Poster of May 68 against state repression

In recent months, in public meetings and online forums, there have been criticisms and misinterpretations of our positions regarding the state measures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic: lockdowns, curfews, bans on gatherings on public places, and compulsory vaccination for essential professions. Some of the critics have even concluded that the ICC in fact supports these measures of the state. The aim of this article is to respond to these critiques, both by reaffirming our opposition to the current anti-lockdown protests and by explaining the difference between the so-called “protective measures” of the bourgeois state and the precautions we recommend to communist militants and the working class.

In the past year the policy of the bourgeois state, in its attempt to counter the spread of the pandemic, has given rise to different campaigns and protests. Some of these campaigns plead for the abolition of the measures altogether, others for more human measures, and others even for a tightening of the measures.[1]

The first campaign is well-known. Behind slogans such as “against the violation of our rights”; “we want our freedom back”, “tyranny versus freedom”, “down with the mask”, numerous demonstrations have taken place in the past months, in various countries, to protest against the lockdown measures. In the framework of the so-called “Worldwide Rally for Freedom” the weekend of 20-21 March 2021 saw protests in some 40 countries in Europe and beyond.[2] These rallies were often characterised by an anti-elite rage and in certain cases even led to vandalism, nihilist riots, massively violating the imposed restrictions. In Holland there were even attacks on testing stations and hospitals.

A second campaign has taken place in French Canada, where demonstrations are organised under the slogan “Ensemble pour les mesures sanitaires et solidaires – Non au couvre-feu”. In a statement, the organisers denounce the curfew of the government as “an attack on our freedom and on our relations and aspirations of solidarity”. They think that the curfew further marginalises vulnerable communities, like homeless people, sex workers, drug users, and non-status workers. The protesters, who reject a police solution to the health crisis, “refuse the dichotomy between blind obedience to the government and the silly manipulations of conspiracy theorists.”[3]

In its political combat against the policy of the state in response to the pandemic, the ICC has - in several articles - denounced the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie and its complete neglect of the health of the population. Despite the lockdown measures the bourgeoisie “continues its negligence, which it masks by trying to make us feel guilty, by making us bear the blame for the infections, for the exhaustion of the care workers who are victims of the "irresponsible behaviour" of individuals. (…) The state imposes curfews as early as 6pm or lockdowns at weekends, while proletarians are openly allowed to infect themselves in the workplace or on public transport.”[4]

One organisation of the proletarian political milieu even goes a step further and tells us that the essential motivation for the lockdown measures is to prepare for economic attacks in the future. “The proletarians are confined, not to protect their health, but to impose a discipline that will be necessary in the face of the next economic and social measures that are planned to be applied.”[5] But even if the bourgeoisie does not hesitate to make a virtue out of necessity and will not fail to use the opportunity to prepare for future confrontations with the working class, the main goal of the lockdown is not to discipline the proletariat but to block the spread of the virus, which for the moment poses a greater threat to the economy and social cohesion.

The danger of “partial” struggles

In the past year the ICC has not supported any of the protests against obligatory lockdown put into place by the state in an attempt to block the rampant spread of the Covid-19 virus. The reason for this is that these protests remain completely on the surface and do not touch the roots of the capitalist mode of production, which has brought the bourgeois state into existence with the function of defending the capitalist system. The ICC opposes the aims, methods and slogans of the current protests which, however radical they sometimes may seem, call on us to defend certain “rights” as citizens within capitalist society. Such a position is the subject of a special point in our platform.

 “It is wrong to think that it is possible to contribute to the revolution by organising specific struggles around partial problems, such as racism, the position of women, pollution, sexuality, and other aspects of daily life. The struggle against the economic foundations of the system contains within it the struggle against all the super-structural aspects of capitalist society, but this is not true the other way around.”[6] These “partial” struggles are incapable of attacking the root of the problem, i.e. exploitation of one class by another, in the form of capitalist wage slavery.[7]

The working class has nothing to gain from reclaiming “our freedom as citizens”, which has supposedly been taken away from us by the “authoritarian” restrictions of the bourgeois state. It has also nothing to gain from demands for “social justice” and for “our rights”. Such protests do not open the prospect of a solution, which can only gain momentum in and through the struggle for the proletarian perspective. On the contrary, “By their very content ‘partial’ struggles, far from reinforcing the vital autonomy of the proletariat, tend on the contrary to dilute it into a mass of confused categories (races, sexes, youth, etc.) which can only be totally impotent in the face of history”.[8]

