It's 40 years since the year-long miners' strike of 1984-85. The BBC and Channel 4 broadcast some documentaries to commemorate it[1]. These programmes focussed mainly on the testimonies of miners as well as some of their wives who joined the picket lines and protest demos. We were also served up comments from individual police and those state functionaries involved in planning and plotting the defeat of the struggle. The documentaries want to show the tragedy of the strike, the hopelessness of a situation where the miners were overpowered by police, and where there was division and fragmentation across the various regions of the British coalfields and violence on the picket lines between the pickets and miners who decided to cross them. The obvious conclusion from this is that “struggle doesn't pay”.

Revolutionaries must draw the lessons of the defeat and place these events in the broader context of the struggles of the international working class taking place at the time. This strike followed in the aftermath of the 1980 Polish mass strike and in a period when many struggles had occurred and were still occurring across the European heartlands. At the time of the miners' strike there was the potential for a broader struggle with some level of support from striking dockers, or from workers in the steel industry and transport sector, but the TUC and the other unions acted to isolate and disarm the strike, which led to its ultimate defeat. One clear lesson to draw is that there is no way in which one sector of the working class can defeat a capitalist state machine that is well-prepared and well-armed.

 

The emergence of Thatcherism

The history of miners’ strikes in 1971/72, 1974, and 1981 demonstrated a real solidarity and unity that was effective in enabling workers to push back government attacks and establish the miners as a vanguard sector of the working class during this period. However, a big change was afoot; a new government had taken office in 1979 with a Prime Minister on a mission to apply some drastic surgery to the ailing British economy through privatisations of state-owned sectors, with measures to deregulate and open industry more directly to market forces, and with incentives provided to attract more investment. A key aim was to inflict a serious blow against the resistance of the working class in Britain as a whole. This was part of an international strategy of the ruling class, echoed by the policies of the Reagan administration in the US, the attacks on steelworkers' jobs in France, and so on. 

The miners were first in the firing line of this planned offensive. One of the miners actually speaks of discovering, in the aftermath of the strike, that the Tory party had devised a strategy called 'The Ridley Plan' in 1977 to prepare the Thatcher government for a confrontation with the miners. It proposed “Stockpiling coal at the power stations, training a large mobile police force and recruiting 'non-union' lorry drivers to take responsibility for transporting coal” as the way of defeating the miners and strengthening the hand of the capitalist state[2].

In the face of Thatcherism's anti-working class rhetoric, the NUM in 1982 elected Arthur Scargill, a demagogic figure from the left as national leader of the NUM. So, when the government announced the closure of 20 pits in the South Yorkshire, Kent and Scottish coalfields in 1984, with the loss of 20,000 jobs, the reaction in these coalfields was to take immediate strike action, and to deploy pickets across all the coalfields. Scargill and the national leadership were quick to take a strong grip on the situation, and ordered a mass walk-out across the British coalfields. The media portrayed the situation as a battle between two ideologues: “Thatcher versus Scargill”.

Flying pickets travelled to the other non-striking coalfields and there was immediate support from some pits at the outset, but quite early on hesitations began to appear in the Midlands coalfields of Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire, where pits were considered more viable and profitable, and thus not faced with immediate closure. With permission from the national leadership, the local NUMs in these areas balloted their members and a particular focus fell on the Nottinghamshire coalfield which voted against strike action; a few individual miners began to cross the picket lines, which in turn gave rise to pickets arriving from the South Yorkshire coalfields. The government had the police on standby and squadrons were deployed from all over the country. They set up roadblocks to intercept miners, arresting them and charging them if they would not turn their vehicles around and return home; as a result, many were arrested. The Yorkshire miners who got through and joined the pickets at Ollerton colliery were held back by armed cops providing a safe passage for those going in to work.

These TV documentaries show that the media at the time painted the miners as violent law-breaking thugs inflicting violence on the police! Thatcher referred to it as “the rule of the mob, against the rule of the law”. The hostile government and media propaganda was used to create further divisions in workers' ranks, while the NUM leadership was happy to continue the physical confrontations with the police and would condone physical violence against those branded “scabs” for crossing the picket lines.

 

The so-called “Battle of Orgreave”

Both Channels focussed a lot on events at the Orgreave coking plant in south Yorkshire. Channel 4 devoted a whole episode to it, having been given film taken by NUM officials, said not to have been seen before. Orgreave supplied coke to the Scunthorpe steelworks in Lincolnshire and the NUM leadership believed that blockading it en masse could bring a turning point in the strike. Miners from across all the coalfields were sent there to obstruct lorries entering and leaving the plant. We were told that the NUM mobilised 8,000 miners. Those who were present on the day spoke of being surprised that there were no roadblocks and there was no problem finding parking. The police totalled around 6,000. They had come for a fight, dressed with riot shields, armed with batons, dogs and horses.

