs and that mankind, with its instincts for self-preservation, will muddle through to a victory over global warming. In fact, it is losing the war ...” (The Economist, ‘The world is losing the war against climate change’ 04/08/18). In fact it is very easy for journalists at The Economist or elsewhere to show how bad things are, and what investors or politicians should do, although we have seen that it cannot be effective within capitalism. But what we need to say about Trump’s decision to leave the Paris deal is this: the danger is not that it will prevent the USA carrying out the measures required, but that he will fool us into thinking that by comparison Democratic politicians, or the countries still holding to the Paris accords, are doing something more than “greenwashing” the real problem.

Capitalism is driving the world towards disaster, reflecting its blind and destructive impulses and its historical bankruptcy. This leopard cannot change its spots or its course. This is why movements and organisations that think it is possible to make the capitalist system peace-loving, rational and sensitive to humanity’s needs are peddling illusions. The working class struggle will more and more need to take up the question of mankind’s relationship with the natural world, because it is the only force that can bring the juggernaut of capitalist accumulation to a halt and unite humanity in a common purpose. Duffy,  07/09/18

“President Trump said Friday that tariffs on another $267 billion in Chinese goods are ready to go and could be rolled out on short notice, reinforcing earlier threats and signaling no end in sight for the growing trade dispute. Speaking aboard Air Force One en route to Fargo, N.D., Mr. Trump said the tariffs would be in addition to the tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods the administration has been preparing, which he said will ‘take place very soon, depending on what happens.’” Wall Street Journal, 8/9/18.

On the same page you can watch a video speculating on how the Chinese might hit back[1]. The Trump administration has also announced severe tariffs on imports from the EU – described by Trump on his recent European visit as a “foe” – and even from its neighbours and partners in the so-called North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico and Canada.

The spectre of an accelerating trade war is haunting capitalism. It may seem difficult to understand in a period where production has never been so global and the “free movement of capital and labour” has been an almost unassailable credo of the world’s leading politicians and economists for decades. But it is precisely the inherent contradiction between capital’s thrust towards conquering the globe, and the inhibiting framework of the nation state, which is behind this new surge of protectionism. 

Global v national: an insurmountable contradiction

In the Grundrisse Marx provides us with a key to grasping why the nation state,  as a political expression of capitalist social relations, must itself become a fetter on the global development of the productive forces: “the universality towards which it (i.e. capital) irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognised as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own overcoming”[2]. In 1916, in the wake of the clearest possible expression of this barrier – the first imperialist world war –Trotsky could be more precise: “The nation state has outgrown itself – as a framework for the development of the productive forces, as a basis for class struggle, and especially as the state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” (Nashe Slovo, 4 February 1916) 

The very survival of the nation state had become an added element in the growing contradictions of capital at both the economic and military levels

These contradictions have grown sharper over the past 100 years despite all the efforts of the bourgeoisie to contain them. In the 1930s, the protectionist response of the US to the depression, alongside the rise of the fascist and Stalinist siege economies, deepened the world crisis of overproduction by further restricting the global market. Fortunately for the bourgeoisie, but tragically for humanity, capitalism confronted a defeated working class and was able to “solve” the problem through a gigantic military mobilisation and the subsequent reorganisation of the world market. 

The post-1945 world order was, in part, based on the recognition that limits had to be imposed on national competition. Formally this was expressed in the establishment of the United Nations Organisation, but in reality it was the two-bloc system founded on the rule of the bloc leader and the subordination of its allies that lay at the heart of the new order. Since it was aimed at the rival bloc, it contained the permanent threat of nuclear war and endless conflict at the peripheries, but it also ensured a certain discipline in these conflicts; at the same time, combined with Keynesian economic management and real expansion into new areas following the demise of the old empires like Britain and France, it allowed for a certain stability and economic development.

The crisis of this phase of state capitalism manifested itself first at the economic level: “stagflation” and the beginnings of open unemployment towards the end of the 1960s. The critics of what they called “socialism” or the “mixed economy” argued that direct state management obstructed the free operation of market forces (and there was indeed some truth in this, as we noted in our theses on the crisis in the eastern bloc[3]). The new approach pioneered under Thatcher, Reagan etc was called neo-liberalism because it presented itself as a return to 19th century laisser-faire; in reality, as we always insisted, it was a new version of state capitalism (the German term “ordo-liberalism” is perhaps a more honest description) which was directed by a highly repressive central state

The international face of neo-liberalism is “globalisation”, which began to be a common term in the 90s, i.e. following the collapse of the eastern bloc. There is a deep falsehood in this concept, since it is based on the argument that capitalism had only become global once the “socialist” countries had disappeared: in reality, the Stalinist regimes were a particular form of the world capitalist system. Nevertheless, the end of the autarkic model of the eastern bloc countries made a real economic expansion possible: not so much into the old countries of the Russian bloc, but into areas like India, China, South East Asia etc. This expansion had a number of underlying elements: the technological developments that allowed a much faster circulation of capital and a reorganisation of global industrial networks; a more directly economic dimension, in which capital was able to penetrate new extra-capitalist areas and make use of much cheaper labour power, while at the same time making gigantic profits through the swelling of the financial sector; and also a social element, since the break-up of industrial concentrations in the “old” capitalist countries, driven by the hunt for new sources of profit, also had the effect of atomising centres of class militancy.  

