Our rulers just can’t get enough of war.

A whole year of ‘commemorations’ of World War One, with opinion divided among them about whether this was a Good War or a Bad War. The right wing tends to argue that this was a Good War. The Kaiser was Bad, and had to be stopped. And Britain’s empire was, on the whole, a Good Thing, which had to be defended. The left wing can then pose as very radical, and say, this was a Bad, Imperialist War.

A week or more of celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings in 1944, with royals and presidents hob-nobbing in northern France on the big day. This time left and right are united: this was a Good War. The US and the British were definitely the Goodies, and the Germans were the Baddies. The Goodness of the war is proved by the fact that it made the world safe for Democracy.

When it comes to the First World War, the left can quote authentic revolutionaries like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg and tell us that capitalism, at a certain stage in its historical development, inevitably turns to imperialism and war to prolong its survival past its sell-by date. But they mysteriously forget all this when it comes to the Second World War, which was to all intents and purposes the same war fought by the same imperialist powers as the conflict that ended only 20 years previously.  The magic of ‘anti-fascism’, of ‘Nazism is the greater evil’, wipes away what marxism tells us about the real nature of capitalism, and the barbarism of Auschwitz and Treblinka justifies the barbarism of the aerial obliteration of Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   

In opposing the First World War on the basis of working class internationalism, the revolutionaries who went on to form the Communist International insisted that if capitalism in decay was not overthrown by proletarian revolution, it would drag humanity into a deadly spiral of wars which would threaten its very existence. History has proved them right: the Second World War – which revolutionaries opposed for the same reason – plumbed even greater depths of horror than the First. The “Cold War” that immediately followed wiped out millions in proxy wars between the two superpowers, with the sword of nuclear annihilation hanging over mankind’s head. The break-up of the two imperialist blocs after 1989 did not bring peace, but a growing war of each against all that has swept across Africa, the Middle East, and, with the war in ex-Yugoslavia, to the gates of Europe. The great powers, reacting to the break-up of their spheres of influence, have since 1989 intervened militarily even more often than during the Cold War, but as we can see in Chechnya, Iraq and Afghanistan, they have only accelerated the plunge into chaos.

Today the ruin that is Syria, the permanent massacre that is the Congo and Central Africa, the growing tensions between the USA and Japan and China in the Far East, the descent of Ukraine into an imperialist ‘civil war’ fuelled by both Russia and the western powers – all this is testimony to the fact that the rulers cannot have enough of war, that their system needs it, feeds on it, fuels it, even if this murderous addiction will also lead to capital’s own destruction. Hence all the efforts of all the ruling classes of the world to stir up the poison of patriotism, to make the exploited of the world identify with their exploiters and wave the national flag, which is always the flag of capitalism and war.

For the working class, to identify with our rulers, to march in their parades, leads to suicide. To understand our identity with all the exploited of the world, to unite in struggle against the capitalists’ call for sacrifice in the national interest, to carry on that struggle against the capitalists even when they go to war, to oppose the national flag with the flag of the international revolution – that is the only hope for a world without war.  

Amos, 8.6.14 

In Egypt, the army’s candidate Abdel al-Sisi has won a ‘landslide’ victory, polling between 93% and 96% of the votes. True, the elections were widely boycotted, and only 46% of the electorate went to the polls (government estimate) and the main opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, was banned; true this election was in fact an out and out farce comparable to the one that Bashir Asad organised in war-shattered Syria on 3 June (and even Asad only polled 88.7% of the vote!). But just as the sectarian divisions in Syrian society have led many – such as Christians and members of the Alawite sect that the Asad family belongs to – to support Asad’s brutal regime out of fear of what would happen if he lost the civil war, so in Egypt the fact that many ordinary people continue to support the rule of the army is also a product of fear.

Fear of the repression and corruption incarnated by Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government that came to power in the elections that followed the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011. Fear of the crime in the streets that has grown appreciably worse since the decline of the mass movement that ousted Mubarak. Fear of the jihadist version of Islam which was gaining influence under the cloak of the ‘moderately Islamist’ Muslim Brotherhood. It was this climate of fear which led even many of those who had participated in the 2011 movement – which had been directed against Mubarak’s army-based regime – to turn back to the army in the hope that it would guarantee a minimum of order.