“Partial” struggles increase the division and the confusion within the class and therefore represent a dangerous trap for its struggle. They will inevitably lead into the dead-end of calling for a more “democratic” and a more “human” society, which is and will remain a class society, based on repression and exploitation. And from experience we know that “bourgeois governments and political parties have learned to recuperate and use them to good effect in the preservation of the social order”.[9]

The most important examples in recent years of the “recuperation” of such protests by the bourgeoisie were the “Youth4Climate” and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, which pulled in many young people, often young proletarians.

The ICC has not supported the demand, put forward during the BLM protests, that the police should be “defunded”. As we already explained in a previous article, the call to defund the police or even to abolish the police altogether is, on the one hand, “completely unrealistic inside this society: it is akin to the capitalist state voluntarily dissolving itself. On the other hand, it spreads illusions in the possibility of reforming the existing state in the interest of the exploited and the oppressed – when its very function is to keep them under control in the interests of the dominant class.”[10]

The same applies to the demands to lift the lockdown measures. We agree that these measures are contradictory and doubly coercive since they confine the workers in their free time, but oblige many of them to go to work, when it is obvious that most infections occur at the workplace. Even if we don’t say that they are essentially aimed at controlling the working class, as Le Prolétaire claims, we agree that despite the measures the exploited class is the main victim of the pandemic. Nonetheless we don’t support demands to put an end to these measures. Demands to lift the lockdown cannot contribute to the development of the proletariat’s class consciousness, its combativity and its solidarity. On the contrary: they only raise obstructions against such a development and have no other perspective than reinforcing illusions in bourgeois rule, whether democratic or openly despotic.

Moreover most of the anti-lockdown protests, with their outright demand for the abolition of all the state’s measures against the pandemic, don’t offer any viable perspective other than a further spread of the virus, and thereby show the completely irrational considerations behind these protests. They frequently claim that the virus is just a hoax, something intended to deceive or defraud, but this is more and more refuted every day by the millions of people worldwide who have died and still will die from Covid-19. In a recently published article[11], we denounced the irrational theories and apocalyptic ideologies behind these protest and the danger they pose, not only for the health of the people, but also for the class consciousness of the proletariat.

The state is repressive by nature

Since Marx wrote The Civil War in France, the position of the revolutionaries about the state has been quite clear: the bourgeois state, as the expression of the dictatorship of the ruling class, has to be destroyed in the course of the proletarian revolution. For “in reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy”.[12] That’s why the ICC supports any proletarian struggle against attacks by the state, as it did for instance during the struggle in France in 2006 against the CPE (First Employment Contract - a new law designed to increase the casualisation of the workforce and especially of new employees) In this particular case, the students’ movement, by threatening to extend to the employed sectors, obliged the government to withdraw the CPE. This was an expression of proletarian resistance to a direct attack by the bourgeois state, and it did not concern itself with taking the legal or electoral path to persuade the government to change its mind.

But the current anti-lock down protests take place on a completely bourgeois terrain and in no way open the door to a movement that can really challenge the legitimacy of the bourgeois state. On the contrary, their alternative to the lockdown and similar measures is simply to call for a more liberal or “laisser faire” policy, often connected to the electoral game between different bourgeois factions.

Throughout its existence, the ICC has warned the class against the risk of being drawn onto the bourgeois terrain. The historical phase of decomposition only multiplies these risks, not least because it has been marked by a serious loss of class identity, of the proletariat’s awareness of itself as a distinct social force, making the working class more vulnerable to being dragged into all kinds of protests which take it away from the defence of its own interests and dilute it in a vague mass of citizens or a myriad of competing “identities”. Faced with the increasing dangers for the proletarian struggle, and to show the class the way to fight for its safety, the task of the hour for revolutionaries is to affirm proletarian solidarity and class autonomy.

The struggles of the past year, in particular at the beginning of the pandemic, have shown that the working class does not limit its struggle to economic demands. In the spring of 2020 workers in various countries went on strike, not demanding better payment, but better safety measures against the virus. History has also given several examples of the workers coming out on strike against the repression of the state.[13] And in contrast to the protests of the past year, these workers had no illusions in the bourgeois state and did not demand for legal changes in order to make the state less “authoritarian” and “more friendly” to its citizens. During their fights against state repression the workers relied completely on the strength of their autonomous action as a class.

