Imperialist rivalry and the Left (1 of 2)

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The widespread revulsion among many in the West at the genocide in Gaza explains the increasing clampdown by governments on protests against it.  These tend towards opposition against the Western states themselves, whose complicity is too obvious to hide, while the attempts to disguise and justify it by the likes of the BBC etc. reduces their influence.

This comes at a difficult time when Western political and military leaders and their propagandists in the media announce that the populations of the West should be preparing for war themselves.  The latest is a report stating that:

‘The European Commission should facilitate the prolongation of the conflict in Ukraine in order to contain Russia and prepare for war within the next five years. European Commissioner for Defence Andrius Kubilius made such a statement during the annual conference of the European Defence Agency in Brussels.’

“Every day that Ukraine continues to fight is another day for the EU and NATO to become stronger,” he said, calling on European countries to “prepare for war in the next five years” and to move the European economy to ” turbowarfare regime”.’

“We should spend more on weapons, produce more and have more weapons than Russia,” Kubilius added.’

This is the inescapable logic of all those, from the right to the pro-war left, who currently support the war.  It follows from their claims that Ukraine must be supported because it is fighting for democracy – for ‘us’ – against an aggressive imperialism. If it is acceptable for Ukraine to ally with NATO and for workers in the West to support it in doing so, then the same Russian threat exists not only to Ukraine but also to Eastern Europe.  After all, is this not the inevitable course of an aggressive imperialism?  If this imperialism threatens Eastern Europe only the stupid could deny that the same threat would then not also be posed to Western Europe.

So far, some groups like that promoted by  Anti-capitalist Resistance are committed to this view in relation to Eastern Europe; but a war they believe can spread from Ukraine to Eastern Europe has, for similar causes, no rationale not to spread from Eastern Europe to Western Europe.  This means that there is no reason not to support their own states in this future war and accept the preparations necessary to fight it, those demanded by the EU Commissioner for Defence.

Since most of the Western left has failed to oppose the war it is therefore politically disarmed against the bellicose demands for rearmament by their own capitalist states.  This is true both of those who pretend that the war by Ukraine is one of national liberation and of those who believe it is an imperialist proxy war and a war of national liberation at the same time.  The latter simply import into their position the contradiction that the real world outside damns in the former.

Now, along comes Donald Trump to make it clear that imperialist rivalry really is aggressive by its nature, including the Western variety.  The attempt therefore to claim that it is the Russian variety that is solely responsible for war must explain in what way it is not just one instance of a world-wide phenomenon; why the expansion of NATO to include Ukraine is not central to the cause of the war; why Ukraine should be supported when its criticism of Israel has been that it hasn’t provided it with weapons – something now being rectified; why support should be given to the Western variety of imperialism when it is participating in genocide in Palestine; and most importantly, why opposition to the invasion requires support for the alliance of Ukraine and Western imperialism.

Of course, the pro-war left opposes Trump, but more as an anomaly – rather like others in the bourgeoisie media – who will highlight the differences but ignore the continuities with the previous Biden administration.  However, some of these commentators have already admitted that what stands out about Trump is his open espousal of the same principles as his predecessors without the hypocritical rhetoric that has usually accompanied it.  He is as much a product of Western bourgeois democracy that the pro-war left defends as the Obamas and Bidens.

Trump’s threat of ethnic cleansing will compete against Biden’s genocide for barbarity.  Sanctions and creeping economic war against China started under Trump but were maintained and expanded by Biden.  Trump’s threat to make Europe pay for the war in Ukraine follows Biden’s existing imposition of its costs on Europe through sanctions, blowing up European infrastructure, and selling it more expensive energy and lots of US weapons.

Trump is evidence of there being more than one way to pursue US primacy.  Of course, this doesn’t mean there isn’t a difference, but it is necessary not to limit opposition only to them.  The petty bourgeois character of the left is exposed by its seizing on such differences to drop principled opposition to other bourgeois forces and ally with them in opposition to what is called the far-right or fascism.  This includes the same forces whose rule led to the growth of the far-right in the first place.  We see this process again and again in support for the Democrats in the US, Macron in France, and Starmer’s Labour Party in Britain.  In Ireland it is Sinn Fein that is supposed to be central to a left alternative despite its record in office in the North of the country.

