"In honour of what cause do we perish?"

On April 26 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, exploded with around the force of four Hiroshima-type bombs and spewed out a consequent volume of radioactive fallout that had its own fingerprints on it. The response of the Russian authorities was completely chaotic, totally insufficient, and mendacious.  The rulers of this "socialist paradise" left hundreds of thousands of their citizens to their fate, to the growing ambient decomposition of "every man for himself" that was to be the hallmark of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the political and social tremors around the wider world three years later.

Panicked authorities gave no significant warnings such as staying indoors, or point out the dangers to food, milk and drinking water. The May Day parades in Kiev of thousands of schoolchildren were forced to go ahead a few days later and group after group of them marched. The kids struggled for breath and for many their skin showed unusual purple sunburns. Technology was used to seed rain clouds and bring the radioactive fall-out away from Moscow and down into Ukraine and Belarus. Soldiers, workers, prisoners showed exceptional bravery in trying to put the reactor's fire out but the official disaster death toll of 54 of these "liquidators" is plainly another big lie.

There was a military dimension to Chernobyl in that it produced plutonium for nuclear bombs. There had already been 1042 nuclear accidents in the USSR over five years, with 104 at Chernobyl alone. Forget about the usual lie of "operator failure", Chernobyl's RBMK reactor was inherently unsafe and efforts to stop it melting down fed more fuel to the fire. By summer 1986, 15,000 people exposed to Chernobyl's radiation were treated in Moscow's hospitals; 40,000 checked into hospitals in Kiev, Gomel and elsewhere in the east of the country. Half of the 11,600 treated in Belarus were children. The Central Committee of the Communist Party was told by the Minister for Health that 299 people were hospitalised; part of "the Politburo's alternative universe", says Kate Brown.  Not that being hospitalised did much good in the face of an already patchy and overburdened service that sorely lacked ed beds, equipment and, most of all, knowledge about what they were dealing with. What they were dealing with was not only ignorance, but also the lies and smoothing words of a state that called itself socialist but was in reality a highly statified form of capitalism.

Widespread contamination and official cover-up

The spiralling wind carried the radioactive debris from Chernobyl right around Europe and the heavy rain brought it down to accumulate the poison into "hot-spots", with  for example three in Britain, Cumbria, Wales and Devon, about which there was no official explanation - not a word. In the years after the explosion the amount of strontium-90 in the bones of people living in Zagreb, nearly a thousand miles away, doubled. In Ukraine and Belarus and other parts of the USSR, people continued to eat the meat, fruit, vegetables, drink the milk and water, and burn the peat fuel and timber that were all repositories for accumulated and accumulating radioactive cocktails. Lorries were way above the "safe" levels for contamination - given that the safe levels were arbitrary and deliberately underestimated - after carrying sheep's wool and other by-products saturated with radioactivity. Some produce taken through EU contaminated areas was chopped-up with "clean" stuff and sent as aid to Africa. Blueberries from Ukraine and Belarus continued to be picked, warehoused, put in fancy containers and sent to the EU. All the blueberries from this region were radioactive, some of them highly so. They were mixed up with the lower doses and sold in supermarkets and delis across the EU, after which ubiquitous TV food programmes extolled their "miraculous health benefits".

Kate Brown has done a real service in her research and analysis and though no revolutionary her analysis clearly indicts a system of production for profit and militarism for the unfolding public health disaster. Her odysseys in and around the exclusion zone, talking to workers, farmers, peasants and officials at every level, are interesting and revealing, giving this book a much more urgent feel. She was in the Soviet Union before and after its collapse where she clearly identifies a chaotic situation where everyone was left to their own devices, the plunder and ruthlessness of the security forces that harassed, jailed and tortured anyone who suggested that a public health disaster was unfolding.

But this is not a "this is where communism gets you" diatribe that runs alongside the "victory of capitalism". Kate Brown rightly exposes the calculated callousness, stupidity and cruelty of the Russian bourgeoisie but also talks to many brave individuals throughout Russia who raised the alarm and continued to do research and ask questions, with some of them paying a heavy price. In Ukraine, Belarus and other parts of Russia there were widespread strikes and disquiet and cynicism regarding official "explanations" and their advice (the Manual reference in the book's title refers to the manuals that the Russian authorities put out after the disaster along the lines of there being "no problem", with the actual problems being obliquely referred to afterwards). The book goes far wider and deeper than one incident and Kate Brown makes the point that the Chernobyl event is only one part of a continuum of nuclear pollution from the Cold War until now, and she  clearly illuminates the cover-up that necessarily accompanies it.

In East and West – the ruling class is careless about life

The US general in charge of the nuclear bombing of Japan, Leslie Groves, rejected claims of nuclear poisoning, and the medical section of the US army report on the physical damage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is missing from the US National Archives to this day. It was dismissed as "something small", "to be disregarded". In the Three-Mile-Island disaster, Pennsylvania 1979, scientists estimated one or two extra cancers. When State Health Commissioner Gordon McLeod announced 9 months later that child mortality in a ten-mile radius had doubled, he was sacked. Apart from all the nuclear "accidents" before and since Chernobyl - Windscale, Dounreay, before, St. Louis and Fukushima after, to name only a couple, nuclear testing has set off bombs, sometimes in secret, high in the atmosphere and deep into the ground with no concern as to their effects. The normally conservative US National Cancer Institute estimated that nuclear tests in Nevada caused between 11,000 and 220,000 thyroid cancers downwind. To this can be added all other nuclear testing, secret or not, British, French, Pakistani, Indian and Chinese.