The US looks to bail out of its own world order

This new post-Cold War order remained one under the aegis of the US despite the increasing erosion of US domination at the imperialist level, especially around events in the Middle East. International organisms created in the previous period (IMF, World Bank, WTO) survived and were still US-led. Rival trading blocs, in particular the EU, were accepted as necessary by the US.

But this new order also corresponded to the advancing decomposition of capitalist society, creating powerful centrifugal forces that tended to undermine the state and inter-state structures of the ruling class. Decomposition not only pits nation against nation in an increasing free-for-all, but even precipitates the disintegration of nations, starting with the “failed states” at the peripheries but spreading towards the centre (cf the Catalonia crisis in Spain, even the drive towards Scottish independence in the UK). At the political level, these tendencies are the soil for the growth of populism, a form of reaction against the parties and institutions tied to the “neo-liberal” world order which has overseen a massive increase in inequality, the ruin of whole areas of traditional production and a growing inability to deal with the problems posed by the refugee crisis and the terrorist “blowback” in the capitalist centres. These latter phenomena were to a large extent the unwanted results of imperialist wars in the Middle East and elsewhere – in turn the product of the USA’s efforts to preserve its world hegemony through the application of its undisputed military superiority.

At the economic level, the growth of populism can be linked to the financial crash of 2008, which was the first major sign of the limits of the new economic world order with its growing addiction to speculation and debt. The fragility of the “recovery” since 2008 can be gauged by the fact that most of the remedies adopted by the capitalist states have been founded on the same basic policies that led to the crash in the first place: a state supported bail out of the centres of global speculation – the big banks, the printing of money, and an even greater recourse to debt. Even China, which has been presented as the new workshop of the world, a place where real production is the basis of the economy, is now facing a debt crisis which threatens its huge economic and imperialist ambitions. [4]

Thus the rise of populism expresses the attempt to turn away from the “globalised” order and withdraw behind national borders, increasingly combining neo-Keynesian social measures with vicious policies of exclusion. Most of these policies are anathema to the common sense of the mouthpieces of globalisation, as we saw with the reaction of a large panel of economic experts to the latest shots in Trump’s trade war, recalling the lessons learned from the utter failure of similar policies in the 1930s[5].

There have been real counter-attacks to the populist upsurge by those who still uphold the old order (the Macron election, the investigations into Trump in the US, the united response of Europe to Trump’s trade tariffs, etc) but the populist upsurge continues to grow and to have increasing effects on the economic crisis and imperialist conflicts. Trump has had to back-track again and again (on Russia, on China, North Korea, migrants) but his policies are supported by a significant section of the ruling class who want to continue the policy of tax cuts and favours to certain industries, as well as by a “base” kept on board by his culture wars positions, but also by economic bribes (tax bonuses, social programmes, tariffs on foreign goods that raise hopes of reviving jobs in old industries).

The ICC’s June report on imperialist tensions[6] emphasises that we shouldn’t underestimate the method in Trump’s madness, aimed at imposing a situation in which the US is at the very heart of ‘every man for himself’, but including a network of deals and bilateral agreements which aim at pulling apart existing alliances. Yanis Varoufakis, the ex-Syriza economist who now uses his knowledge of Marx to advertise ways of saving capitalism, provides some backing for this argument in a recent article in The Guardian: “Armed with the exorbitant privilege that owning the dollar presses affords him, Trump then takes a look at the trade flows with the rest of the G7 and comes to an inescapable conclusion: he cannot possibly lose a trade war against countries that have such high surpluses with the US (eg Germany, Italy, China), or which (like Canada) will catch pneumonia the moment the American economy catches the common cold”[7].

Furthermore, the capacity of Trump to survive and pursue his methods is giving heart to populist solutions elsewhere, above all in Europe: Britain, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, Germany, and now Italy. Italy’s new regime above all represents a threat to the euro and the EU itself. Italy’s huge debts can be used as a basis for blackmail because the EU cannot allow Italy’s economy to fail, while an Italian exit would be a huge disaster for the EU; at the same time as a main landing post for the refugee problem its current stance threatens to undermine any unified response to the migrant crisis[8].

This doesn’t mean that the warnings of the “experts” about the dangers inherent in the return to protectionism are ill-founded. Populism is, in part at least, a product of the economic crisis but its policies cannot fail to deepen it – the short term benefits protectionism may bring to this or that national economy will have destructive long term effects on the world system. But neither can the “globalists” create a truly world order since capitalism is irrevocably tied to competition between national units organised around the bourgeois state. The necessity of communism, of a world human community without borders and states, is continually highlighted by the present international crisis, even when the proletariat itself, the bearer of the communist project, seems to be very far from grasping this perspective.   Amos 8/9/18