The fight for our safety

As we wrote in the summer of last year “this proletarian sense of responsibility, which also prompts millions to follow the rules of self-isolation, shows that the majority of the working class accepts the reality of this disease, even in country like the US which is the ‘heartland’ of various forms of denialism about the pandemic”.[14] Since the publication of this article the class struggle has continued, although on a lower level. But in nearly all its struggles the rules of social distancing, and in the bigger mobilisations the use of protective clothing (PPE), were respected.

If the ICC doesn’t support the measures of the bourgeois state, this does not mean that it completely neglects the necessary precautions to protect its militants against the danger of the virus. It follows the example of the working class. The policy of the ICC is to listen to the science and the science tells us that, as long as there is no other solution, social distancing (including PPE) is the best protection against infection by Covid-19.

If the ICC respects this scientific advice, such advice is not swallowed blindly; on the contrary it must always be critically evaluated. As revolutionaries we are wary of any form of applied science under capitalist conditions since we know how it is utilised; the most striking example being the war industry of course. But also science used for commercial purposes is something that has to be approached with the necessary suspicion. The first and main goal of the pharmaceutical industry is to make profit, even if it is at the cost of the health of the population. But this isn’t a reason to distrust science as such.

The Covid-19 pandemic has faced revolutionaries with an extraordinary situation. The bourgeois state is an enemy of the communist movement and the virus is an enemy of human life. But if the ICC follows the advice about social distancing and the use of PPE, this doesn’t mean it is supporting the state and the ban on protests, which will inevitably be used against any attempt by workers to come together on a class basis, whether to demand adequate safety measures at work or to fight the wage reductions and lay-offs that will accompany the lockdown and its aftermath. The ICC is fully aware that the only alternative to the measures of the bourgeois state is the struggle for a fundamentally new society, the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the elimination of capitalist exploitation.

Dennis, 13 May 2021

 

In the first part of the reply to this reader's letter[1], we responded to the criticisms made by comrade D. to the "Report on the Question of the Historical Course", adopted at the 23rd ICC Congress and published in International Review 164. In this second part, we would like to deal with another question raised by the comrade in his letter: that of the possible prospect of a generalised nuclear war.

The conditions for the outbreak of a generalised war

Comrade D. states in his letter that "the question of war is not at all excluded by the theory of decomposition which replaces the theory of the historical course".

Apart from the fact that the ruling class has not been able since 1989 to reconstitute new imperialist blocs, the comrade forgets that the second condition for the outbreak of a new world war is the ability of the bourgeoisie to mobilise the proletariat behind national flags, especially in the core countries of capitalism. This is by no means the case today. As we have always said, a proletariat which is not prepared to accept the sacrifices imposed by the worsening economic crisis is not prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice of its life on the battlefields. After the long counter-revolutionary period which had notably allowed the states to send millions of proletarians to their deaths under the flags of fascism and anti-fascism during the Second World War, the working class returned to the stage of history at the end of the 1960s (May '68 in France, the hot autumn in Italy, etc.).

The bourgeoisie had been prevented from unleashing a third planetary butchery during the Cold War because it was not in a position to mobilise a proletariat which, although it was not able to develop its struggles onto a revolutionary level, was at the same time very combative and absolutely not willing to be killed or to massacre its class brothers. In spite of all the difficulties that the working class has encountered, since 1989, in developing massive struggles, the historical situation is still open. As the proletariat has not suffered a decisive and definitive defeat, the worsening of the economic crisis can only push it to fight tooth and nail to defend its living conditions, as we have seen again recently with the movement against the pension reform in France during the winter of 2019-2020. And in its capacity to resist the attacks of capital, we have also seen a tendency to seek solidarity in the struggle between all sectors and all generations. Of course, this does not mean that the bourgeoisie can never again inflict a historic and decisive defeat on the working class. But, as we stated in our "Theses on Decomposition" (International Review 107), social decomposition can destroy any capacity of the working class to overthrow capitalism and lead to the destruction of humanity and the planet.

Towards a reconstitution of the imperialist blocs?

