Monthly Archives: July 2025

The politics of morality and Palestine solidarity

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The rights of ‘the people’ or ‘humanity’ may appear to be more fundamental and therefore more vital than those of a particular class (e.g. the working class), but this ignores the essential nature of the society that makes the struggle for these rights necessary.  Society is based on particular relations of production that generate the threats and the struggle to defend them.  These relations are capitalist, and the working class is the only social force that can fundamentally challenge these relations and the attacks on democratic and other rights that are generated by them.

It is not an answer to claim that the fight for ‘human rights’ can be taken up by the socialist and working class movement as a struggle to involve the widest layers of society in defence of what might appear legitimately to be human rights – the question of genocide in Gaza is one striking example – especially when it is claimed that no particular class perspective is required.  So, it might be claimed that surely denial of the right to life, most poignantly illustrated in the children murdered by the Zionist state of Israel, is one such example of human rights that transcend class and class interests.

The problem with this is that it ignores the cause of the genocide; that it lies in the nature of the Zionist state and its settler colonial role, and more fundamentally ignores that this is role is on behalf of Western, particularly US, imperialism.  The cause of the genocide does not lie beyond or transcend class politics but is a searing demonstration of the consequences of the continuation of the capitalist system.

Capitalism as the fundamental causal factor is disguised not just by mainstream media censorship and spin but by popular and inadequate understanding of what capitalism is.  It is not a case of class ‘reductionism’ to note that the ideology of Zionism and the actions and policy of the settler colonial state are inadequate explanations for the genocide, which can only be adequately explained by the support and endorsement by western imperialism.  Without this the genocide would not be taking place.

Even attributing the cause to imperialism can leave open a misunderstanding of what is happening, and the tendency to see it a something separate from capitalism, as opposed to its nature as its most advanced form that encompasses the planet. In this case, opposing imperialism can be a way of not opposing capitalism and avoiding putting forward a working class and socialist alternative.  This often begins by excluding a class perspective from the start and appealing to supposedly more fundamental humanitarian concerns that can be expressed in the demands and objectives of single issue campaigns.

This approach confuses the need for the working class to take on board opposition to all oppression and exploitation – to be the universal class that represents the new society within the old – with relegating its own class interests and the central role around which all the struggles against oppression must coalesce and unite.  The working class thus doesn’t become the leadership of such a movement but becomes simply one component of a putative coalition with different agendas, which excludes agreement on the central role of working class struggle and socialism.

The effect of watering down demands to appeal to a wider human-rights concerned audience is that it fails to identify the cause of oppression and fails to fight it effectively.  The constant humanitarian approach, that today justifies the old popular front strategy of yesteryear, has moved older activists to the default belief that this is the path to mass campaigning and led them to forget previous debates about the difference between this approach and a workers’ united front.  For younger activists all this is a completely different language that they see no need to learn.  As George Orwell once said about thought corrupting language, language can corrupt thought.

An example of the effects of this was illustrated to me in a recent conversation with a comrade in Dublin who is involved in the Palestine solidarity campaign.  When Israel, and then the US, bombed Iran she asked that fellow activists oppose the bombing.  She found no support, with opposition usually framed on the grounds that attention should not be distracted from the plight of the Palestinians.

The first thing to note is the instinctive rejection of opposing the attack on Iran (while also opposing the genocide), illustrating how previous instincts for solidarity have been severely weakened.  This is, however, entirely consistent with the policy of single issue campaigning which fails to recognise how the world actually works, meaning you have no coherent idea how it might be changed.  It means no protest against the extension of Zionist and US aggression, intended to strengthen their power – including against the Palestinians – and no intention of offering a total opposition to the forces of oppression.

It rests on the claim that what is needed is that attention is focused on the genocide, as if everyone by now doesn’t know exactly what is going on.  Those who don’t, don’t want to know, and those who do need to realise that the problem isn’t that people are not aware but that they feel powerless to do anything about it.  The repeated demonstrations and protests have not changed anything so those who previously took part, or looked on wondering whether to do so, can see no point to them except that they haven’t worked.