This order, of course, is also based on the same ruthless repression which kept Mubarak in power for so long, and which sustained the brief rule of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. The clearest proof of this was the mass death sentence handed out last March to over 500 Brotherhood supporters who took part in a demonstration which resulted in attacks on people and property, and the death of one police officer.

Such blatant manipulation of the courts, whether or not the deaths sentences are carried out, is designed, like all forms of state terror, to drum home the message that any form of rebellion against the state will not be tolerated.

For the moment the message is getting home: the social revolts and the workers’ strikes of 2011 have fallen silent.

In 2011, these movements were seen as part of an  ‘Arab spring’, an outbreak of hope, where people could leave their fear behind and come together in their thousands in the streets, facing the forces of repression (not only the police and the army, but also the criminal gangs unleashed on the demonstrators by the regime). Massive strikes centred round the huge textile factories and other industrial concentrations affirmed the power of the working class and were a decisive factor in the decision of the ruling class to ditch Mubarak. The revolts centred in Tunisia and Egypt were an inspiration to a rebellion across the divide of war, in Israel, and to the ‘Indignation’ which motived the mass demonstrations and assemblies in Spain, the Occupy movement in the USA, and the street rebellions in Turkey and Brazil in 2013.

But these revolts never escaped the profound ideological illusions of those who took part in them. They were in essence the response of a new generation of the working class, faced with a capitalist system mired in an insoluble economic crisis and with a future of insecurity, unemployment and austerity. These revolts saw themselves as revolutions, even as part of a world revolution, but they were the product of a proletariat which has largely lost its sense of identity as a class, forgotten its real history and its traditions of struggle. The participants acted in their hundreds of thousands, but they still largely saw themselves as citizens, individuals, not as part of an associated class.

‘Democracy’ is the logical expression of this outlook of the atomised citizen: one man, one vote, enter what the French call the ‘isoloir’ the polling booth/isolator to elect a capitalist party to manage the capitalist state. And this was the great goal that was offered to, and largely accepted by, these movements, with only a small minority arguing that the assemblies where people came together to discuss and take decisions could be the basis of a new form of power, like the soviets of 1917 – one which left the ‘democracy’ of bourgeois parliaments in the dustbin. On the basis of this abdication to democracy, dictators like Morsi and al-Sisi may vie for government office, but the state power they serve remains intact.

Today the dreams of the Arab spring have been rudely shattered: in Egypt which has become a sordid contest between power-hungry factions, in Libya which is collapsing into the rule of local armed gangs, with the chaos spreading south into Chad, Mali and beyond; in Syria, above all, which has become an almost unimaginable nightmare, where Asad rules over a country that has been bombed to ruins, and where the ‘opposition’, increasingly torn between ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’ Islamist factions, offers the grimmest possible alternative. In Ukraine, a series of events which were superficially modelled on the Arab spring was immediately engulfed in nationalism and integrated into the reviving imperialist rivalries between Russia and the western powers. In Europe and the USA as well, the struggles against the impact of the capitalist crisis have gone into retreat. Small wonder that so many have succumbed to despair, where the hope of changing the world is dismissed as a fairy tale.

But this is not the first time that the class war has gone underground.  The proletarian revolution takes its time. It does not obey an immediate calendar, or respond machine-like to a certain level of economic indicators. Those who stand for the genuine revolution against world capitalism have the task of drawing out the lessons of past defeats so that the revolts of the future do not repeat the same mistakes – not least, the fatal error of believing in the bourgeois sham of democracy. 

Amos, 6.6.14

As the results of May’s elections to the European Parliament became clear, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said it was “more than a warning. It is a shock, an earthquake.”  The ‘seismic’ outcome was that about a quarter of the seats would be taken up by parties that are ‘malcontents’ when it comes to the European dream.

From the Right there were massive gains by the Front National in France, the UK Independence Party in the UK, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece and other ‘extremist’ parties in Hungary, Austria and Denmark. From the Left there was Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain. In Italy the Five Star Movement, difficult to categorise in left/right terms, also had an impact, coming second overall in the poll.

As has happened before, with only a 43% turnout across Europe, the majority of people didn’t vote at all. And of those who did, how many had any real concern with the European Parliament, how it functions and whatever it is it does? British Foreign Minister William Hague said “I think that people do know that in the European elections they can have a free vote, a free hit”. The Euro vote is seen as a focus for frustrations, an impotent means of expressing anger or unhappiness. This also applies to those who are elected. UKIP leader Nigel Farage said in a speech in February: “We can’t change a thing in Europe” and that while Eurosceptics could “have some fun” in the European Parliament trying to block legislation, it would “not last very long” (Guardian 27/2/14).