To support his analysis of the current potential for a large-scale military conflict, Comrade D. says: "Apart from the question of long-range nuclear weapons, there is at the moment one country that does not need to have constituted a united and perfectly held and supported bloc in order to launch itself into a war which, if not global, will not be confined to a theatre of operation limited in time and space (like the two wars against Saddam Hussein). This country is of course the United States, which has the economic power, the military supremacy and the basis for intervention all over the world. For a war with battles in different parts of the world, occurring simultaneously and over a fairly long period of time (several years), it is enough for another power, which constitutes vassal states through foreign trade and economic investments, to acquire military bases abroad in these vassal states, to start building aircraft carriers and generally an efficient and numerous navy, so that at a certain point the risk of generalised conflict becomes a definite probability. That country already exists, it is China, which may soon, thanks to the Covid-19 epidemic, overtake the US in global economic terms."

It is true that the strategic battle for a "new world order" is concentrated around the opposition between these two superpowers. China, with its vast "Silk Road" programme, aims to establish itself as a leading economic power by 2030-50 and to have a "world-class army capable of winning any modern war" by 2050. Such ambitions are causing a general destabilisation of power relations and since 2013 has been prompting the US to try to contain the rise of this threatening Chinese power. The US response, which began with Obama (and has been taken up and amplified by Trump), represents a turning point in US policy. The defence of its interests as a national state is now tied up with the tendency towards every man for himself which dominates imperialist relations: the United States is moving from the role of policeman of the world order to that of the main propagator of every man for himself, challenging the very same world order established since 1945 under its aegis. On the other hand, the idea implied by what the comrade says is that there is a tendency towards bipolarisation, since on the one hand the European countries, within the framework of NATO, would take the side of the United States, while China, not only could rely on its vassal states but would have a major ally, Russia.

However, the emergence of China itself is a product of the phase of decomposition, in which the tendency towards bipolarisation is being undermined by the every man for himself attitude of each imperialist power. Similarly, there is a big difference between the development of this trend and a concrete process leading to the formation of new blocs. The increasingly aggressive attitudes of the two major poles tend to undermine rather than strengthen this process. China is deeply distrusted by all its neighbours, including Russia, which often aligns itself with China only to defend its immediate interests (as it does in Syria), but is terrified of being subordinated to China because of the latter's economic power, and remains one of the fiercest opponents of Beijing's "Silk Road" project. America, meanwhile, has been actively dismantling virtually all the old bloc structures that it had previously used to preserve its "new world order" and which helped resist the "every man for himself" shifts in international relations. It increasingly treats its NATO allies as enemies, and in general has become one of the main actors in aggravating the chaotic character of current imperialist relations.

Is a nuclear war conceivable in the present period?

Finally, by excluding one of the essential conditions for the outbreak of a new world war (the necessity of the ideological mobilisation of the proletariat), comrade D. advances another hypothesis. He refers to articles in the bourgeois press (L'Observateur and Le Canard enchaîné) to assert that a nuclear war is quite possible, especially between the United States and China (which has become an industrial and imperialist power facing the first world power).

As we have always argued, imperialism has its own dynamic and is an integral part of the way of life of capitalism in its period of decadence. And as Jaurès said, "Capitalism carries war with it like the cloud carries the storm". No economic power can compete with others, and assert itself on the world stage, without developing ever more sophisticated weapons. The trade war between states is therefore always accompanied by an exacerbation of imperialist tensions. While it is true that nuclear weapons are no longer just a means of "deterrence" as they were during the "Cold War", today the arms race is a means of blackmail and bargaining between the nuclear-armed states. The exacerbation of imperialist tensions does not always lead to a direct conflagration, as we saw, for example, in 2017 with the military tensions between the United States and North Korea (which gave rise to alarmist discourse in the bourgeois press). After several months of negotiations, this conflict ended (at least momentarily) with warm embraces between Trump and North Korean president Kim Jong-un

The more the bourgeoisie is cornered by the bankruptcy of its system and the acceleration of the trade war, the more each power seeks to advance its pawns in the global imperialist arena for the control of strategic positions against its adversaries. As capitalism sinks into social decomposition, the bourgeoisie appears more and more as a suicidal class. Uncontrolled outbreaks on the imperialist level cannot be excluded in the future, if the proletariat does not take up the challenge posed by the gravity of the historical situation. But for the moment, the prospect of a nuclear conflagration between China and the US is not on the agenda. Moreover, what would be gained by the two powers dropping massive nuclear bombs on their rival's soil? The destruction would be so great that no troops from the victorious country could be sent to occupy the ruins.