They have failed not because people haven’t been paying attention but because the protests are based on the illusion that an obvious humanitarian disaster will lead to those responsible for it stopping if enough people say that they should. Except appeals to those who are the problem are not a solution.  Western states are fully in support of the Zionist state; thinking this can be radically changed by ‘pressure’ simply avoids recognition that the Western states under ‘pressure’ press back by trying to criminalise opposition.

This approach simply exposes the fact that there is no understanding about the nature of the imperialist system despite often repeated references to it.  It simply leads to some taking more radical direct action that shows awareness of the problem but simply displaces responsibility to a small number of activists.

The current approach of moral condemnation allows many to claim that they are part of the solidarity movement when all they do is mouth words of outrage and nothing else.  Those supposedly in positions of influence are allowed to speak at protests while doing nothing, not because they are getting away with fooling their audience but because this is all that the movement demands.  They pay no price for their failure and the whole movement is rendered impotent by the acceptance of it.  If the movement accepts false friends, why should Western states fear false enemies?

Even to put it like this illustrates the problem.  It is not a question of changing the minds of this or that government but of challenging the interests of the imperialist states involved.  Were a conscious attempt made to go beyond ritualistic moral protest and seek to radicalise the movement politically, including by taking up the attack against Iran, the movement would just by this become a greater concern to the political leadership of the imperialist states.  Were organisation to be directed to workers’ action to prevent armed support to the Zionist state it would have both an immediate direct effect and increase the radicalisation of the movement.

Such a focus is not guaranteed to be successful but only the blind can deny current failure.  At worst we would have a more politically advanced working class movement for the future.

In one respect the slogan “we are all Palestinians”, which I really dislike, is true.  The failure of the political leadership of the Palestinian people is mirrored by the failure of the moral politics of the solidarity movement.

‘The People’ before Profit? – Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (part 67)

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The substitution of ‘the people’ for the working class as the subject of struggle is presented In Ireland, in an almost classic case, by the People before Profit organisation, whose reformist politics are based on actions demanded from the Irish capitalist state.  While ‘people’ are to come ‘before profit’, ‘people’ replaces the working class, while coming before profit still leaves profit in place.  And anyway, aren’t capitalists people as well? 

This precept fails to bring to the fore the ‘property question’, demanded by Marx in the Communist Manifesto, whereby the profit of capital arising from exploitation of the working class is not de-prioritised but abolished!

It might be argued ‘what’s in a name’, were it not for the fact that the name was deliberated on and selected precisely in order to avoid clearer identification with the working class and socialism. Presumably because reference to ‘the people’ is more readily acceptable; postponing the task of raising awareness of the paramount role of class and denying the centrality previously accorded to it by anyone calling themselves Marxist. In asserting the priority of the people, and so rejecting the primacy of class, the organisation is setting an example to be followed, not one to be excused or ignored.

Failure to root socialist politics in the material reality of the working class leaves it rootless and prey to the material reality of other forces – we have already pointed to the role of the state in the political alternative offered by People before Profit – but the ideologies encompassing this are many.  Nationalism and racism require denial of the separate political interests of the working class – socialism is international while racism denies working class unity.  It is precisely class interest that is the alternative to these reactionary programmes, not acceptance of the prior interests of an undifferentiated people.

It is possible to fill this missing foundation with moral claims to ‘humanity’ which bases internationalism on ‘human rights’; the ‘self-determination of (capitalist) states’, or protection of minorities based simply on their being a minority.  Similarly, it is possible to oppose racism based on human rights, ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’ and opposition to ‘hate’, but these are even more vague and useless than the concept of ‘the people’.  Their employment by many on the left, tellingly often paraded under the banner of a ‘social justice’ movement, is testament to a collapse into liberal (i.e. bourgeois) politics compared to which the 19th century republicanism we have been examining in the previous posts looks positively revolutionary.