All these have failed, or will fail, because these forces are not an alternative to what is called the far-right, which in many cases is just the further right.  These far-right formations represent, or are composed of, the reactionary sections of the petty bourgeoisie with their narrow nationalist ideas that must inevitably under current conditions gravitate to those they seek to replace, or shift their ground to achieve the same outcomes with different methods.  The accommodation that many so-called centrist bourgeois formations are making with the far-right should be all the evidence needed that the dividing line is not some notion of a more and more discredited bourgeois democracy against right wing populism and authoritarianism but between the working class and the bourgeoisie that is attempting to conscript it for war and get it to pay the price in money and blood.

Forward to part 2

Marxism and Gender Identity Ideology (8) – Identity politics on steroids

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For some on the left the executive order by Donald Trump that the Federal Government will recognise only two sexes – that gender identity “cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex’, and that it will not replace ‘the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa’ – will be seen as confirming their support for these views.  His decision, it will be said, is one from an arch-reactionary who is only being consistent with his other reactionary views.

It is a pity for the holders of such views that their perspective on consistency should lead them to celebrate the progressiveness of the previous Presidential champion of gender ideology, Joe Biden – the sponsor of war in Ukraine and accomplice in the carrying out of genocide in Gaza.  The ability of Trump to weaponise simple truths is as much a feature of identity politics as its pernicious role in undermining socialist politics and the primacy of working class unity.  The role it has played in the Presidential election and in Western media reports demonstrates the salience of the issue for the health of socialist politics, quite apart from the threat the ideology poses to women’s rights.

I remember, when I was a young teenager and had joined the International Marxist Group, an older gay man telling me that there was nothing inherently left-wing or socialist about being gay and that this was also true of the gay movement. Socialists may have been heavily involved in the fight for gay and lesbian rights, but this has not prevented their incorporation by capitalism into questions of individual identities and attitudes, with no question of structural oppression.  In seeking acceptance and equality, capitalist society in many countries has accepted their demands through incorporation on its terms by commodifying them.

The constraints on this incorporation are strict.  The UK may have had three women Prime Ministers, but the names Thatcher, May and Truss are hardly symbolic or symptomatic of progress for anything but the most miserable form of feminism.  The rotten character of this liberal feminism is demonstrated in its willingness to erase the essential nature of women altogether by prioritising the demands of men who claim to be women.  Ireland has had a right-wing gay Taoiseach, and the sectarian arrangement in the North is headed by two women, but belonging to a social group that suffers some form of oppression does not by that fact entail resistance or opposition to the social system that generates it.

Moves to equal representation under capitalism get you closer to equality, but only equality of exploitation and oppression, which affects the working class, including in its ranks the majority of women, black people, gays, and lesbians.  It doesn’t get you anywhere near emancipation or liberation from exploitation and oppression.   Identity politics creates division that breeds competition, undermining the grounds for the unity required to remove capitalist exploitation as well as sexual oppression and homophobia.

Gender identity ideology is an extreme example of this sort of politics that has commodified sex by pretending that it can be changed while simultaneously denying its centrality. This, for example, removes coherence to any claim to same sex attraction.  Ironically, it has done this through attaching its letter to LGB alongside an expanding set of letters – LGBTQQIP2SAA+ – that bear no relation to the initial three, except to cannibalise them, with a + for whatever can be imagined next.

One feminist has described it as akin to religious belief, ‘that trans ideology’s appeal rests on a metaphysical salvation fantasy, that would help explain why it functions far more like a religious cult than a political discourse—and why true believers are so impervious to rational argument and so fond of denouncing heretics and apostates’, ‘the primacy of gender identity would then express the drive to transcend bodily limitation analogous to the thought of The Resurrection’. (Jones, Jane Clare. The Annals of the TERF-Wars and Other Writing (p. 351-2). Kindle Edition.)