We have always rejected the vision of a "press-button" war where the bourgeoisie could unleash a global nuclear cataclysm at the push of a button, without any need for the proletariat to be enlisted. The ruling class is not completely stupid, even if irresponsible and completely insane heads of state can come to power on a short-term basis. It is not a question of underestimating the danger of imperialist tensions between the great nuclear powers like China and the United States, nor of totally ruling out the prospect of a conflagration between these two powers in the future, but of measuring the catastrophic repercussions at the world level: none of the belligerent powers could benefit from it. Contrary to the alarmist speeches of certain media and the predictions of geopoliticians, we must beware of playing Nostradamus. If the dynamics of imperialism (the outcome of which we cannot predict today) lead to such a situation, the origin will be found in the loss of total control by the ruling class over its decaying system. We are not there yet and must beware of crying "Wolf!" too quickly.

Revolutionaries must not give in to the social atmosphere of "no future". On the contrary, they must remain confident in the future, in the capacity of the proletariat and its younger generations to overthrow capitalism before it destroys the planet and humanity. By abandoning today our past analysis of the "historical course", we do not have, as comrade D. thinks, a "pessimistic" vision of the future. We still count on the possibility of generalised class confrontations that enable the proletariat to recover and affirm its revolutionary perspective. Contrary to what our reader says, we have never “announced” the defeat of the proletariat in advance.

Sofiane

“The Labour party has lost touch with the working class”. This is the lament from those on the left who are desperate for Labour to regain credibility as a party that could seriously contend for government office, following a series of humiliating electoral defeats, the latest being the by-election in Hartlepool, the first time Labour has lost this seat since it was created as a constituency in 1974.

From the right, however, this is not a lament, but a gloating proclamation of victory. The Conservative Party, we are told, is now the party of the working people of Britain. The Conservatives alone are the ones giving voice to the real concerns of the “left behind”, the “white working class”, or just “hardworking ordinary people”. The Tories’ election success in the last two years has to a large extent been based on their ability to win over large numbers of working class voters who in the past have been solidly Labour: the so-called Red Wall[1].

There’s no doubt that Labour, along with many other social democratic parties in Europe (France, Spain, Italy, etc) has been increasingly pushed to the edge of the electoral field. This has notably been the case since the rise of populism in many countries – whether organised in specifically populist parties like Rassemblement National in France, La Liga in Italy, Vox in Spain, UKIP in Britain, or through the traditional parties borrowing the slogans and attitudes of the populists, as with the Tories in Britain or the Republicans in the US. Today it’s the populists who make the loudest noise in denouncing the “established elites” in political life, combining right wing memes (immigration, crime, anti-“woke” stances on issues like race and gender) with a kind of neo-Keynesianism which is not afraid to spend big on the welfare of the “national community”. This is exemplified by the huge sums doled out by the Tory government on the furlough schemes during the lock-down and on backing research into and production of Covid-19 vaccines.

The capacity of the populists to present themselves as the true representatives of the working class is symbolic of the loss of class identity over the last few decades, a key element in the increasing difficulty of the working class to fight for its own interests in the face of a crisis-ridden system. We have written about this problem at greater length elsewhere[2], but very briefly we can say that this loss of class identity is the result both of enormous ideological campaigns (especially those around the so-called “collapse of communism” after 1989) and material changes in the organisation of global production. These elements have combined to reinforce the idea that the working class has either disappeared or is limited to those who work in traditional industries, while those who work for a wage in many of the new sectors (communication, services, etc), especially in the big cities, are labelled as essentially “middle class”. The real unity of interests between these different parts of the working class is hidden behind a smokescreen of false choices, typified by the campaigns around Brexit, which pitted the “urban elites” who tended to be pro-EU and the Red Wall voters who bought into Johnson’s slogan “get Brexit done”.

Labour’s fudge over Brexit, which Corbyn expressed in the most caricatured manner [3] expressed the inability of the party to appeal to these different sectors of the working class, in general becoming increasingly identified with the falsely named urban elite or middle class.