But if more than 200 million (out of 380 million) people didn’t bother to vote, what can be said of the illusions of those who did? Elections channel discontent into support for different factions of the bourgeoisie, but it is significant when new or revived forces come to the fore and support for long-established parties declines. In Greece, for example, there is a widespread conviction that European institutions are dominated by Germany and many parties, not just Syriza, see the re-structuring of the EU as essential if national economies are going to improve. But across Europe, nationalists of all hues blame the EU for economic and social problems: in short, the EU is a visible scapegoat for capitalism’s economic crisis, in a way not dissimilar to blaming the bankers for the crash of 2008.  

More sinister is the growing tendency of the ‘new’ political forces to focus the blame on immigrants and ethnic or religious minorities. Racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric are the common currency of bourgeois parties, but groups like Golden Dawn are not just anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant in words, they terrorise their victims, using physical violence without hesitation. The spirit of the pogrom lurks in the anti-immigrant nationalism of many parties.

In the propaganda of all the populists, left and right, there are simple answers. Everything’s the fault of the EU. It’s all because of German domination. It’s immigrants. It’s the Jews. Where once middle class voters would have confidence in their conservative or liberal choices, and workers would routinely support the parties of the left, there is now increasingly disorientation throughout society, because while the ruling class is increasingly incoherent and fragmented, the working class is not putting itself forward as a social force which can change society at its roots. In such a situation, discontent with the way things are does not easily lead to a questioning of the capitalist system that is at the root of material deprivation and cultural impoverishment; disillusionment with the ‘respectable’ parties that manage the various capitalist states can soon be replaced with illusions in ‘new’ parties that promise ‘radical’ alternatives or identify easily defined scapegoats.

The real power of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, does not lie in its parliaments, European or national, but in its position as the class which appropriates the surplus value created by the working class. Elections give an outlet for dissatisfaction, and, when traditional parties begin to become discredited, there are other forces waiting in the wings. But these forces are there solely to make sure that ‘the more it changes, the more it stays the same’.   

Car 8/6/14

City and media commentators think that things are definitely looking up for the British economy. The statistics that they are basing themselves on certainly show a vigour in the economy that has not been present for six long years, since the crash of 2008. The housing market is moving forward at a great pace, and not just in London. So much so, there is definite anxiety about an unsustainable bubble. Unemployment has fallen sharply – much faster than predicted by the Bank of England. The UK car industry has seen a long period of growth with sales rising for 27 months in a row (although presumably some of the demand is met by German output, for example). Some see exports doing well, but the UK’s trade deficit with the rest of the world widened by more than expected in April, because of weaker manufacturing exports, which were offset by the usual surplus in the services sector.

But British commentators do look for good news about the performance of the economy, and like to compare it with Europe where possible. As a commentator in the Evening Standard  (5/6/14) said: “Consider that the eurozone economy grew by just 0.2 per cent in the first quarter, missing targets, while Britain advanced at four times that rate. The European Commission forecasts 1.2 per cent growth for the economic bloc this year followed by 1.7 per cent next; it has pencilled in 2.7 per cent and 2.5 per cent for the UK over the same periods.”

A key reason why the commentators feel a little less restrained in talking up the performance of the British economy is that it has finally, at this point in time, arrived back at the level of output prior to the financial crash in 2008 (i.e. 6 years). Previously, even if, at times, the economy appeared to be on an overall growth track, everyone knew that there was no recovery in the formal sense: arrival back at the level of economic activity before the recession. Furthermore, the time taken to arrive back at the starting point for Britain is longer – much longer – than in the case of the Great Depression. In the Great Depression (in the 1930s) it took ‘only’ 4 years for the economy to arrive back at the level of output it had at the beginning of the recession. This is one reason why the state authorities (notably Mr. Carney and his colleagues at the Bank of England who have responsibility for interest rates) take quite a very measured view of the performance of the economy and have caught out speculators on interest rates more than once.