It was a summer's day, 18June, three months into the strike, and the miners were in tee-shirts and casual clothes, oblivious to what was in store for them. There was the usual push and shove between police and miners, but otherwise the mood seemed light, with some stone-throwing in the direction of the heavily armed riot police. But this stone-throwing became the excuse for the full-scale attack once the miners were hemmed in. One of the programmes shows Scargill urging the miners forward, encouraging them to surge towards the police lines, after which he then got himself arrested and removed from the scene before the onslaught began.

It was a total trap. With the stage set, the sea of police lines was given the order. A pathway for the mounted police cavalry was created and they drove the horses straight into the crowds of unprepared miners. The baton-wielding foot police followed closely behind. The footage shows miners having already suffered terrible injuries being dragged across the ground by teams of cops to then be arrested. And the assault didn't stop there, as the police, including those on horses, drove the miners from the coking plant into the pit village, a deliberate strategy to be able them to charge the miners with “riot”.  As one of the defence lawyers who represented the miners in court, Gareth Pierce, explained later, the charge of “riot” requires that a civilian population “is frightened” by protesters. This deliberate framing of the strikers and other lies and deceptions used in court by the police were duly exposed as fraudulent. On the day 95 miners were arrested, 55 charged with “riot”, which can come with a life sentence. The charges were dismissed in court after a 48-day trial and the South Yorkshire police were ordered to pay £425,000 compensation to the miners for assault, unlawful arrest and malicious prosecution. By the end of the strike, across the whole of the British coalfields, there were 11,291 arrested and 8,392 charged with breaking the peace or obstructing the highway.

Thatcher revelled in the triumph of her well laid plan at Orgreave, continuing the lie that the miners were the ones who incited the violence. She drew a parallel between her victory in 1982 evicting the Argentinian forces from the Falkland Islands and the victory over the miners at Orgreave. For her, one was the “the enemy without” and the other “the enemy within”.

The defeat inflicted at Orgreave by the British government on the miners weakened the resolve among many miners. So, at the end of August some Yorkshire miners began to return to work for the first time. Nonetheless the strike would be dragged out for a further 6 months. Orgreave symbolised the broader trap laid by the NUM, which aimed to convince workers that the strike could be won through a war of attrition in a single sector, a total blocking of coal supplies, rather than extending the struggle to other sectors of the class.

 

The demand for the national ballot

In one of the TV programmes a miner in the Nottinghamshire coalfield who was an NUM representative there, strongly criticised the fact that there was no national ballot across all the UK coalfields, which he claimed would have united all the miners behind the all-out strike from the start. This lack of a ballot became a common refrain and a criticism in the media of the 'undemocratic' NUM leadership of Scargill. At the end of August when miners in Yorkshire were returning to work, it is possible that the outcome of a national ballot could have been in favour of a return to work, but this would have weakened Scargill's grip over the miners, so it was rejected by a vote of the NUM executive.

There was a subsequent challenge to the NUM's refusal to call a national ballot, not from within the union, but from the courts. In September 1984 the miners' strike was decreed illegal because of the NUM's refusal to hold a national ballot. The court seized the NUM's assets. At which point, as the programme shows, the NUM's behaviour became farcical as footage shows NUM representatives making approaches to the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi, a major financier of terrorist groups like the IRA, for financial support,

Official data claims that there were 26 million strike days in the miners’ strike, the largest since the 1926 General Strike. The funds of the NUM in support of the strikers would run out quite early on and, as the law denied strikers welfare benefits, the miners were dependent on other family members or on financial support from other unions, and concerned groups and from money collected at numerous rallies and demonstrations across the country. The steelworkers’ union, the ISTC, had refused any cooperation with the NUM from the start, but donated food and other means of support in the later stages “but gave no money as they didn't want to be accused of financing the aggressive picketing”. The financial toll on those who were prepared to see it through till the bitter end, on March 3 1985, was a heavy one, leaving families burdened with debts that would take many years to pay off.