For opinion writers in left newspapers like The Guardian, the key question therefore is how to find policies that can attract both Labour’s new clientele and its errant former supporters. They tend to be critical of Starmer’s negative approach of harping on about Tory failures over the pandemic or about the “same old Tory sleaze” over scandals like David Cameron’s informal lobbying of government ministers, and the saga about who paid for the refurbishment of Boris Johnson’s flat in Downing Street. They want Labour to come up with positive policies that combine a green economy and job-creation without ditching “progressive” cultural and social attitudes, while recognising sadly that the Tories, for the moment, are making the running in promises about “levelling up” and overcoming the grotesque social inequalities laid bare by the pandemic and the lockdowns. 

Election defeats for the Labour Party are not defeats for the working class

Contrary to those who want to find a winning formula for Labour, whether back to Blair, back to Corbyn, or forward with some new alchemical concoction, we think that the question has to be posed in completely different terms. If being “in touch” with the working class means that you are actually one of its organised expressions, then the Labour Party “lost touch” with the working class when it transformed itself into a fully functioning cog in the machinery of capitalism.

In the second half of the 19th century, genuine socialists (we, like Marx, prefer the term communists) worked to build large workers’ parties, which, along with the trade unions, were part of the process through which the working class established itself as a distinct social force inside capitalism. A force which could fight for reforms within an expanding capitalist system, and at the same time develop the perspective of a socialist society that would begin a whole new stage in human history. But precisely because capitalism was in its period of triumphant expansion and ascent, inside the workers’ parties (such as the Social Democratic Party in Germany, and the organisations that would eventually come together in the Labour Party in the first years of the 20th century) there was a growing divide between those who understood that this new society would become not only a possibility but a vital necessity, and those who thought that capitalism could go on forever, improving the lot of the workers and perhaps even, bit by bit, transform itself into socialism. In fact, when the Labour Party was formed, there was no mention of socialism in its programme: “the movement is everything, the goal nothing”, as Eduard Bernstein, the leading spokesman for the reformists in the SPD, put it. Unlike other social democratic parties, the Labour Party never even defended the goal, the “maximum programme” of socialist revolution.

This crucial debate was settled by the events of 1914. The carnage of the imperialist war demonstrated that the choice facing humanity was not between reform or revolution, but between revolution or barbarism. Capitalism, entering its epoch of decadence, would become an increasing threat to the very survival of humanity. And the Russian revolution of 1917, followed by revolutionary movements in other countries, confirmed that the only way that capitalism’s drive towards destruction could be halted was through proletarian revolution: the destruction of the bourgeois state by the international power of the workers’ councils.

Confronted with this epochal change, the Labour Party – together with the majorities in the other social democratic parties and the trade unions – made its choice. Faced with the imperialist war, Labour capitulated to patriotism and played its role as “recruiting sergeant” for the slaughter. And faced with the threat of revolution after 1917 – which also had its echo in Britain – the watchword was: man the barricades, but on the side of the capitalist state. Faced with widespread sympathy for the Russian revolution, and some very militant workers’ struggles, such as the strike on “Red Clydeside” in 1919, the Labour Party adopted demagogic slogans which aimed to absorb or derail the revolutionary aspirations growing within the working class. The famous “Clause Four”, calling for the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy, was adopted in 1918 and was evidence of Labour’s fake conversion to socialism, in reality a commitment to state capitalism as the last rampart of capitalist social relations.

Within a few years, in 1924, the Labour Party confirmed that it had been fully integrated into the capitalist system by assuming the reins of government, as predicted in 1920 by Sylvia Pankhurst: “The British Labour Party, like the social patriotic organisations of other countries, will in the natural development of society, inevitably come into power. It is for the Communists to build up the forces that will overthrow the social patriots, and in this country we must not delay or falter in that work”[4]. And she added, reflecting her opposition to the views of Lenin and the leadership of the Communist International, “we must not dissipate our energy in adding to the strength of the Labour party; its rise to power is inevitable. We must concentrate on making a Communist movement that will vanquish it”. In sum, against the idea - still propagated by Trotskyists and other leftists today, that we can enter the Labour Party in order to transform it from the inside, or at least win over a substantial minority of it to the revolution – history has demonstrated that you cannot change the nature of a party which has gone over to the enemy class. You can only work for a class movement which will recognise the need to destroy it as an essential component of the capitalist state.