The ‘recovery’ takes many forms. The level of employment in Britain in actual numbers is much higher than it was at the beginning of the recession. Historically, it is higher than it has ever been. This is a bit confusing since unemployment is very high as well – even after the recent falls, it is over 2 million (and that is only the official count). Nonetheless, it is true that employment has expanded as the population has expanded (partly due to natural increase and partly due to immigration). Now, one does not have to be an expert to see that productivity has therefore fallen – significantly fallen. To figure out national productivity the bourgeoisie simply divide the overall economic output by the number of people working. Since the economy has only just got back to where it started (in 2008) it follows that productivity has fallen since the working population is significantly larger. That is a very serious problem for the bourgeoisie and has a profound implication for the ‘success’ of the recovery. That is why the bourgeoisie do not talk about their success in employing so many new people as often as one might expect – despite the fact that what has been achieved on this level is not replicated in every country.

Furthermore, for the bourgeoisie’s purposes, claims of ‘falling unemployment’ are not undermined by the growth of chronic underemployment, highlighted by the scandal of zero hours contracts; and ‘overall economic output’ tends to include any number of parasitic and unproductive  activities, such as property speculation. In sum, more reasons for being sceptical about the ‘recovery’.

This is why for every proclamation of progress in the economy, usually from the government and its least critical supporters, there is also caution. The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) recently upgraded their predictions for growth, but “dampened some of the feelgood factor with a warning that 2014 could mark the high point for the economy as households come under renewed financial strain next year once interest rates start to rise.” (Guardian 30/5/14). The director general of the BCC warned that “The task at hand is to ensure that 2014 is not ‘as good as it gets’ for the UK economy” (ibid) A spokesman for the treasury agreed that “we cannot take the recovery for granted” (ibid).

Other commentators are more blunt. “James Meadway, a former adviser at the Treasury, has criticised Chancellor George Osborne’s claim that newly released GDP figures prove ‘Britain is coming back.’ He argues that the government’s relentless pursuit of stringent austerity and expansion of household debt is reinforcing the risk of a major economic crash. Meadway argues that the policies driving UK growth are fatally flawed: ‘We are setting up… exactly the conditions that helped produce the crash of 2008: debt-led growth, in which stagnant or falling real earnings are masked by increasing levels of household debt that sustain continued consumer spending.’

Despite the 0.8% increase in growth over the last quarter, current performance indicates that manufacturing output ‘will not recover to its 2008 level before 2019.’ With average earnings rising at a rate of 1.4%, and the Consumer Price Index’s inflation figures ignoring the large cost of housing at around 40% of household income, real inflation ‘is now running at 2.5% a year, well ahead of increases in earnings…The fall in real earnings since 2008 is the longest sustained decline in most people’s living standards since the 1870s.’” (Guardian 1/5/14)

This particular bourgeois expert comes perilously close to telling the truth: that the ‘recovery’ is largely a sham fuelled by debt, that the prospects for future difficulties are clearly discernible, and that the perspective for the working class is a continuing attack on its living conditions.

Hardin/York 8/6/14

The country has a new president, Petro Poroshenko, elected by a majority in the first round of voting and promising to defeat the “separatist terrorists” in the East of the country within hours. A new hope he is not. His political career started in the United Social Democratic Party of Ukraine and then the Party of Regions, loyal to Kuchma, an ally of Russia, before swapping to Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine Bloc in 2001.  He has been a minister in governments of both Yushchenko and Yanukovych. A chocolate billionaire, he was accused of corruption in 2005 and fought the presidential election with the support of former boxer Vitaly Klitschko, who was elected Mayor of Kiev at the same time, and his corrupt backers, Levochkin and Firtash. Ukraine has yet another corrupt oligarch in charge, imposing the only perspective this rotten capitalist system has in store for humanity: militarism and austerity.

Far from defeating the pro-Russian separatists in hours, the fighting has continued with Ukraine repulsing a separatist assault on Donetsk airport, at the cost of dozens of lives, and losing a helicopter with a general on board. The fighting continues and the separatists remain in place.

Far from ushering in a new era of democratic stability and growth, Ukraine’s presidential election on 25 May was another step in its slide into bloody civil war, just as much as the referendums held by separatists in Crimea in March and Donetsk and Luhansk in May. What we are seeing is the widening of the internal divisions in this bankrupt artificial country, precipitated by imperialist manoeuvres from outside. The danger is that the country will be torn apart in civil war, ethnic cleansing, pogroms, massacres, and widening imperialist conflict and instability in the region.