While this may be true of some adherents and provides clear parallels of the ideology with religious belief – based on faith and not material reality – it does not explain its attraction to the left in more secular western societies.  Ironically, the more religious, with traditional views of sexuality, are less prone to swallow it because they recognise that their conservative sexual norms apply to real sexes.

Instead, the vulnerability of certain sections of the left to gender identity ideology is due to their abandonment of socialist politics based on the material world and their flight into a more congenial and comforting world of moralistic claims, of good and bad, to be addressed through the assertion of rights to be imposed by the state.  The liberal left now dominates as its natural home is the state, which provides the environment of NGOs and other state-funded organisations that substitute for the working class movement as the agent of radical change.  The long-standing view that the state can embody socialism eases the journey to this destination even of it does not make it inevitable.

Identity politics is a world of the sanctity of self-identity (no matter how detached from reality); of self-determination of the individual (how is this possible and what does it permit or not permit?); of the claims of the oppressed and their ‘lived experience’ (what other kind is there?); with an absolute value placed on ‘inclusion’ and absolute exclusion of ‘exclusion’.  The solipsism involved prevents the liberal left responding in the standard way to the claims of the religious – that extraordinary claims demand commensurate explanations – and instead pronounce the empty and ignorant mantra of ‘no debate’.  It forgets that freedom of religion also requires freedom from religion just as the freedom to associate requires the freedom not to associate.  The freedom for women to associate also requires their freedom not to associate with men, those ‘identifying’ themselves as women or not.

Politics based on moral values free from actual struggle can find its grounding on the claims of oppressed groups, irrespective of their politics, based simply on the fact that they are oppressed, or claim to be.  No need to elaborate theories or political programmes that analyse oppression, ground it on an analysis of material conditions, seek to learn from historical struggles and test alternatives in debate.

When these struggles do not exist, or have not existed for some time, or have been defeated, and thus do not impose their requirements on participants, all this is unknown – especially to generations in which mass working class struggle is largely history. Hence the attraction to youth, highlighted by the generational divide over gender identity ideology, and the noteworthy fact that this ideology has flourished especially, although no longer solely, in English speaking Western countries where working class struggle has suffered long term defeats.  In such reactionary periods reactionary ideas take hold, and this is one.

Unfortunately, the experience of some countries in Latin America illustrates its compatibility with left presenting regimes accommodating reactionary policies, such as gender ideology in the constitution of Ecuador and Bolivia and legislated in Argentina and Brazil, while in all except Argentina legal abortion is not allowed.  In the latter it was introduced in 2020 for ‘pregnant people’, while women became a ‘gestating person’. (Women’s Rights, Gender Wrongs p66 and 68)

That the left is identified with this ideology is one more piece of alien baggage it will have to discard and to do so not by ignoring it but by exposing and defeating it. 

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Ukraine and imperialism after three years of war (2 of 2)

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Credit: Julian Simmonds for The Telegraph

Western imperialism can keep providing war materiel for years, at greater or lesser amounts as it rebuilds its stocks and rearms, while continuing to encourage the Ukrainian state to hold out for maximalist demands it calls ‘justice’ but which promises only continued war.  This is called ‘fighting to the last Ukrainian’.  However, the problem with this is obvious – you eventually get to the last Ukrainian.

This is obviously not in the interests of the Ukrainian state, so if Western imperialism risks uncontrollable war if it further escalates its intervention, Ukraine risks complete devastation if it continues on its present course. Equally obviously, the war will not reach this stage because there will be too many Ukrainians who will have no intention of joining the queue to be the last one to die.  We already see this in the numbers of especially young men getting out of the country; in the number avoiding military recruitment and coming into conflict with the military recruiters, and the massively increased desertions from the army.

More and more Western politicians are calling for the age of mobilisation of men to be reduced from 25 to 18, which has been resisted by the Zelensky regime.  He claims that he needs more weapons for any mobilisation while the warmongers in the West say that more troops are necessary to wield them. Zelensky is acutely aware of the unpopularity of sending Ukraine’s youngest generation to their death: the previous mobilisation was not completely successful while the very need for another is proof of the massive number already killed.