In 2015, the physicist James Smith published a one-and-a-half page paper stating that wildlife was abundant in the alienation zone of Chernobyl. Smith had never been to Russia but the media lapped it up, reporting and re-reporting it along the lines that "nature will sort everything out". It even gave rise to "Green" eco-tourism around the Chernobyl zone, documentaries and TV wildlife programmes showing how everything was returning to "normal". But as Kate Brown shows, intrepid scientific researchers in the same area at the same time were finding radioactive damage "under every rock they turned over". Nature has bitten back against nuclear pollution with a vengeance on a global scale and in the long term. Despite all the evidence the UN and its offshoots continue to deny the scale of the problem. The idea that a little radioactivity is good for you persists. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) continues with high and arbitrary thresholds. In 1995 Unscear (UN Scientific Committee for the Effects of Nuclear Radiation) said nothing needed to be done because there was no problem and that they had been "exaggerated and incorrect", with the UN saying that increasing thyroid problems are "easily treatable".

The cynical balance-sheets of capital

Nuclear fallout permeates a human body through the skin and through every orifice. It's not the sole cause of cancers but a major cause. It also causes respiratory problems, heart problems, gut problems and those of the brain and nervous system. We were told that the rise in cancers was mainly due to the fact that "people are living longer" and through advances in medical care. The "living longer" line is one the bourgeoisie uses a lot: you're getting ill - it's because you are living longer; it's your fault - die earlier and save the state some money! In any case life expectancy is now falling in the US and Britain and much more dramatically in poorer areas while the male fertility rate is falling, particularly in the northern hemisphere where radioactivity tends to cluster. And the argument about living longer doesn't explain the rise in childhood cancers; twenty to twenty-five years ago a child with cancer would bring doctors and specialists from far and wide. Now? Now they appear in clusters everywhere in young bodies which soak up and accumulate nuclear pollution.

And while nuclear energy has a strong military component,  it is also an important source of energy in the capitalist economy. And as such it is a typical showcase of the short-sighted, unsustainable) approach inherent in capitalist economic balance-sheets. Thus for example the calculation of the cost of energy production in a nuclear plant never takes into consideration the huge technical difficulties involved in getting rid of nuclear waste. All the different ways of getting rid of it or even just storing it involve astronomical costs, which will be an ecological and economic burden for centuries. All this is of no interest to the respective energy companies.

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Kate Brown notes with disgust that in the 1960's the western bourgeoisie came up with the concept of the "collective dose" of radiation (ignoring its accumulative and complex interactions) giving a cynical and arbitrary "cost benefit" which weighed the negatives of nuclear testing on the population against the "positives of increased security" from possessing tested nuclear weapons. Decadent capitalism is driven to develop its weapons of destruction in order to defend itself against the historical obsolescence of the national state, which is a central factor in its permanent drive towards war. It is irrational and dangerous but capitalism is enmeshed in this logic and will continue this deadly drive whatever the cost; nature is already having its revenge. This is the “cause in whose honour we perish” in answer to the question raised by those immediately affected in Ukraine. The calculated indifference to the suffering masses by the state, the lies, the blatant cover-ups of the facts, the deceit are not aberrations but an inevitable part of a system based on exploitation, profit and national defence..

Baboon, 3.5.2019

 

 

 

In reality the working class has no stake in the Brexit imbroglio, no camp to choose among the many factions or the umpteen ‘solutions’. All the arguments in the Brexit debate are ultimately to do with the best conditions in which to manage the capitalist economic crisis, the best way to compete with other capitalist swindlers on the world market, with the ultimate aim of extracting the maximum surplus value from the working class and deciding amongst the bourgeoisie who gets the biggest cut.

The inexorable decline of workers’ living standards - now there are 14 million in poverty in Britain according to the latest UN report - began long before Brexit and will continue whatever ‘solution’ is found to the EU conundrum.

And behind Brexit is the question of Britain’s imperialist role in the world and which military conflicts the proletariat will have to pay for.

Workers have no interest or benefit in any of these ‘national interests’. Even if, in the fantasy of the no-deal Brexiteers, immigration were to stop, the erosion of workers’ livelihoods would continue. Even if Britain remained in the EU, workers would still be the target of austerity measures like those imposed on the Greek proletariat.

Indeed, the ongoing media circus about the Brexit mess is used as a means of obscuring the central questions for the working class and pretending that the latter has no interests and perspective of its own.

The different factions in the Labour Party play a full part in creating and maintaining this smokescreen concerning the real interests of the working class, and are barely distinguishable from the Tory factions. Jeremy Corbyn and the ‘hard left’ only provide a subsidiary diversion, with the promise of ‘nationalisations’, the pretence of ‘redistributing wealth’ - which means in reality making poverty more equitable - or on the world arena supporting an alternative set of imperialist gangsters. The Trotskyists and other leftists have still more radical variations on these illusions.

All these political games of the bourgeois parties help to reinforce the present disorientation of the working class.