If class is not primary and immediately necessary in order to take forward a movement and programme what is opened up is the intrusion of a wide variety of identity politics that makes nationality, race, or sex etc. the primary means of securing freedom from oppression. This in turn can lead to ‘intersectional’ coalitions that further divide while pretending to unify.

It leads to rejection of the view that the working class is the only social force able to create a new society and which alone can unite the oppressed through the abolition of class. It thereby simply becomes one segment of society with no reason to prioritise its role more than any other.  Petty bourgeois ideas of individual subjective identity flourish where the nebulous abstraction of ‘people’ becomes the source of power to change the world.  With this view of politics the numerous instantiations of the people come to substitute for the working class, which in turn leads to the search for a mechanism for them to do so, and which is invariably found to be the state.

In 1849 Marx criticised the naive belief in a single “will of the entire people” rather than that of a singular ruling class (or grouping of classes) that might represent its own interest as that of society as a whole, or at least of its large majority:

‘For the National-Zeitung there exists one will of the entire people, which is not the sum of contradictory wills but a united and fixed will. How is that?

That is—the will of the majority.

And what is the will of the majority?

It is the will which emerges out of the interests, life situation, and conditions of existence of the majority.

In order to have one and the same will, the members of the majority must therefore have the same interests, the same life situation, the same conditions of existence, or must be temporarily linked together in their interests, their life situation, their conditions of existence.

In plain words: the will of the people, the will of the majority, is not the will of separate estates and classes but of one single class, and of those classes and fragments of classes that are socially—i.e., industrially and commercially—subordinated to this ruling class.

“What should we say to that?” Is the will of the entire people the will of the ruling class?’

(Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 8 p272, Articles from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung)

Marx, in The Civil War in France, noted that the Paris Commune ‘was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris middle class—shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants—the wealthy capitalists alone excepted. The Commune had saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever-recurring cause of dispute among the middle classes themselves—the debtor and creditor accounts.’

It was necessary then (as it is now) for the working class to be the ‘universal’ class and to represent the needs of a society oppressed by the prevailing system: ‘For the first time in history the petty and moyenne middle class  has openly rallied round the workmen’s Revolution, and proclaimed it as the only means of their own salvation and that of France!.’ (Marx, The Civil War in France, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol. 22 p336 & 496)

This was not something that Marx learned only from the Commune but was something strikingly demonstrated by it, particularly the need to win the majority of the population that was then composed of peasants.  How this need is addressed today depends on the particular class composition of society, but this requires that the idea of a unified people is abandoned and the various classes and their interests identified.  In relation to the peasantry, for example, it did not mean strengthening or enlarging their individual property, while a programme based on the demands of ‘the people’ would leave this wide open.

In the writings through which he and Engels formulated their particular politics, The German Ideology, he argued that ‘For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.’ For the working class, this is realised through the abolition of all classes, including itself.

Marx identified this early in his political development (in 1843) before becoming a ‘Marxist’ and expressed himself in the language of the philosophy of the time: ‘No class of civil society can play this role without arousing a moment of enthusiasm in itself and in the masses, a moment in which it fraternises and merges with society in general, becomes confused with it and is perceived and acknowledged as its general representative, a moment in which its claims and rights are truly the claims and rights of society itself, a moment in which it is truly the social head and the social heart.’ (Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

For this to happen the working class must win others as allies to its programme.  This can only be done if, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, socialists ‘disdain to conceal their views and aims.’  It will not be done by pretending that its views are those of an amorphous ‘people’.  You can only rally others to your flag if it is your flag.

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‘The People’ vs the Working Class 

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Republicanism and Communism differed on the nature of the revolution that was required and so disagreed on the social force that would accomplish it. For the former it was ‘the people’ and for the latter the ‘proletarians of all countries’, which should ‘unite.’