The underlying problem is that Ukraine has relatively few under-25s due to the sharp decrease in birthrates in the 1990s, a consequence of the shock of the collapse of the Soviet Union and introduction of capitalism.  If all the other cohorts of men have been exhausted, the mobilisation of the youngest does not promise victory but future demographic collapse, caused by death and absence of the most fertile cohorts of the population.  Volodymyr Ishchenko, quoted in the previous post states that ‘according to the latest UN forecast, by the end of the century, the Ukrainian population is going to decrease to 15 million from the 52 million that Ukraine had in 1992 after the disintegration of USSR. This is not even the most pessimistic scenario.’  Demographic forecasts are uncertain but the probability of a greater number of war casualties than that admitted by the Ukrainian state makes it more likely the most pessimistic forecasts are the more accurate.

So what are we to make then of the repeated calls of the pro-war left that we should recognise Ukrainian ‘agency’?  What agency?  That of the Zelensky regime?  Does this left support his current refusal to draft the youngest or will it support his change of mind, or will it support whatever the regime decides to do, whatever that is?  In the latter case the demand for support for Ukrainian agency is actually a demand to deny one’s own; in the case of another mobilisation, to surrender it to the demands of Western imperialism.

In defending Ukrainian agency, this left in reality denies the agency of Western imperialism – of its own ruling class and its state. In this, the supporters of Ukraine and its Western sponsors make the same error (if you can call it that) as the supporters of Russia – they identify the interests of the working class with that of their state.  One or other of these states become the defender of the working class on the world stage, which condemns the working class of their particular saviour to complete subordination.

The consequence is that the working class is no longer a world class and socialism is no longer international, having in effect been subordinated to one or other nationalism.  Hence the prominence of ‘self-determination’ in the discourse of each – a nationalist demand unrelated to the policy of Lenin but a declaration of support to already independent capitalist states in an inter-imperialist war.

Volodymyr Ishchenko has interesting things to say about the power of this nationalism in Ukraine. He.states that ’There are multiple indications that the enthusiasm of 2022 was pretty fragile, and it is not the first time that we see this kind of dynamic. After the 2004 Orange revolution and the EuroMaidan revolution of 2014, people have had high expectations that quickly gave way to disappointment. A similar dynamic happened after the election of Zelensky in 2019 and then in 2022. One of the lines of interpretation is that those events were the manifestation of the rise of the Ukrainian Nation, according to a very linear teleological dynamic, as an ultimate culmination of the national liberation struggle.’  

He goes on to say – ‘the actual desire to sacrifice oneself for the state is very low’, introducing the key missing element by noting that ‘the class issue is very important because conscripts will come primarily from the lower classes, from the villages. Mainly, from among the poor people who could not bribe the recruitment officers . . . It is really difficult to argue that the war is still a kind of “people’s war” if the majority of Ukrainian men actually do not want to fight.’ 

Of the role of the working class, which is the agency that should concern socialists, he is much more honest than the pro-war left that avoids it – by substituting the agency of the state for it – ‘The working class cannot play a role in the current situation. The labor movement in Ukraine was weak well before the war. The last really massive political strike was by Donbas miners in 1993. They demanded the autonomy of Donbas and closer relations with Russia, ironically.’  So much for a Ukrainian take on Ukrainian agency.

In the previous episodes in 2004 and 2014 the Ukrainian people were lied to by all factions of the oligarchy and their foreign backers with the result that the drive towards NATO precipitated the current invasion.  Ukraine is losing and the longer the war continues the greater the loss – this is reality and not the bellicose propaganda of the British, whether from Starmer on his visit to Kyiv or from that county’s pro-war leftists.  Just as it was Boris Johnson who helped torpedo the early Istanbul negotiations that might had ended the war, so has Starmer turned up to make nonsensical promises of a 100 year partnership and £3bn a year in military aid “for as long as it takes.”  As a practised purveyor of untruth, we can be confident that this is another lie.

Russia too has good reason to seek an end to the conflict but too little reason to permit it to involve Western troops in unoccupied Ukraine, which would be both a permanent threat to it and incentive to whatever reactionary regime surfaces in Ukraine to provoke another war.  In such a case Western troops would immediately be involved, triggering a European-wide war that would quickly involve the US in defence of its European imperialist vassals.