However, sooner or later, the further worsening of the economic crisis will oblige the working class to revive the struggle to defend its living conditions, to recognise itself as an autonomous class once more and expose more clearly the fact that the present social system has no alternative to the decline of its system other than a growing barbarism.

This renewed class struggle will reveal itself as a political struggle. But the working class has nothing to gain from the bourgeois state or the parliamentary game which, as Brexit shows, excludes the political interests and participation of the proletariat. In the future the working class will therefore have to re-create its own mass organisations of political power and a revolutionary political party.  Como  25.5.19

1. The historical and international significance of the UK’s exit from the EU marks a qualitative acceleration of the impact of decomposition on the political life of the world bourgeoisie. Brexit demonstrates the increasing impact of populism, the political expression of the deepening of capitalist decomposition, which has also taken the form of populist governments in eastern Europe and Italy, and the strengthening of populist parties and factions in Western Europe and the US.  The Brexit mess has become a veritable caricature of political crises internationally.

With the impasse over Brexit, the whole of the British bourgeoisie, state and society has been thrown into a political crisis due to the irresponsibility of minority factions of the bourgeoisie, the result of the contamination of these factions by the upsurge of populism.

To this can be added the other manifestations of the deepening historical crisis: the growing undermining of the post-World War Two institutions of the Pax Americana: the EU, WTO, the World Bank, NATO, and, underlying all this, the irresolvable global economic crisis.

The historical roots

2. Brexit has been able to have such an impact in Britain because of the historical tensions within the ruling class over Europe that have been generated by its decline as an imperialist power. Before 1956 the British ruling class believed it could influence Europe from outside, but after the humiliation of Suez it had to accept the end of its time as an international power of the first rank. Being part of Europe was not only about economic stability but also, very importantly, about continuing the long-term British imperialist policy of trying to keep the continental powers divided, and particularly of opposing the influence of German imperialism.

At the same time, British imperialism also needed to balance its involvement in Europe with the “special relationship” with the USA, a relationship that only really had substance if the UK was part of Europe.

Fundamentally British imperialism had been grudging about having to be part of the EU; nevertheless it had bitten the bullet in order to further the national interest.

Growing chaos and the question of Europe

3. The end of the division of the world into two imperialist blocs in 1989 unleashed powerful centrifugal tendencies. The Eastern bloc collapsed and the Western bloc lost its reason for existence. This pushed all the major imperialist powers into a new historical period, trying to find the best way to defend the national interest in a much more chaotic world. At the imperialist level this meant all of the secondary powers having to navigate international waters in which the US was in decline, and thus all the more determined to maintain its role.

This placed great pressure on the British bourgeoisie, exacerbating the already existing divisions within it, especially in its political apparatus, over how best to defend the national interest in relation to Europe. The rise of German imperialism over the last 30 years and the weight of French imperialism in the EU have both underlined the weakened role of Britain. Thatcher’s stated disquiet about the impact of the rise of Germany expressed a deep historical fear haunting British imperialism, fueling Euroscepticism within the Tory party and xenophobia amongst its electorate. By the early 2010s the ability of the British bourgeoisie to manoeuvre within the EU was thus being undermined due to the increasing weight of Euroscepticism within the Tory party and to the electoral successes of UKIP. It was this that led to the decision to hold the referendum in 2016.

The disaster of the referendum and the impact of populism

4. The political gamble of calling the referendum to counter the growing influence of Euroscepticism and populism ran up against a number of fundamental problems. In particular, the bourgeoisie underestimated the depth of the impact of populism within the population and parts of the working class, the result of:

- the proletariat’s loss of confidence in itself over the last 30 years under the impact of a series of important defeats;

- the growing weight of despair and lumpenisation in areas and regions which have been abandoned to rot;

- a growing cynicism and distrust towards the parliamentary system, not in the context of a developing proletarian alternative but rather in one of confusion, frustration and anger which has left parts of the proletariat prey to the influence of populism. The fact that the Leave campaign was able to mobilise 3 million to vote who had previously abandoned voting enabled them to win the referendum;

- the use of Euroscepticism as a panacea for austerity, the blaming of immigration for the decrease in workers’ living standards.

- the ideology of blaming the economic recession of 2008 on the bankers and the traditional political elites, rather than capitalism itself.

The depth of the political crisis

5. Brexit has thrown the British bourgeoisie, one of the oldest and most experienced in the world, into a profound political crisis. It has faced other crises but never one which has so fundamentally weakened every aspect of its political life.

In the Theses on Decomposition of 1990 the ICC showed that this was one of the manifestations of decomposition:

“Amongst the major characteristics of capitalist society’s decomposition, we should emphasise the bourgeoisie’s growing difficulty in controlling the evolution of the political situation. Obviously, this is a result of the ruling class’ increasing loss of control over its economic apparatus, the infrastructure of society. The historic dead-end in which the capitalist mode of production finds itself trapped, the successive failures of the bourgeoisie’s different policies, the permanent flight into debt as a condition for the survival of the world economy, cannot but effect the political apparatus which is itself incapable of imposing on society, and especially on the working class, the ‘discipline’ and acquiescence necessary to mobilise all its strength for a new world war, which is the only historic ‘response’ that the bourgeoisie has to give. The absence of any perspective (other than day-to-day stop-gap measures to prop up the economy) around which it could mobilise as a class, and at the same time the fact that the proletariat does not yet threaten its own survival, creates within the ruling class, and especially within its political apparatus, a growing tendency towards indiscipline and an attitude of ‘every man for himself’”[1]

30 years ago, when the Theses were published, the main expression of this dynamic was the collapse of the Eastern bloc. However, as we said at the time:

“The spectacle which the USSR and its satellites are offering us today, of a complete rout within the state apparatus itself, and the ruling class’ loss of control over its own political strategy is in reality only the caricature (due to the specificities of the Stalinist regimes) of a much more general phenomenon affecting the whole world ruling class, and which is specific to the phase of decomposition”.