Ukraine’s inherent instability

Ukraine is Europe’s second largest country, an artificial construct including 78% Ukrainians and 17% Russian-speaking who form the majority in the Donbas Region, as well as various other nationalities including the Crimean Tartars. Economic divisions follow much the same lines, with the coal and steel industries in the Russian speaking East largely exporting to Russia, and accounting for 25% of the country’s exports, and with the Western part of the country, which has been the scene of the Orange protests in 2004 and the Maidan protests this last winter, looking towards the EU for its salvation.

The economy is a disaster. By 1999 output fell to 40% of the level of 1991 when the country became independent. After a relative revival it contracted by 15% in 2009. The industry in the East is out of date, highly dangerous and polluting. Depletion of the mines has led to more dangerous working at depths up to 1200 metres with the threat of methane and coal dust explosions as well as rock bursts (the hazards that caused over 300 deaths recently in Soma, Turkey). Pollution from mine water affects water supplies, while antiquated coke and steel mills spew out visible air pollution and spoil tips or slag heaps risk mud slides[1]. Added to which there is radioactivity from Soviet era nuclear mining. These industries are not competitive in the medium term, or even the short term if they have to face EU competition, and it is difficult to see who will want to put in the necessary investment. Not the oligarchs who have a history of getting very, very rich while the economy goes to pot. Not Russia which has its own out of date Soviet era industry to cope with. And surely not Western European capital which presided over the closure of much of its own mining and steel industries in the 1970s and 1980s. The idea that Russia could offer a way out of economic disaster, impoverishment and unemployment, which has all been going on while the oligarchs get rich – a sort of nostalgia for Stalinism and its disguised unemployment – is a dangerous illusion that could only undermine the working class’ ability to defend itself.

Illusions in money from the west are equally dangerous. The IMF bailout in March, worth $14-18billion, replacing the $15billion withdrawn by Russia when Yanukovych fell, has come on condition of strict austerity, raising fuel prices 40% and cutting 10% of public sector employees, about 24,000 jobs. Unemployment figures are already unreliable as many people are unregistered or underemployed.

While Ukraine was part of the USSR and surrounded on its Western borders by Russian satellites, the divisions did not threaten the integrity of the country. This does not mean such divisions were not used and played on. For instance 70 years ago the Crimean Tartars were expelled and only recently some of them returned. The divisions are being played up in the most nauseating and bloodthirsty manner by all sides. It’s not just the far right Svoboda, nor the interim government’s rehabilitation of Stepan Bandera, the wartime Ukrainian Nazi: Yulia Tymoshenko uses the language of shooting and bombing Russian leaders and population, and Poroshenko is putting this into practice. The Russian side is equally nauseating and murderous. Both sides have formed paramilitaries. Even Kiev does not rely solely on the regular army. These irregular forces include the most dangerous fanatics, mercenaries, terrorists, killers, inflicting terror on the civilian population and killing each other. Once these forces are unleashed they will tend to become autonomous, out of control, leading to the sort of death toll we see in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Syria.

Russia defends its strategic interest in Crimea

Russian imperialism needs Crimea for its Black Sea fleet, a warm water fleet with access to the Mediterranean. Without its Crimean bases Russia could no longer maintain operations in the Mediterranean or the Indian Ocean. Its strategic position depends on Crimea. Ukraine is also needed for defence of the South Stream gas pipeline when it is finished. This has been a constant concern since Ukrainian independence. It simply cannot tolerate the possibility of a pro-Western Ukrainian government in charge of Crimea, hence its response to any question of an agreement with the EU. In 2010 it gave a discount on gas in return for an extension of the lease on its naval base in Crimea. When the Yanukovych government postponed the Association Agreement with the EU last November, Russia responded with a $15bn assistance package, which was halted when Yanukovych was impeached and fled Ukraine. Shortly after it took over Crimea and organised a referendum on joining Russia, which it could use in its propaganda war in favour of its annexation, despite the fact it has not been internationally recognised.

So in March Russia had Crimea, de facto if not recognised internationally. But it is still not secure, since it is surrounded by Ukraine, a country that is on its way to signing an Association Agreement with the EU and therefore allying with Russia’s enemies, and trying to escape from Russian blackmail by finding new donors in Western Europe. For strategic reasons, in order to have an overland access to Crimea, Russia needs the Eastern part of Ukraine under its control. Eastern Ukraine is a whole different matter from Crimea, despite the weight of the Russian-speaking population that provides the alibi for Russia’s moves. With no military base in Eastern Ukraine the separatist referendums in Donetsk and Luhansk cannot secure these regions for Russia but only destabilise them, lead to more fighting. It cannot even be certain to control the local separatist gangs.