What is depicted in the documentaries is a real working class militancy expressed in the testimonies of the striking miners. The mental scars they still bear today from the barbaric violence inflicted on them by the capitalist state were clearly visible, alongside the trauma they suffered from the nauseating propaganda they were subject to in the media. Many went to prison and were denied further work in the coal industry. Deaths of miners and family members occurred. They had been led into a trap and striking workers today must learn the lessons from this. This defeat would prove to be a heavy defeat not just for the working class in the UK. Bourgeois propaganda illustrated with images of the misery inflicted on the miners, isolated from the rest of the working class over the course of a whole year, would circulate around the world and impact the working class internationally.

It is importance for the emerging new generation of militant workers to understand that the working class needs the broadest possible unity of its forces when defending its class interests. This can only occur through the self-organisation of workers' struggles, by organising their own mass meetings and elected strike committees. And that is only possible when workers are able to escape the union traps designed to reinforce division and create conflict between them and their fellow workers in the struggle to defend their living standards against the increasing attacks of the capitalist state.

Duffy 31/3/24

 

On 27 January, the ICC held a public meeting in Madrid, in person and online, on Bilan's contribution to the struggle for the world party of the proletariat. This was not a call for discussion in a vacuum, as we were able to see that there is an interest in Bilan in the political milieu which had already been expressed on two previous occasions in Madrid.

Why are we organising a public meeting on "Bilan"?

The communist organisations of today are nothing without being fully inscribed in the critical historical continuity of the communist organisations of the past. We claim two links in this continuity: Bilan and Internationalisme[1].  As we said in the announcement of the public meeting: "the proletariat needs its world party, and to form it, when its struggles reach massive international strength, its base will be the Communist Left of which we claim to be a part  [...] The public meeting we are proposing is intended to provoke a debate in order to draw up a critical assessment of Bilan's contribution, to appreciate where Bilan is fully valid, where it needs to be criticised, and where we need to go further. Its strengths, its errors, its organisational and theoretical experience are indispensable materials for the struggle of today's revolutionaries".

 

The critical historical continuity of Marxism

One participant opened the debate by declaring that marxism is dogmatic and immutable. For him, marxism should not take into account the evolution of the historical situation, but should remain fixed and stuck on positions affirmed from its origins. In this respect, he described himself as "sclerotic" and even "trapezoidal", and went so far as to say that only the dead change. The participants present  and those who took part via the Internet put forward the following arguments against this point of view:

- In marxism there are basic positions and principles that do not and will not change: that the class struggle is the motor of history, that the class struggle of the proletariat is the only one that can lead to communism, that every mode of production, and therefore also capitalism, knows an ascendant epoch and an epoch of decadence, that the destruction of capitalism is necessary to build communism, that the constitution of a world party is indispensable for the proletariat, that marxism plays a leading role in the development of class consciousness, etc.

- However, from these foundations, which form its bedrock, marxism has developed by responding to the new problems posed by the evolution of capitalism and the class struggle, but also by correcting any errors, inadequacies or limitations associated with each historical period. This approach is fundamental in science, but it is even more vital for the proletariat which, as both an exploited and a revolutionary class, must develop its struggle for communism by working its way through innumerable errors and weaknesses, learning from its struggles and defeats, and ruthlessly criticising its mistakes. All the more so, it must develop its struggle on the basis of a full awareness that it possesses nothing other than its labour power and that, unlike the historical classes of the past, it cannot develop its project without destroying capitalism from top to bottom, as well as eradicating the roots of all exploitative societies.

- This also applies to its revolutionary organisations, which must be capable of critically analysing previous positions and their own positions. Thus, in 1872, in the light of the experience of the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels corrected the idea that the state should be taken back from the ruling class as it was, and put forward the new historical lesson that had just been so dearly won by the proletariat: the absolute necessity of destroying the previous bourgeois state. Lenin, in the April Theses, put forward the need to modify the party programme by integrating into it an understanding of the world-wide and socialist nature of the revolution and the seizure of power by the soviets.

It is seriously irresponsible to cling dogmatically to positions that are no longer valid. The social democratic parties did not want to grasp either the decadence of capitalism, or the consequences that flowed from it: the end of the possibility of wresting lasting improvements and reforms from this system of exploitation through struggle, or the nature of imperialist war, or the mass strike, etc. All of this led to the betrayal of social democracy. Trotsky's Left Opposition dogmatically clung to the unconditional defence of the programme of the first 4 congresses of the CI, which plunged it into opportunism, and never engaged in a critical approach to the revolutionary wave of 1917-1924. Finally, after Trotsky's death, Trotskyism betrayed proletarian internationalism by supporting one of the imperialist camps involved in the Second World War and thus passed into the bourgeois camp.