In government or in opposition, a party of capital

Subsequent events have further reinforced this conclusion. The defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 opened the door to the second world imperialist war. And again, the Labour Party displayed its recruiting sergeant’s stripes, above all with its ideology of a “people’s war against fascism” (echoed by the Stalinist “Communist” Parties and the majority of the Trotskyists). At the end of the war, in order to defuse any possibility of a revival of the proletarian discontent that had followed the 1914-18 massacre, it was the Labour Party that again came to power to implement the state capitalist measures aimed at keeping the working class on board with the existing system – above all, the introduction of the NHS in 1948.

Again, in the years after 1968, faced with a new economic crisis and a new wave of workers’ struggles, the Labour Party fitted in very nicely with the bourgeoisie’s political responses to the proletarian danger: first the strategy of offering the workers the bright prospect of returning the left to power; then, obliged to deal with workers’ anger against the attacks on their conditions launched by the governing Labour Party (as in the Winter of Discontent in 1979), in a kind of division of roles between Thatcher’s Tories – with the right in power implementing brutal attacks on jobs, and the Labour power in opposition presenting a purely bourgeois political alternative. The strategies changed, but the aim of keeping the class struggle under control remained.

Since 1989, we have been going through a long phase of retreat in the class struggle, a period of growing social fragmentation in which the divisions within the ruling class have grown increasingly brutal and chaotic. In this context, Labour’s role for the bourgeoisie has become increasingly mixed up and confused. Its primary role is no longer that of derailing rising workers’ struggles, and it has got more and more caught up in the internal divisions of the ruling class, as we can see from the scars inflicted on it by the Brexit fiasco.

It’s quite possible that in a future resurgence of the class struggle, there will be a new impetus to present Labour as a real workers’ party, as a force for socialism, but whatever policies it adopts, whether “Starmerite” respectability or “Corbynite” radicalism, it will not change the class nature of the Labour Party. The working class will have to break with the capitalist Labour Party in a fully conscious way, not on the bourgeois terrain of elections, but by fighting for its own demands and its own political perspective: the perspective of the destruction of the state and the transformation of society from the bottom to the top.

Amos 16 May 2021

 

This is not the first time that Hamas or other Islamic jihadists have rained rocket fire on civilian targets in Israeli cities, killing without discrimination: among the first victims were an Israeli Arab father and daughter in Lod, blown up in their car. Nor is the first time that Israeli armed forces have responded with devastating air raids and artillery fire, targeting Hamas leaders and weapons but also inflicting a civilian death toll in Gaza’s crowded buildings and streets dozens of times higher than anything “achieved” by Hamas rockets. Nor is it the first time that Israel has been on the verge of a military invasion of the Gaza strip, which cannot fail to result in further death, homelessness and trauma for Palestinian families. We saw all this before in 2009 and 2014.

But it is the first time that such a major military effort has been accompanied in a number of Israeli cities by a wave of violent clashes between Israeli Jews and Arabs. These are essentially pogroms: right wing gangs brandishing the Star of David and screaming “Death to the Arabs”, hunting for Arabs to beat up and murder; and at the same time attacks on Jews and synagogues set alight by crowds “inspired” by Islamism and Palestinian nationalism. Sinister and ironic memories of the Black Hundreds in Tsarist Russia or Kristallnacht in the Germany of 1938!

Provoking war and pogroms

The Israeli government under Netanyahu has to a large extent sown the seeds of this noxious development: through new laws reinforcing the definition of Israel as a Jewish state, and through the policy of annexing the whole of Jerusalem as its capital. This latter is essentially a declaration that the “Two State Solution” for the Israel/Palestine conflict is dead and buried, and that the military occupation of the West Bank is now a permanent fact of life. The immediate spark for the riots by Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem – the threat to expel Arab residents from East Jerusalem and replace them by Jewish settlers - flowed from this whole strategy of military occupation and ethnic cleansing.

The “democracies” of Europe and the US weep their usual crocodile tears at the escalation of military conflict and civil disorder (and even Netanyahu has called for an end to the street violence by Jews and Arabs alike). But the US under Trump had already sanctioned Israel’s openly annexationist policies, part of a wider imperialist project of bringing together Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states in an alliance against Iran (but also against great powers like Russia and China). And if Biden has taken some distance from Trump’s uncritical embrace of the Saudi regime, for example, his first concern in the current crisis has been to insist that “Israel has the right to defend itself”, because the Zionist state, for all its aspirations to playing its own game in the Middle East, remains a key component of US strategy in the region.  