Russia has one other card to play in the possible destabilisation in the area:Trans-Dniester, which broke away from Moldova on Ukraine’s South Western border, and also has a large Russian-speaking population.

Not a new cold war, but anotherspiral into military barbarity

This is by no means a return to the cold war. That was a period of decades of military tensions between two imperialist blocs that divided Europe. But in 1989 Russia had become weakened to the point that it could no longer keep control of its satellites, or even the old USSR, despite its efforts, such as the war in Chechnya. Now many Eastern European countries are in Nato, which can operate right up to the Russian border.  But Russia still has its nuclear arsenal, and it still has the same strategic interests. The threatened loss of all influence in Ukraine is a further weakening it cannot tolerate, and it has forced it to react.

The USA is the only remaining superpower, but it no longer has the authority of a bloc leader over its ‘allies’ and competitors in Europe, as shown by the fact that it could no longer mobilise these powers to support it in the second Iraq war the way it could in the first. The US has in fact been weakened by more than 20 years of being bogged down in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The USA is faced with the rise of a new rival, China, which is destabilising South East Asia and the Far East. As a result, despite the USA’s intention to cut its military budget, it is obliged to focus attention on that region of the world. Obama has said that “some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences”[2]. That does not mean it will not try to get a piece of the Ukrainian action through diplomacy, propaganda and covert operations, but it has no immediate perspective of military intervention.  Russia does not face a united West, but a number of different countries all defending their own imperialist interests, however much they verbally condemn its moves in Ukraine. Britain does not want sanctions that harm Russian investment in the City, Germany is mindful of its current reliance on Russian gas, although it is searching for other energy suppliers. The Baltic states are in favour of the strongest condemnation and measures since with large Russian populations in their countries they also feel threatened. Thus the Ukrainian conflict has sparked off another spiral of military tensions in Eastern Europe, showing that they are an incurable cancer.

At present Russia faces sanctions which are potentially very damaging since it relies so much on its oil and gas exports. Its recent deal to sell gas to China will be a great help. China abstained on the UN condemnation of Russian annexation of Crimea.  On the level of propaganda it claims Taiwan on the same principle as Russia claimed Crimea, the unity of Chinese speaking people, but it does not want to admit the principle of self-determination when it has so many minorities of its own.

All the bourgeoisie’s factions, both within Ukraine and those stirring things up from outside, are facing a situation where every move makes things worse. This is like zugzwang in chess, a game much loved in Russia and Ukraine, a position in which any move a player can make only worsens his position, yet he has to move – or resign. For instance, Kiev and the EU want a closer association, which only leads to conflict with Russia and separatism in the East; Russia wants to secure its control of Crimea, but instead of taking control of Ukraine or its Eastern region all it can do is stir up separatism and instability. The more they try and defend their interests, the more chaotic the situation, the more the country slides towards open civil war – like Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This is a feature of the decomposition of capitalism in which the ruling class cannot put forward any rational perspective for society, and the working class is not yet able to put forward its own perspective.

The danger for the working class

The danger for the working class in this situation is that it should be recruited behind the various nationalist factions. This danger is greater because of the historical enmity based on the real barbarity carried out by each faction during the 20th century: the Ukrainian bourgeoisie can remind the population and particularly the working class of the famine that killed millions as a result of forced collectivisation under Stalinist Russia; the Russians can remind their population of the Ukrainian support for Germany in the Second World War; and the Tartars have not forgotten their expulsion from Crimea and the deaths of about half the 200,000 people affected. There is also the danger of workers being hoodwinked into blaming one or other faction for their increasing misery, and being drawn into support for the other on that basis. None of them have anything to offer the working class but worsening austerity and bloodthirsty conflict.

While it is inevitable that some workers will be drawn into the pro or anti-Russian sentiment[3] we do not know the situation on the ground. But the fact that the Donbas has become a battle ground for nationalist forces emphasises the weakness of the working class in the area. Faced with unemployment and poverty they have not been able to develop struggles for their own interests alongside their class brothers in western Ukraine, and are faced with the danger of being divided against each other.

There is a tiny, but nonetheless significant, minority of internationalists in Ukraine and Russia, the KRAS and others, whose courageous statement, “War on war! Not a single drop of blood for the ‘nation’!”[4], defends the working class position. The working class, while it cannot yet put forward its own revolutionary perspective, remains undefeated internationally, and this is the only hope for an alternative to capitalism’s headlong drive towards barbarism and self-destruction. 