Republicans accused communists of “ignoring the rest of humanity” while they viewed the people as the non-elite sections of the population, which may or may not have included the capitalist class, depending on the particular republican view.  Karl Heinzen, for example, did not see the new bourgeoisie as the enemy.

Marx argued that “The people . . . was a vague expression” to be replaced “by a definite one, the proletariat . . .”  The attempt to use the former combined various classes with an assumed common interest so that any separation within them was an unwarranted division that set back their common interests.

Even were a “privileged class” identified such a view failed to identify the different interests of the ‘non-privileged’ classes as if they had common class interests, including, for example, the working class, independent artisans, peasants and other petty bourgeois classes.

Only an identification of class and their associated interests could specify their material interests that might unite them or divide them. Such an analysis was inevitable as soon as one identified the particular class interest of the “privileged class”, which might prove to be varied – feudal princes or modern capitalists for example – which would then identify the subordinate class(es) they oppressed and exploited.  Talk of “the people’ obscured the interests of all classes, particularly the subordinate ones, and most importantly for the creation of a new society, concealed or blurred the interests of the working class.

Marx argued that failure to identify the separate interests of the different classes making up “the people” resulted in a false understanding of contemporary political realities.  So, in the elections to the French Constituent National Assembly in 1848 the republicans’ “imaginary people” were replaced by the “real people” the majority of whom voted for the candidates of the anti-republicans and elected the representatives of the bourgeoisie and landowners.

‘Accordingly, when a struggle is impending, they do not need to examine the interests and positions of the different classes. They do not need to weigh their own resources too critically. They have merely to give the signal and the people, with all its inexhaustible resources, will fall upon the oppressors.’  (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 11 p 65)

In the event of defeat ‘then either the fault lies with pernicious sophists, who split the indivisible people into different hostile camps, or the army was too brutalised and blinded to comprehend that the pure aims of democracy are also the best thing for it, or the whole thing has been wrecked by a detail in its execution, or else an unforeseen accident has this time spoilt the game. In any case, the democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as immaculate as he was innocent when he went into it, with the newly-won conviction that he is bound to win, not that he himself and his party have to give up the old standpoint, but, on the contrary, that conditions have to ripen to suit him.’ (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 11 p 65-66)

Politics based on the purported interests of ‘the people’ create imaginary interests that are not shared.  Marx gives the example in France of its famous fraternité, which in the 1848 revolution ‘found its true, unadulterated and prosaic expression in civil war, civil war in its most terrible aspect, the war of labour against capital.’ (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 7 p 147)

Marx accused the republican, Karl Heinzen, of invoking the solemn concept of ‘humanity’ to distract from the fact that while individuals may adopt a position that does not accord with their class position, this cannot be true of ‘whole classes which are based on economic conditions independent of their own will.’ (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 330)

The result is to deny the reality of class struggle, which has the result not of abolishing it but of confirming the interest of the bourgeoisie.  In 1850 Marx and Engels wrote that:

‘The struggles of the various classes and factions of the classes against each other, whose progress through their individual stages of development actually constitutes the revolution, are in the view of our evangelists only the unfortunate consequences of the existence of divergent systems, whilst in reality the reverse is true, the existence of various systems is the consequence of the existence of the class struggles. This itself shows that the authors of the manifesto deny the existence of the class struggles. Under the pretext of combating dogmatists, they do away with all specific content, every specific party point of view, and forbid the individual classes to formulate their interests and demands vis-à-vis the other classes.  They expect them to forget their conflicting interests and to become reconciled under the flag of a vagueness as shallow as it is unblushing, which only conceals beneath the apparent reconciliation of all party interests the domination of the interest of one party—the bourgeois party.’  (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 10 p 530)

Concepts such as ‘the people’ are unable to identify the specific interest of classes and are very rarely appropriate terms of analysis.  Their use usually denotes a false unity of interest behind which lies the interests of the capitalist class.  This can also appear credible because the social system, the dominant mode of production, aligns with the interest of the dominant class.  So, the claim to represent or act in the interests of the people is also the primary ideological justification of the capitalist state.