A proletarian organisation which is not capable of a ruthless critical evaluation of its own trajectory and that of the previous organisations of the workers' movement is condemned to perish or to betray. Bilan gives us the method of such a critical evaluation in the article "Towards a Two and Three-Quarter International" (Bilan No. 1, November 1933) in response to Trotsky's Left Opposition: "At each historical period of the formation of the proletariat as a class, the growth of the Party's objectives becomes evident. The Communist League marched with a fraction of the bourgeoisie. The First International sketched out the first class organisations of the proletariat. The Second International founded the political parties and mass trade unions of the workers. The Third International achieved the victory of the proletariat in Russia.

In each period, we shall see that the possibility of forming a party is determined on the basis of previous experience and the new problems which have arisen for the proletariat. The First International could never have been founded in collaboration with the radical bourgeoisie. The Second International could not have been founded without the notion of the need to regroup proletarian forces in class organisations. The Third International could not have been founded in collaboration with the forces acting within the proletariat which aimed to lead it not to insurrection and the seizure of power, but to the gradual reform of the capitalist state. In every epoch, the proletariat can organise itself into a class, and the party can be based on the following two elements:

1. the consciousness of the most advanced position which the proletariat must occupy, the intelligence of the new paths to be taken.

2. The growing delimitation of the forces which can act in favour of the proletarian revolution".

This work is not done by starting from scratch, by taking isolated new developments as a reference, or by examining possible errors without comparing them with previous positions. It is done on the basis of a rigorous critical examination of previous positions, seeing what is valid, what is insufficient or outdated, and what is erroneous, requiring the elaboration of a new position. One participant, attracted by the smoke and mirrors of theories on the "invariance of the communist programme", proposed adapting marxism to modern theories of human behaviour and psychology, by combining it with new scientific discoveries. However, the marxist method does not operate a "change of position", nor does it adapt to apparently new ideas, but proceeds to a development and a rigorous confrontation of reality with its own starting framework, which enriches it and takes it much further.

 

On the repression of the Kronstadt revolt

The participant who called himself "invariant" described the crushing of Kronstadt as a "victory of the proletariat" and justified the repression of Kronstadt by saying that the party must impose its dictatorship on the class.  For us, this position is a monstrosity and we responded in the following way, with the support and active participation of several other speakers. The working class is not a shapeless mass that needs to be kicked or caned to move it forward and "liberate" it. It is clear that behind this blind defence of the repression of Kronstadt lies a totally erroneous vision of the proletarian party and its relationship with the class. The proletarian party is not, like the bourgeois parties, a candidate for state power, a state party. Its function cannot be to administer the state, which would inevitably alter its relationship with the class into a relationship of force. Instead its contribution consists in orienting it politically. By becoming an administrator of the state, the party will imperceptibly change its role and become a party of functionaries, with all that this implies in terms of a tendency towards bureaucratisation. The case of the Bolsheviks is exemplary in this respect.

According to a logical "common sense" point of view that survives in certain parts of the proletarian milieu: "the party being the most conscious part of the class, the class must trust it, so that it is the party that naturally and automatically takes power and exercises it". However, ”The communist party is a part of the class -- an organism secreted by the class in its movement, with the aim of developing the historic struggle of the class towards its ultimate vict­ory, the radical transformation of social rela­tions, the foundation of a society which realizes the unity of the human community:"[2].  If the party identifies itself with the state, not only does it deny the historical role of the proletariat as a whole in favour of a bourgeois conception of the direction of society, but it also denies its specific and indispensable role within the proletariat to push methodically, tooth and nail, for the development of proletarian consciousness, not in a conservative sense, but  within the perspective of revolution and the transition to communism.

Moreover, Bilan, while acting with more caution and circumspection on other questions, had a very clear position in its defence of proletarian principles to firmly oppose the use of violence in the settlement of problems and disputes which may arise within our class : "There may be a circumstance in which a section of the proletariat - and we agree that it may even have been an unwitting captive of the enemy's manoeuvres - may come to fight the proletarian state. How are we to deal with this situation, starting from the question of principle that socialism cannot be imposed on the proletariat by force or violence? It would have been better to lose Kronstadt than to keep it from the geographical point of view, because, basically, such a victory could have only one result: to alter the very basis, the substance of the action led by the proletariat"[3].