6. The political destabilisation of the ruling class in Britain has been most graphically expressed in the chaos that has developed as the date for the UK’s exit from the EU has drawn ever closer. This has led to the paralysis of parliament. The British state was once seen as a master of controlling the political situation; now the political apparatus is being openly mocked, but also distrusted, due to its inability to manage the Brexit process.

The main factions of the state accepted that they had no option but to accept Brexit following the referendum. Nevertheless, British state capitalism has sought to do all it can to try and make the best of a very bad situation. The main factions in the Tory and Labour Parties around May and Corbyn accepted this policy. But with the deepening tensions generated by the realisation of the full implications of Brexit, each of the parties has become increasingly divided by numerous factions pushing their own solutions to the irreconcilable contradictions of Brexit. Even within the main factions of the Tory and Labour Parties there are divisions over how to achieve a planned Brexit. May has to struggle against the hard-line Brexiteers of the European Research Group, while Corbyn seeks to reconcile supporting a planned Brexit in a party that is overwhelmingly Remain. This situation has resulted in more than two years of conflict in both parties as all the factions have battled it out. Both May and Corbyn have had to fight off ‘coup’ attempts in the form of parliamentary confidence motions.

This situation of increasingly irresponsible political conflict has been exacerbated by the faction-fighting as the state desperately seeks to avoid crashing out of the EU. Through May the state has been reduced to attempting to bribe MPs into supporting the Withdrawal Agreement, with millions of pounds being offered to the most pro-Brexit Labour constituencies, which are usually the most deprived. This has generated even more tensions within the Labour Party, with pro-Remain MPs denouncing other MPs for accepting these bribes.

These divisions are not limited to the main political parties but extend into the unions and the leftist groups, which underlines just how integrated they are into the state structure.

7. The state’s efforts to negotiate a deal have not only had to cope with the political crisis domestically but have increased the political crisis in Europe. The result of the referendum poured petrol onto populist bonfires across Europe. The populist governments in Hungary and Poland drew renewed strength from the result. In France, the Front National gained inspiration, whilst in Italy the populists of the Northern League and Five Star Movement rode to power on the coat tails of Brexit. Faced with this upsurge of populism, the main factions of the EU have no choice but to make Brexit as difficult as possible. The most responsible parts of the European bourgeoisie are particularly angry about this fall-out from the British bourgeoisie’s inability to control its own political situation.

8. It is very difficult to make a precise analysis of the perspectives for the unfolding of this crisis because the bourgeoisie is engaged in an increasingly desperate effort to avoid a no-deal Brexit. However, what can be said with certainty is that this crisis and political instability will continue and worsen. Even if the bourgeoisie was able to achieve a planned Brexit it is still faced with the increasingly complex question of steering its way, in a weakened state, through the deepening chaos of the international situation. Given the chaos already inflicted on the British bourgeoisie by the process leading up to Brexit, the accentuating pressures towards political irresponsibility, ‘every man for himself’ and the fragmentation of the political apparatus can only continue.

The impact on the two-party system

9. Over the course of the last 100 years British state capitalism has maintained a two-party system in order to contain and control the political situation. However, even before Brexit this system was being weakened by the emergence of nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. Now we are witnessing a process of fragmentation of the Tory and Labour Parties themselves. The last two years have exacerbated these tensions to levels that threaten the very existence of the Conservative Party. Post Brexit these divisions will widen as the party’s factions blame each other for the deepening problems faced by British capitalism, entering into new battles over which policies to follow. This is assuming that the party does not fracture under the pressure of achieving Brexit.

10. The situation in the Labour Party will not be much less fractious. The rise of Corbyn enabled the bourgeoisie to establish a clear difference between the Labour and Tory Party. This is now in danger as Corbyn’s strategy - trying to please the Leave faction by agreeing to Brexit, but at the same time insisting on the need for the closest possible relationship with the EU in order to contain the Remainers - comes under increasing strain. Fundamental to these tensions is the fact that the greatly increased party membership, who joined in support of Corbyn, in a large majority support a second referendum. This is being used by the Remain MPs to put pressure on Corbyn. The Blairites in particular will continue to use this tension in order to undermine Corbyn. As with the Tory Party, if the party survives Brexit, there will be a sharpening of these tensions as the anti-Corbyn factions try to depose him for allowing Brexit to take place.

The fragmentation of either of the parties would be a major problem for the British ruling class, because it would open up a political arena that could be exploited by the populists, thus further deepening the tensions and difficulties in its political apparatus. Such a collapse of the two-party system would be a further expression of a growing loss of control of the political situation.