The concept of the people is incapable of exposing the claims of the state to act on behalf of the people because it rejects the separate interest of the working class.  At most it permits the view that the state is imperfectly or unsatisfactorily acting on behalf of the people but that it can be made to act in a way that remedies this.  This is the basis for the view that the state can reform the social system in such a way as to truly implement the interests of ‘the people’ and therefore that the state itself can be made to carry this out by reforming itself.  It is what Marxist call reformism, which denies that a replacement of capitalism and its state is necessary or possible.

Part 66 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism

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Socialism and the inadequacy of republicanism

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A photograph of the Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, London, 1848

Marx supported the struggle for democratic rights because he believed that a bourgeois republic with political freedoms would make the class struggle between capitalists and workers arising from social inequality more transparent, less disguised by monarchical rule.  It would weaken the legitimacy of authority more generally and stimulate working class political development.  Without this freedom the working class would not develop the political capacity to become the ruling class.

Bruno Leipold, in his book Citizen Marx, notes that Marx adopted many of the democratic demands of republican revolutionaries that constituted these political freedoms, ensuring that implementation of democratic rights was not restricted by measures from the bourgeois state specifically designed to nullify them. (Citizen Marx p244). He notes that this enthusiasm led to what proved to be over-optimistic expectations of what would follow as a result.  So, Marx and Engels appeared to endorse the view in 1846 that the introduction of the Peoples Charter would mean that the working class “will become the ruling class of England” (Marx and Engles Collected Works Vo 6 p 58, ‘Address of German Democratic Communists of Brussels to O’Connor, quoted in Citizen Marx p245)

In The Communists and Karl Heinzen Engels stated that ‘the Communists for the time being rather take the field as democrats themselves in all practical party matters. In all civilised countries, democracy has as its necessary consequence the political rule of the proletariat, and the political rule of the proletariat is the first condition for all communist measures.’ (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 299)

Leipold discusses their optimistic expectations of universal (manhood) suffrage in his book (p 245-249) but he also notes Marx’s view of the experience of the French Second Republic, which originated in a democratic revolution but which was usurped by a coup d’état led by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who later declared himself Emperor. This experience had shown that although “bourgeois rule as the outcome of universal suffrage . . . is the meaning of the bourgeois constitution” their democratic commitment crumbles the “moment that the content of this suffrage, of this sovereign will, is no longer bourgeois rule.” On “March 10 universal suffrage declared itself directly against the rule of the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie answered by outlawing universal suffrage.” (Citizen Marx p 246 and 247). Marx was therefore wrong when he claimed that “The classes whose social slavery the constitution is to perpetuate, proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, it puts in possession of political power through universal suffrage.” (Marx The Class Struggles in France, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 10 p79)

In country after country, we can see the fraudulent character of bourgeois democracy.  In the United States measures to suppress voting are routinely employed while the constitution that is so revered contains significant undemocratic institutions and practices.  The political system is dominated by massive amounts of big business money and individual capitalist wealth.  The repression unleashed by Trump and the multiple law and order organs of the state has demonstrated its class nature and renders pretence of its hallowed democracy cynical.  In Europe, triumvirates of Starmer, Macron. Scholtz or Merz participate in a proxy war that no one voted for and are either deeply unpopular and/or elected on historically low votes but endowed nevertheless with full powers.

The defective features of bourgeois democracy are particular to each country but their universal existence in one form or another is due to the capitalist character of society and the social power this entails for the capitalist class and its retinue of helpers.

Marx was later to learn that a different form of state was required to break the power of these forces and embody real democracy.  This was discovered in the Paris Commune of 1871, when the working classes of that city overturned the ruling authorities and imposed their own rule.  Marx noted that:

‘The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.’

‘While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes . . .’

‘It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.’

‘Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery.’

Republicanism promised the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ but only social emancipation can deliver it.

Part 65 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism

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