The world revolution will go through many complicated episodes, but in order to defend its orientation and development, it will have to firmly defend fundamental principles in the actions of the proletariat. One of these is immutable and invariable: there can and must never be relations of violence within the working class, all the more so when acting in its name to exercise and justify repression against part of it, all the more so when this repression claims to be an attempt to defend the revolution. The crushing of Kronstadt accelerated the path towards the degeneration and defeat of the revolution in Russia and towards the destruction of the degenerating proletarian substance of the Bolshevik party.

 

Drawing militant conclusions from public meetings

Other very interesting and polemical discussions took place, and not only about the supposedly "invariant" positions. We insisted on the substantial difference between Bilan's organisational, theoretical and historical method and that of Trotsky's Left Opposition[4]: 

- Bilan remained faithful to the principle of the struggle against the deformation of principles by bourgeois ideology. While the Left Opposition claimed that the Congresses of the CI theorised opportunism and laid the foundations for Stalinism, the left fractions criticised all these opportunist theorisations which developed from the Second Congress onwards. They waged a patient polemical struggle to try to convince the maximum number of militant forces trapped within the opportunist framework of the "tactics" of the Left Opposition.

- Bilan was capable of making a profound and rigorous critique, which enabled them to draw lessons from the erroneous positions of the CI which subsequently led the latter to betrayal, such as the united front tactic, the defence of national liberation struggles, the democratic struggle, partisan militias... enabling them to preserve the defence of revolutionary positions in the class for the future, in line with the positions defended by the Communist Left.

- Their analysis of the relationship of forces between the classes was vital in determining the function of revolutionary organisations in this period, as opposed to the "permanent influence on the masses" that the Opposition sought to gain at all costs.

There are also substantial differences between Bilan's conception and that of the German KAPD, although both fall within the framework of positions defended by the Communist Left. The KAPD, and this was its great weakness, was not based on a historical analysis, it even rejected the continuity of the revolutionary link of its positions with the October revolution and totally neglected the organisational question. In other words, it was Bilan who bequeathed us his vision of political and organisational work AS A FRACTION: "it is the fraction that makes it possible to maintain the continuity of communist in­tervention in the class, even in the blackest pe­riods when that intervention encounters no im­mediate echo. This is demonstrated by the whole history of the Left Communist fractions. As well as Bilan, its theoretical review, the Italian Fraction also published a newspaper in Italian, Prometeo, with a bigger circulation in France than the paper of those past-masters of activism, the French Trotskyists”. [5] In the same way, the essential role of the Fraction is to lay the foundations for the construction of the future world proletarian party and to be in a position to analyse the concrete measures to be taken and the moment when it is necessary to start fighting for its direct formation.

Within the framework of work conceived as that of a fraction, as defended by Bilan, the discussion at public meetings must have a MILITANT orientation and not remain a gathering where everyone puts forward their own "opinion", without achieving any result. This was interpreted by the self-declared "sclerotic" participant as a manifestation of ICC sectarianism, a mode of discussion and recruitment on a sectarian basis and, on this pretext, he objected to the conclusions being drawn and stormed out of the meeting before hearing them, taking with him the companion with whom he had arrived[6]. 

A proletarian meeting must be able to draw conclusions which include a reminder of the points of agreement and the points of disagreement in the discussion, thus consciously determining where it has arrived, highlighting questions discussed on which there has been progress in clarification, and establishing a bridge towards other discussions to come. With this in mind, we tried to urged the two runaways to stay and present any disagreements they had with the conclusions. Unfortunately, we were unable to persuade them to do so, as apparently their taste for informal eclecticism was also an immovable principle!

We invite readers to continue the debate by making contributions or by attending the public meetings and events organised by the ICC.

ICC, February 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Along with increasingly dangerous military exchanges between Hezbollah and the Israeli army on the Lebanese border and the actions of the 50-odd armed groups of the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces against US bases in that country, the attack by the Yemeni Houthis on international shipping through the Red Sea and the subsequent bombing of Yemen - largely restricted to American and British forces - represents a significant escalation of the wider war across the region through a multiplication of imperialist clashes . The Houthi attacks are also having an impact at the economic level, forcing ships to steer clear of the Suez Canal and go round the whole of Africa, thus greatly increasing transport costs and disrupting global commerce. The Houthis have thus become an additional factor in the irrationality and unpredictability of the Middle East conflict.

The regional forces aligned to the “Axis of Resistance” against Israel are much more diverse than Hamas, underlining the fact that while Iran is at the centre of this alignment of forces – supplying them, supporting them - it is by no means in a position of “command and control” over all of them. Considering the many differences between all these component parts, this is not a coherent “bloc” but what the bourgeoisie call a “multi-dimensional” convergence of purpose, which is really a living expression of capitalist decomposition. The fact that the groups of this “Axis” cannot possibly be bombed into submission will not stop the futile attempts to do so – as the civilian populations take the brunt of the suffering.