11. To this political instability has to be added the prospect of the strengthening of moves towards independence amongst the Scottish fractions of the British bourgeoisie. Such a threat to the integrity of the United Kingdom would provoke unprecedented tensions within the ruling class. Not only between the Scottish Nationalist Party and the rest of the national bourgeoisie, but also within the Scottish bourgeoisie, as not all agree with independence, and also within the national bourgeoisie as a whole, as those who wanted to Remain blame the Brexiters for undermining the territorial integrity of British capitalism.

12. Tensions will also worsen in Northern Ireland between the Loyalist and Irish Nationalist factions of the bourgeoisie. The Good Friday Agreement that brought about the ceasefire was based upon the UK being in the EU, thus providing the Nationalists with the ability to appeal to the EU over the UK. The loss of this framework is not discussed by the bourgeois media. However, the Irish bourgeoisie is very aware of the potential for renewed instability in the North and that is why they are insistent upon the withdrawal plan which tries to ensure there is no hard border and the subsequent potential for reigniting the ‘Troubles’.

The majority in the North voted to Remain in order to avoid this. However, the hard-line Democratic Unionists are fervent Brexiteers, while Sinn Fein was for Remain. These divisions in the context of political instability in the wider political apparatus will accentuate pressures towards the outbreak of open conflicts between the different factions of the bourgeoisie in the North.

The Welsh Nationalists who also supported Remain in order to have a counter to the national bourgeoisie will renew their calls for independence.

Weakening of Britain’s imperialist and economic position

13. Leaving the EU marks a qualitative moment in the 100-year decline of British imperialism:

- being forced out of the EU through its own political weakness means that British imperialism has retreated from one of its most important areas of interest. The whole imperialist policy of Britain within the EU was to contain and undermine a resurgent Germany. For example, Blair’s push for the extension of the EU into Eastern Europe was aimed at bringing into the EU states who historically have opposed Germany. Leaving the EU undermines this ability. British imperialism will now have to stand on the sidelines as its main European rivals Germany and France are given a freer hand. It will only be able to have an influence by provoking tensions within the EU, supporting those countries opposing Germany. However, these countries distrust the UK as it walks away from Europe.

- The ‘special relationship’ with the US is threadbare and will become even more exposed because, without Britain in the EU, the US no longer has the UK to counter German and French imperialism. Trump has already made it clear that he sees Britain as a state whose political life he can openly seek to destabilise, with his support for Brexit. This may have helped to deepen the political crisis in Britain and the EU, but once Britain leaves what role can Britain play for the US in its efforts to undermine the EU and confront Russia and China? A profoundly weakened British imperialism will find itself marginalised and forced into desperate actions in order to try and assert itself.

- For China, Britain outside the EU becomes a secondary European power that it will try to use as a counter-weight to the US.

In this context tensions within the bourgeoisie will be worsened as the ruling class desperately seeks ways to maintain some international influence. The idea of moving closer to the US will provoke strong opposition given the bitter experience of the US’s undermining of Britain’s imperialist role over the last 100 years, intensified by the loss of international reputation caused by the Blair government’s support for the US in Afghanistan and Iraq. The EU will keep the UK at arm’s length. British imperialism will be left looking increasingly like a third-rate imperialist power.

14. Brexit has already had a very important impact on the economy. A central part of the manufacturing base is the car industry but this has seen a 50% fall in investment since 2016. The main business bodies, the City, the Confederation of British Industry, the Chambers of Commerce, have all expressed their anger about the political crisis and paralysis. They, along with other more responsible parts of the bourgeoisie and the state, are determined to avoid a no-deal Brexit, hence their support for the Withdrawal Deal. However, the political instability caused by trying to get this deal agreed holds out a grim prospect for the future trade deal with the EU and this will reignite the tensions over Brexit. The achieving of a trade deal with the EU is of huge importance to the economy not only because of the size of the EU, but also because, as Japan has made clear, until such a deal is agreed it will not discuss a deal with the UK. Given that the EU and Japan in January 2019 signed one of the biggest trade agreements in the world, they will not want to give British capitalism any advantages when it comes to an agreement between them. The signing of this deal underlines just how damaging Brexit is: British capitalism is being forced to leave one of the world’s biggest free trade areas. All the talk of a new, expanding ‘global Britain’ is just hot air.

This is further underlined by the situation facing the UK in relation to the USA. The Brexiteers made much of being able to strike a deal with the US rapidly. The brutal use of US economic, political and imperialist power by Trump to openly attack its main rivals, to rip up existing free trade arrangements and to impose bilateral deals are the most obvious indications that any hopes placed in the US being ‘nice’ to British capitalism are delusions.

The impact of Brexit on the proletariat

15. The referendum campaign and the period since have seen an unprecedented ideological onslaught, outside of a situation of world war, on the proletariat in Britain. Five years of being suffocated by a blanket of democratic, nationalist and xenophobic ideology has seen important divisions generated within the proletariat. The social atmosphere is saturated with manufactured tensions between Leave and Remain, the North and South, City and Country, the poor white working class and the rest of the class. A climate of irrational hate, social tension and boiling potential violence pervades society.