Alex, 8.6.14

Iraq has been in an almost permanent state of war for four decades. It has been the theatre of three imperialist wars since 1980. But history is not just repetition. This new conflict, after 100 years of capitalist decadence, is the expression of the decomposition of a society which has become totally irrational. The tragedy unfolding in Iraq goes well beyond the frontiers of this country. As we go to press, the murder of three young Israelis, and the revenge murder of a Palestinian of the same age, is sharpening tensions in Israel/Palestine, with Netanyahu using it as a new opportunity to step up the simmering conflict with Hamas and with Iran.

For a century, capitalist society has been through two world wars which left tens of millions dead. Since 1945, there has been a succession of localised imperialist conflicts.

The wars in Korea and especially in Vietnam from the 50s to the 70s, in Afghanistan, in the Middle East such as the Yom Kippur war of 1973 and the conflict in Lebanon in the 1980s, the intifada between the Palestinians and Israel, the war in Somalia in 1992, in Rwanda in 1994, in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1998 and 2000, but also in the Ivory Coast, Sudan, and most recently in Mali ...the list of imperialist wars goes on and on. For whole portions of humanity, horror has become their daily bread.

And the opening of the 21st century has not seen any improvement, far from it. According to the UN there are now officially over 50 million refugees in the world. These masses of human beings fleeing from war and disaster are for the most part stuck in camps, at best surviving from day today with little provision for food, medicine and hygiene. But for the bourgeoisie this doesn’t count for much and war continues and spreads. Syria is in ruins and a large part of the terrorised population lives in cellars and devastated buildings. And now for the fourth time since 1980, a new open war is ravaging Iraq. This inhuman reality confirms in blood and tears what the revolutionaries were saying a century ago:

“‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism”[1]. Between 1914 and 1945, this regression into barbarism was illustrated in particular by the outbreak of two world wars. Since then, it has taken the form of a proliferation of local wars which today are the expression of a society rotting on its feet. Why? Because since the 1960s, neither of the two fundamental classes in society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, have been able to develop their own perspective: world war on the one hand, world revolution on the other. The proletariat emerged from the Stalinist counter-revolution at the end of the 1960s (May 1968 in France being the symbol of the revival of the proletariat’s ability to struggle), so that the bourgeoisie was no longer facing a working class which had been crushed physically and ideologically, and ready to be dragooned into a new imperialist butchery, as in the 1930s. But at the same time, the proletariat has not been able to affirm its revolutionary perspective. Since 1989, the lying but horribly effective propaganda which equates Stalinism with communism, and the collapse of the ‘Soviet’ bloc with the end of the dream of a new society, has served to bring about a deep reflux in proletarian consciousness and in the self-confidence of the exploited. The situation thus appears to be blocked: neither world war, nor revolution. But nothing remains fixed, and society tends to decompose. Iraq is a dramatic illustration of this.

30 years war in Iraq

Since the beginning of the 80s, Iraq has been in an almost permanent state of war.

• At the beginning of that decade and for 8 years, there was a murderous conflict between Iraq and Iran, with the USA supporting the Saddam Hussein regime against Iran. The fall of the Shah of Iran and the coming to power of Ayatollah Khomeini led the US to push Iraq into the war, with its toll of between 500,000 and 1,200,000 million deaths.
   
• After the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc in 1989, America, then under the reign of George Bush Senior, provoked the Gulf war in order to try to hold its own bloc together. But the aim of the US at this time was not to get rid of Saddam Hussein and his regime. The fear of the country breaking up led the US and the western powers to leave the regime in place after the war. It was enough for the US to make a demonstration of its military power to its former allies. But the benefits of this demonstration didn’t last very long. With no common enemy, the western bloc rapidly disintegrated. Each imperialism, large or small, began to play its own cards more and more openly. It was a case of every man for himself.
   
• In 2003, the US invaded and occupied Iraq. The occupation was to last 8 years. The power of Saddam Hussein and the (Sunni) Baath party was destroyed. In its place the US put Nouri al-Malaki and his Shia clan in power. The idea was to set up a police and military apparatus that could maintain order and a direct US influence on the country. This was a lamentable failure. For  8 years the war never really ended. The country was mired in chaos. Malaki pushed the Sunnis out of government office to the benefit of his own clan, and to the despair of the Americans who could do nothing about it. The former partisans of Saddam Hussein and the most extreme jihadists carried out a never-ending series of terrorist attacks. Totally unable to do anything about it, the western armies and finally the Americans themselves pulled out of the whole mess both in Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving the various religious and ethnic groups to slug it out.