The Yemeni Houthis are a pure expression of capitalist decomposition...

The Houthi movement is a religious and nationalist movement that has its roots in Zaydism, one of the branches of Shiism that appears as a reaction against religious and political corruption. Enjoying a relative territorial autonomy, the Houthi region in the North joined the Royalist forces in the civil war with the Republicans during the sixties. The establishment of the independent Republic of Yemen in the seventies, with a huge political influence of Saudi Arabia, has led to the pre-eminence of the Sunnite elites of the country and a religious pressure by radical forms of Sunnism, like Wahhabism and Salafism, against Zaydism, while Houthis represent more than 30% of the population. From 2004, and activated by the Gulf War of that year, the Houthis rebelled against economic segregation and political and religious oppression by the corrupt Sunnite elites, supported by the Saudis. They made deep connections with other Shiite movements, like Hezbollah, and therefore Iran, while the official government, although adhering to the “partnership against terror”, sought support from al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) and Isis. In 2014 the Houthis began a civil war against the Saudi and western-backed government of President and head of the military, Abudrabbuh Mansur Hadi. They took the Yemeni capital Sana’a and, emphasising the fact that these are not simply Iranian proxies, they did so against the express wishes of Tehran[1]. This expressed an immediate danger for the Saudis, as the Houthis claim certain border provinces in Saudi Arabia (Najran and Asir), populated by similar Shiite tribes

In response, the Saudis, British and Americans unleashed “Operation Decisive Storm” which launched tens of thousands of air strikes deliberately aimed at civilians: schools, nurseries, public transport, hospitals, clinics, etc., in a bombing campaign that lasted 4 years. They also organised a blockade that was aimed to spread starvation and disease, a man-made famine which was very effective in killing children and spreading cholera, all contributing to many tens of thousands of deaths of Yemeni civilians. Much of this horror went unreported in the western press. With the help of Iran and Hezbollah, the Houthis replied in September 2019 with a devastating attack on the Saudi-Aramco oil fields and processing facilities in Jeddah which cut Saudi oil production by half. The result was the offer of a Saudi cease-fire.

Like Hamas, the Houthis were particularly unpopular with their populations before the latest war and the subsequent attacks on Red Sea shipping. At the end of last year there were massive demonstrations in Sana’a and other major cities, led by workers protesting over unpaid wages (Channel 4 News, 20.1.24). But the repressive apparatus of the Houthis responded. This apparatus, which was built up on the basis of the dreaded Saudi/Hadi torturers, is formidable and extensive and even includes trained female torturers (the “zainabiya” who assist in the rape and torture of both women and men - the Houthis have particularly demonised women under the guise of a crackdown on prostitution). Like the Taliban, Hamas or Hezbollah – other pure expressions of decomposition – the Houthis have fashioned their medieval ideology and adapted it to the capitalist world of imperialism and oppression.

The Middle East threatens to get out of control

Within the present tensions and war in the Middle East there is no doubt about the central role played by Iran to increase its leading role in the region. To reach this objective, it has been using its various tentacles and “allies” in order to stir up more trouble against Israel and its western backers. However, these “allies” have their own agenda, which cannot be reduced to the aims of Iran, as was highlighted by the restricted direct military support of the Mullahs to the suicidal offensive of Hamas, as a direct military confrontation with Israel and the USA would put at risk the considerable gains they have accumulated in the region over the last two decades. Within this, Iran itself is racked by the effects of the economic blockade and more globally of decomposition on its fractured society, with the heads of the Islamic Republic engaged in political infighting and facing a working class which remains militant.

Since the collapse of the bloc system in 1989 where, instead of a new millennium of “Peace, Freedom and Prosperity” promised by the ruling class, we have had three decades of austerity, war, chaos and irrationality. Rather than coherence and stable alliances, we see incoherence and every man for himself in international relations as capitalism breaks down and rots from its very roots. Thus, the situation today is much more dangerous than the Cold War when pawns and proxies were generally held in the straitjacket imposed by the major powers, and there was a certain stability and “playing by the rules” in imperialism’s Great Game. Today, that is no longer the case, and the accelerating and world-wide flight into irrationality and everyman for himself has become the dominant tendency of imperialism, so that increasingly uncontrollable escalation is everywhere on the cards.

Baboon, 15.2.24