But the Israeli state is not alone in acting as a provocateur. Hamas responded to the repression of the Jerusalem riots by launching a continuous salvo of rockets against civilian targets in Israel, knowing full well that this would bring fire from the skies on the unprotected population of Gaza. It has also been doing its utmost to encourage the ethnic violence inside Israel.

It is a characteristic of war in the epoch of capitalist decline that the first victims are the civil populations, above all the working class and the oppressed. Both Israel and Hamas are acting in the barbaric logic of imperialist war.

Faced with imperialist war, revolutionaries have always called for the international solidarity of the exploited against all capitalist states and proto-states. This remains the only possible barrier to a descent into war and barbarism.

But the ruling classes in the Middle East have, along with their more powerful imperialist backers, long stoked the flames of division and hatred. There were pogroms against Jewish settlers in Palestine in 1936, stirred up by a Palestinian political leadership that was seeking to ally itself with Nazi Germany against the dominant power in the region, Great Britain. But these were dwarfed by the massive ethnic cleansing of the Arab population that accompanied the 1948 “War of Independence”, creating the intractable Palestinian refugee problem which has been systematically instrumentalised by the Arab regimes. A succession of wars between Israel and the surrounding Arab states, Israeli incursions against Hamas and Hezbollah, the transformation Gaza into a vast prison – all this has deepened hatred between Arab and Jew to the point where it appears as nothing more than “common sense” on both sides of the divide. Against all this, examples of solidarity between Arab and Jewish workers in struggle are extremely rare, while organised political expressions of internationalism on both sides have been more or less non-existent.

The danger of an uncontrolled spiral of violence

There are further contingent elements in the provocative actions of the Israeli state. Netanyahu, the acting Prime Minister, has been unable to form a government after a series of inconclusive general elections, and still faces a number of corruption charges. He could certainly benefit from playing the strong man in this new national crisis. But there are deeper tendencies at work which could escape the control of those trying to benefit from the current mess.

The big Arab-Israeli wars of the 60s and 70s were fought in the context of the two imperialist blocs that dominated the planet: Israel backed by the USA, the Arab states supported by the USSR. But since the break-up of the bloc system at the end of the 80s, the innate drive towards imperialist war in decadent capitalism has taken a much more chaotic and potentially uncontrolled form. The Middle East in particular has become the stamping ground of a number of regional powers whose interests do not necessarily coincide with the schemes of the world powers: Israel, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia…These powers are already heavily involved in the bloody conflicts ravaging the region: Iran uses its pawn Hizbollah in the multi-sided conflict in Syria, and Saudi Arabia has been deeply enmeshed in the war in Yemen against Iran’s Houthi allies. Turkey has carried its war against the Kurdish peshmergas into Syria and Iraq (while also sustaining a military intervention in war-torn Libya) As well as reducing whole countries to ruin and starvation, these wars contain a real risk of spiralling out of control and spreading the destruction across the Middle East.

This mounting chaos at the military level is one expression of the global decomposition of the capitalist system. Another and closely related element is played out at the social and political level, through the intensification of confrontations between bourgeois political factions, of tensions between ethnic and religious groups, of pogroms against minorities. This is a global trend, typified, for example, in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the persecution of Muslims in Myanmar and China, the sharpening of the racial divide in the USA. As we have seen, the ethnic divisions in Israel/Palestine have a long history, but they are being aggravated by the whole atmosphere of despair and hopelessness generated by the seemingly irresolvable “Palestinian problem”.  And while pogroms are often unleashed as instruments of state policy, in today’s conditions they can escalate beyond the aims of state agencies and accelerate a general slide into social breakdown. The fact that this is beginning to happen in a highly militarised state like Israel is a sign that the attempts of totalitarian state capitalism to hold back the process of social disintegration can end up aggravating it even more.

Wars and pogroms are the future that capitalism offers us everywhere if the international working class does not rediscover its own interests and its own future, which is the communist revolution. If the proletarians of the Middle East are, for now, too overwhelmed by massacres and ethnic divisions, it is up to the central fractions of the world proletariat to return to the path of struggle, the only path that leads out of the nightmare of this putrefying social order.

Amos, May 14, 2021