A country on the road towards fragmentation

This development of antagonisms and hatred between the Shia and Sunni populations is not only the result of the instrumentalisation of religious differences, or the simple defence of the bourgeois cliques that operate within these communities. Certainly the unleashing of obscurantism and irrationality, which is a world-wide phenomenon, is a fertile soil for the growth of religious and ethnic hatred. The fact that religious prejudices are such a potent element in this and other wars is itself a sign that capitalism is in a phase of terminal decline. The door has been opened wide to a new series of pogroms between different communities, as we are now seeing in Syria..

Today the forces of ISIS are on the offensive and heading towards Baghdad. Initially ISIS came from a Sunni tribal militia linked to the nebulous Al-Qaida. After the latter distanced itself from ISIS, the latte proclaimed its objective of creating an Islamic state that would take in Iraq, Syria, the Lebanon and Palestine. In fact, as well as being made up of radical Islamists, ISIS is composed of a numerous former officers and fighters of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party, whose main aim is to get revenge for being turfed out of power. On top of this there is the military strengthening of the Kurdish Peshmergas who are now militarily and politically dominating the Iraqi Kurdish region. This is a whole complex of armed forces with antagonistic interests, a situation pregnant with future conflicts.

The accelerating weakness of US imperialism

Since the end of the 1990s the USA’s global leadership has got weaker and weaker. Faced with the rise of Chinese imperialism, now an enemy of the first rank, the US is obliged to maintain a considerable military force in southern Asia, while also having to take account of the attempted advance of Russian imperialism, in Syria for example. In these conditions American imperialism has been obliged to do deals with the devil of yesterday. The accession of Rohani, for the moment more moderate than his predecessor, to the presidency of Iran, has been the pretext for a diplomatic opening.  This is what’s behind the negotiations on the problem of Iran’s nuclear programme. This has led to a rise in tensions with Russia which has been one of Iran’s main supporters, as well as to discount from Israel, an implacable enemy of Iran. However, the new war in Iraq is above all affecting Saudi Arabia, which for decades has been one of America’s main allies. This leading Middle Eastern state, which has a lot of internal divisions, is not looking kindly on the American hand tendered to Iran and the uncontrollable offensive by ISIS[2]. Its imperialist position is being threatened across the region. Thus, the recently signed bilateral agreement on energy between Saudi and China is not simply motivated by economic concerns. This is part of an attempted rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and China. Saudi Arabia is being more and more openly challenged in the Middle East, and it can’t let this happen without reacting, in Syria and probably in Iraq as well.

The fact that the US is clearly in an impasse with regard to the situation in Iraq illustrates the fact that its position as the world’s leading imperialist power is getting weaker all the time. Unable to come back in force to Iraq after quitting it from a position of total failure such a short time ago, it is obliged to support the present government in Baghdad, at least in words. It’s clear that the US wants to avoid the dismemberment of Iraq, just as it hoped that Syria wouldn’t fall apart. But its growing inability to stabilise the situation has itself become a factor pushing towards further chaos in the region. Today no one is really master of the house. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia know this, as do all the warlords and jihadists in the region. The Middle East is h is increasingly fragmenting into a whole number of permanent war zones. Everywhere religious, national and ethnic divisions are playing an increasing role in this slide into barbarism.

The current war in Iraq is a dramatic illustration of the decomposition of this society. This is what we wrote about this after the collapse of the Russian bloc after 1989:

“The disappearance of the Russian imperialist gendarme, and that to come of the American gendarme as far as its one-time ’partners’ are concerned, opens the door to the unleashing of a whole series of more local rivalries. For the moment, these rivalries and con­frontations cannot degenerate into a world war... However, with the disappearance of the disci­pline imposed by the two blocs, these conflicts are liable to become more frequent and more vi­olent, especially of course in those areas where the proletariat is weakest”.(After the collapse of the eastern bloc, destabilisation and chaos [10], International Review 61)

Even if we can’t foresee the precise direction that events are going to follow, we can be sure that this part of the world is being dragged inexorably into the abyss of decomposition.

Tino

4July 2014

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