These destructive forces are not new but express the advancing ideological decay of bourgeois society, the noxious fumes seeping from its rotting flesh. The proletariat cannot escape this poisonous atmosphere. As we said in the late 1980s the decomposition of bourgeois society, as its contradictions tear at the fabric of society, would have an impact on the very qualities that are the strengths of the proletariat:

“The different elements which constitute the strength of the working class directly confront the various facets of this ideological decomposition:

·           solidarity and collective action are faced with the atomisation of ‘look out for number one’;

·           the need for organisation confronts social decomposition, the disintegration of the relationships which form the basis for all social life;

·           the proletariat’s confidence in the future and in its own strength is constantly sapped by the all-pervasive despair and nihilism within society;

·           consciousness, lucidity, coherent and unified thought, the taste for theory, have a hard time making headway in the midst of the flight into illusions, drugs, sects, mysticism, the rejection or destruction of thought which are characteristic of our epoch”

The impact of these tendencies is clearly manifested in the present situation. Already, before the referendum, these toxins were seeping into the working class.

16. The series of defeats suffered by important bastions of the working class in the 70s and 80s combined with the international retreat in the class struggle following the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989 led to a sense of disarray and loss of confidence within the working class. This was strengthened by the growing impact of the abandoning of whole regions, cities, towns and villages to a process of social decay following the destruction of the regional and local economies under the impact of the crisis. Workers were abandoned to the crushing poverty of long-term unemployment, or the desperate search for increasingly temporary and insecure jobs. These areas were also faced with a rising tide of destructive drug use, gang rivalries and criminality.

The weight of this decay was also reinforced by the bourgeoisie with its campaigns against asylum seekers, people on benefits, etc. The central message was that the problems of society are the responsibility not of capitalism but of scapegoat communities: shirkers, migrants etc. This ideology is all the stronger because of the lack of open class movements in the recent period (for example, the Office for National Statistics says that the number of strikes in 2017 was the lowest since records began in 1891); but it can also have an impact on struggles around unemployment and low pay, as we saw in 2013 during the Lindsay construction workers’ strike when workers took up the slogan “British jobs for British workers” which had been promulgated by the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown. 

The whole Brexit campaign fed on and deepened this putrid atmosphere, and all the factional divisions it stirred up have had the result of obliterating any alternative to the proletariat lining up behind one faction or other of the bourgeoisie.

The key to the situation is for the working class to recognise that it has separate interests from all factions of the ruling class. A sober analysis of the present situation must admit that the proletariat’s sense of its own identity as a revolutionary class has weakened. A central aspect of the activity of revolutionary organisations is to contribute to the process that leads to the revival of a conscious class struggle.  WR  January 2019

This resolution, adopted by a conference in January 2019, seeks to draw out the main perspectives for the British situation in the coming period. It is one of the core responsibilities of a revolutionary organisation to put forward the most coherent understanding of the perspectives for the national situation. This takes on even more importance when the whole social situation is dominated by the ruling class’s unprecedented political crisis around Brexit – a crisis that is going to continue to worsen in the coming period. Without an understanding of the roots and consequences of this turmoil it is impossible to draw out the probable implications of this for the proletariat in Britain and internationally in the coming years.

The role of the resolution is not to provide a detailed analysis of dynamics at work - this is done in the report on the national situation from the same conference - but to lay down a general theoretical framework and its implications. In the last issue of World Revolution we published the historical section of the report, which readers can refer to[1].

In this introduction we want to examine if the resolution has been verified by the unfolding of events.

The resolution argues that Brexit is the product of the combination of the century-long decline of British imperialism, the divisions within the ruling class that this has generated, the deepening of the impact of the decomposition of capitalism since the 2008 financial crisis, and the rise of populism. The resolution demonstrates that the bourgeoisie is caught up in irreconcilable contradictions. These are not only represented by the rise of populism, but also by the already existing divisions over Europe within the main parties, which have been pushed to a point where they could destroy the carefully constructed parliamentary political apparatus that has served the British bourgeoisie so well over the last two centuries.

This has been fully confirmed by the paralysis of the parliamentary machine over the last 6 months. Both the main political parties have been torn by factional struggles over Brexit. The Withdrawal Agreement drawn up by the May government and the EU, aimed at preventing Britain from simply crashing out of the EU, has been undermined by the inability of the main factions of both parties to agree on how to carry out this plan. May was unable to compromise because of the pressure exerted by the pro-Brexit hardliners, whilst Corbyn was constrained by the divisions within Labour where important factions want a Customs Union or a Second Referendum. The last desperate effort to get this Agreement were the common talks between both parties but these were doomed because it became obvious that May was going to be driven from power by factions in the Tory party opposed to a deal with Labour, as proved to be the case when May announced that she would resign on 7 June. This paralysis has now produced a leadership contest in the Tory party, with the most rabidly pro-Brexit figures easily in the lead, but whatever the result it will not resolve the stalemate.

This political vacuum has stimulated a new upsurge of populism, fed by anger and frustration at the inability of parliament to progress on Brexit. Farage and his wealthy bourgeois backers have taken full advantage of this void by forming the Brexit Party. This new party expresses a serious danger to the main parties. It represents a new face to populism. Gone is the strident anti-immigration rhetoric and the odd and bizarre characters that made UKIP unacceptable to many. The new party is very slick, it has a very sophisticated internet campaign and sells itself as being both multi-cultural and supported by younger voters. Farage has made much of his rejection of UKIP’s increasing racism and Islamophobia. This operation is a serious effort to make inroads into the main parties, based on being the only party able to defend the democratic vote of “the people”.

The rise of the Brexit Party, has thrown a spanner in the works. A new leader of the Tory party will not want to call a general election, as long as Brexit is not solved, because as one former Cameron aid put it, they will be “toast”. Labour will also be very reluctant to go for an election because the Brexit Party is making an effort to sell itself as the party of working people.

This means that three years after a referendum that was meant to push back the tide of populism the ruling class is now faced with a re-invigorated and more sophisticated populist party pouring petrol onto its political crisis.

As the resolution says, this crisis is threatening the territorial integrity of the British state. The election of a hard-line Brexiteer as Tory leader and/or the arrival of the Brexit party in parliament would worsen tensions with the pro-Independence Scottish fraction of the bourgeoisie.

The impact of this is not confined to Britain. As the resolution explains Brexit contributed to the strengthening of populism in Europe and the US. The EU and the main European powers have responded with a very hard line towards the British bourgeoisie. This line has paid some benefits, because the political chaos has produced a real fear even amongst the European populist parties and governments, who have now abandoned or toned down the demand to leave the EU. However, the populist far right still poses a serious threat to the future of the EU.

The Brexiteers hopes of a new “global” Britain able to strike up free trade deals have already started to hit the hard rock of reality. The developing trade war between the US and China has made it clear that the US has no hesitations to undermine the interests of its former allies in its increasingly desperate struggle with China. The Huawei scandal has seen China threatening its investment in Britain if the British government gives in to US pressure to ban Huawei from its infrastructure.

The struggle with China for global dominance, along with its intention to undermine its European rivals, means that the US has little interest in a weakened Britain outside the EU. Trump was happy to encourage Brexit in order to hurt the EU, but, once Brexit takes place, what role can the UK play for the US?

The resolution’s perspective of the deepening of the political crisis has been verified by events. Its warning of the threat of populism in this situation of paralysis was justified. The emergence of the Brexit Party is another factor of chaos and instability, further endangering the British state’s efforts to ensure an orderly Brexit.

The implications of this situation for the working class are grim. More than a decade of austerity has taken place with hardly any response from the class. This does not mean there is no discontent but it has not found expression through the class struggle due to the proletariat’s profound lack of self-confidence. This disorientation and demoralisation have been exacerbated by Brexit and the political crisis. The support for populism and its simplistic promise of a better tomorrow among parts of the proletariat is an expression of this despair and hopelessness.  However, an even greater danger to the proletariat is being mobilised behind anti-populism and its defence of democracy and the democratic state. At present and in the coming period the proletariat will find it hard to avoid being mobilized behind these different bourgeois factions.

But the economic crisis will continue the deepen, and no matter which bourgeois faction dominates, they are all going to have to attack the proletariat. It is only through struggling against these attacks that the working class can defend itself. Such struggles will see the same response from the Tories, Labour or populists, because in the end they all defend capitalism.  WR, 25.5.19

Those born in 2001, the year of the 9/11 attacks will be 18 in 2019. What have they grown up with? What have they been exposed to on the news? What sort of world have they been living in?

Following 9/11 there was Bush’s “global war on terrorism”. In reality, it was just “war” where, in invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (and in other campaigns as well) US imperialism attempted (and failed) to assert its position as the only surviving super power.

But what about terrorism? That seems to have gone from outrage to atrocity, from unspeakable massacre to indiscriminate terror. To take a handful of examples, there were the 2002 bombings in a tourist area of Bali where more than 200 people were killed and hundreds injured. In 2004 there were the bombings of four commuter trains in Madrid which killed 193 people and injured 2000. In 2011 there were the attacks by Anders Breivik: a car bomb in Oslo which killed 8 and injured more than 200 - followed by the attack on a summer camp where he killed 69 and injured more than 100. In Paris in November 2015 there were mass shootings and suicide bombing at cafes and restaurants, culminating in the attacks on the Bataclan theatre; 130 died and more than 400 were injured. There was the attack in Nice in 2016 where a lorry was driven through crowds of people celebrating 14 July where 86 died and nearly 500 were injured. Also in 2016, there was the attack on the gay club in Orlando, where 49 people were shot and many injured. More recently we have seen bloody attacks on synagogues in Pittsburgh and San Diego.

And how does the capitalist media explain terrorism? The perpetrators are typically described as Islamist fanatics, or white supremacists. Their crime is “extremism”. But there have been other massacres with individuals “on the rampage” as in the US school shootings such as Parkland, Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech. How do they fit into the picture? Or what about the October 2017 shootings in Las Vegas where a man fired more than 1000 rounds of ammunition into a crowd of concertgoers, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds? For the media people are bad or mad, or sometimes there is just no explanation.

The shootings at two mosques in March this year in Christchurch, New Zealand, added one grotesque element to the horror as it was live-streamed on the internet for all the world to see. There were many stories about the 51 Muslim worshippers who were killed, some of whom had moved from other countries (including Iraq, Palestine, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Turkey) in the hope of finding a haven from war and persecution in their country of origin. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was praised for her empathy and sensitivity, while she tried to find ways to censor the internet

In Sri Lanka the attacks in April on Christian churches and luxury hotels by suicide bombers left 258 people dead and more than 500 injured. The government had received warnings in advance from Indian Intelligence Agencies that the attacks were imminent, but did nothing to stop them. After the events the Sri Lankan government strengthened its apparatus of repression with a number of measures including the need for all sermons in mosques to be submitted to the relevant ministry.

A framework to understand terrorism

How are this year’s 18-year olds supposed to make sense of terrorism? The only possible approach is to look at the phenomenon in class terms, and historically. In 1978 the ICC published an article and a resolution on terrorism, terror and class violence. These were attempts to re-assert the marxist position, on, among other things, the distinction between capitalist state terror and the terrorism of intermediate social strata.

The terror of the bourgeoisie, whether by the state or other bodies, has as its goal the perpetuation of exploitation and the rule of the capitalist class. “Terrorism on the other hand is a reaction of oppressed classes who have no future, against the terror of the ruling class. They are momentary reactions, without continuity, acts of vengeance with no tomorrow”. (https://en.internationalism.org/ir/014_terror.html [5]). Terrorism is “not directed against capitalist society and its institutions, but only against individuals who represent this society. It inevitably takes on the aspect of a settling of scores, of vengeance, of a vendetta, of person against person and not a revolutionary confrontation of class against class.” (https://en.internationalism.org/content/2649/resolution-terrorism-terror... [6])

In the 19th century two notable exponents of terrorism were the Narodniks in Russia and certain French anarchists in the 1890s. Three consecutive examples of the latter give an idea of their “propaganda by the deed”. In December 1893 Auguste Vaillant threw a home-made bomb into the French Chamber of Deputies, causing only limited injuries to a few of those present. In February 1894 Emile Henry set off a bomb in a bar in the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. When asked why he had hurt so many innocent people he said “there are no innocent bourgeois”. In Lyon in June 1894 Sante Caserio stabbed and killed the French President Carnot. It was episodes like these that gave anarchism a violent image for decades. The leading anarchist Peter Kropotkin distanced mainstream anarchism from this tendency: “an edifice which is built on centuries of history will not be destroyed by a few kilos of explosives”. The classic expressions of petit-bourgeois ‘revolt’ were not so prevalent in the twentieth century, although we can point to the Red Army Faction (Baader–Meinhof Gang) in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy in the 1970s and 80s, and the Angry Brigade in the UK in the 1970s.

In contrast to these petit-bourgeois expressions of ‘revolt’, the methods of terrorism, bombs detonated in public places, indiscriminate shootings etc, became part of the arsenal of factions in intra-bourgeois conflicts, in inter-imperialist wars. The US State Department’s standard definition of terrorism is appropriate here: “politically motivated attacks on non-combatant targets”. Examples that come to mind are the activities of the Stern gang and Irgun in Palestine in the 1940s, the bombings and massacres of the factions in the Algerian War (1954-62), the car bombs, shootings and retaliations of paramilitary gangs in Northern Ireland, or the decades long bombing campaigns of ETA in Spain. All these show terrorism in the service of identifiable bourgeois goals.

Some academics see these as examples of a period of ‘old terrorism’. This changes to a ‘new terrorism’ in the 1990s with, as an early example, the 1993 attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre with a massive truck bomb beneath the North Tower (which was supposed to collapse into the South Tower) “So‐called ‘new terrorists’, on the other hand, are nihilistic, are inspired by fanatical religious beliefs, and are willing to seek martyrdom through suicide. They rarely set out aims that appear remotely attainable; they give no warnings; they do not engage in bargaining; they find compromise solutions to problems unappealing; they are willing and even eager to carry out the mass slaughter of non‐combatants; and they frequently do not even claim responsibility for their deeds.” (Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics)

Other examples of this ‘new terrorism’ are the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack on the Tokyo underground or the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh in which hundreds were injured and more than 150 died, in revenge for the attack on Waco

However, neither the analysis of academics nor the sensational accounts of tabloids give any real explanation for this development. For all the talk of irrational hatreds, racism, fanaticism, alienation, nihilism etc, the commentators who serve the bourgeoisie cannot give any truthful answers because the roots of terrorism lie in a global capitalist system that has outlived its usefulness, but will continue its decay until it is destroyed. With a stalemate between the two main social classes in capitalism - the proletariat and the bourgeoisie - terrorism is just one of the phenomena, along with fanaticism and nihilism, which proliferates with decomposing capitalism. For some, desperation in the face of the miserable reality of capitalism leads to the flight into religion or other drugs; for others the certainties of religious or political dogma inflame a desire for destruction, of self or of others. But where the impotent terrorist acts of intermediate strata in the nineteenth century were fleeting moments of ‘revolt’, today’s terrorism is an expression of the nihilism at the heart of a rotting social order.

In Northern Ireland in April, the journalist Lyra McKee was killed by the paramilitaries of the “Real IRA” as they shot at the police. Politicians rushed to condemn the action, while still maintaining their various roles to sustain the society that produces terrorism. In an article published in 2016 (“Suicide of the Ceasefire Babies”) McKee showed that, in Northern Ireland, more people committed suicide in the 16 years after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 than died in the 29 years of violent conflict before it. This shows what capitalism really has to offer; its ‘peace process’ led to a world without prospects, with, for many, seemingly, nothing to live for. The prospects of war are horrifying, the reality of ‘peace’ in capitalism unbearable.  Those in the marxist tradition argue that capitalism has its own gravediggers, the working class, which offers the perspective of revolution against a society where fear and terror are endemic, and for a society based on relations of solidarity.

Car 24/5/19