Russia is also suffering from sanctions and the freezing of its assets, including $300bn in the EU, even if it has surprised the West by not collapsing and continuing to grow its economy.  However it is suffering from high inflation and high interest rates, which will hamper further growth.  It has survived as well as it has by measures it took following the first Western sanctions in 2014, which have involved increased state direction of the economy and diversification of markets, especially for its energy exports, some of which still go to the West through third parties such as India..

The change in the distribution of available productive resources through increased arms production creates its own disproportions. The part of constant capital – machinery, materials etc and labour power used to produce commodities the use value of which does not make possible either the reconstitution of this constant capital or the reconstitution of labour-power can slow down or even lead to the contraction of the economy’s reproduction if it leads to a reduced amount of this constant capital and labour-power.

It is thus not in the interests of any of the parties that the war continue indefinitely.  Its continuation promises a military defeat for Ukraine and thus for its Western imperialist sponsors that only unacceptable escalation could avoid at unpredictable cost for all involved.  Russia has interests to defend that the war damages, including its economy, and it is undoubtedly suffering significant losses, whatever its supporters on social media in the West like to pretend.

In all this the party with most interest in ending the war is the working class, particularly the sons and daughters of the working class dying and suffering as a result of it.  A working class organised to demand and compel an end to it should be the object of the socialist movement across the world.  Unfortunately too many on the left are tied to supporting either Ukraine and its imperialist allies or Russia, and are therefore also tied to whatever deal eventuates from their eventual negotiations, the terms of which will be determined by the interests of the respective capitalist states.

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Ukraine and imperialism after three years of war (1 of 2)

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At the start of last year media in the West was still predicting Ukrainian victory, continuing the theme from early in the war by pointing to its invasion of Kursk and Zelensky’s ‘victory plan’. We were expected to forget the previous claims that accompanied the Ukrainian offensive in 2023, even when it was obviously failing; the repeated claims that Russia was running out of missiles, almost from the time it began using them in early 2022; that the Russian army was increasingly demoralised; that sanctions would turn the Ruble to rubble and the Russian economy would be cut in half, and repeated claims about Russian casualties while ignoring Ukrainian losses.

By the end of the year the media was speculating on how the West must avoid Ukrainian defeat and achieve stabilisation of the front in order to bolster its negotiating position.  Much ink has been spilt on what the West’s and Ukraine’s negotiating position should be, usually with no reference to what the Russians would find acceptable.  On occasions this has been taken into account it turns out that there is no basis for an agreement, on the grounds that Russia will not accept Ukrainian membership of NATO even if it is postponed for ten or twenty years, and no acceptance of a ceasefire that entails Ukrainian rejection of existing Russian territorial gains or limits to its future military capacity to recommence hostilities and recapture them.

Western imperialism is playing its part by continuing to supply weapons to Ukraine and to tighten sanctions but it has played almost all its hand of escalation, and its ability to supply more of the same weaponry is increasingly limited while escalatory risk in supplying new weaponry is considered unacceptable.  With daily advances by Russian forces it is clear that freezing the conflict is the preferred solution.  The point of the war from NATO’s point of view has been to weaken Russia and if possible reduce its capacity to stand against US  encroachment not only in Ukraine but also in Asia, all in order to press against China.

If Western imperialism really believed that the conquest of all of Ukraine is a prelude to Russian tanks driving through Eastern Europe (and consequently threatening Western Europe) it would have considered the risk of escalation of the war through more direct involvement one that already existed.  Despite current rearmament, the European NATO countries are in no position to fight a conventional war with Russia, not only because of military weakness but because of lack of domestic support.  Beside the cost in lives and in terms of living standards, the West’s support for Israeli genocide and repeated invasion of other countries, and potential war with Iran, means its credibility in selling sacrifices on humanitarian grounds is weak.  Already, the number of incumbent governments falling in elections is testament to widespread dissatisfaction to which the war is a major contributor.

The US is not prepared to make up for European imperialist weakness and is not in a position to engage in more direct war with Russia while supporting Israel, for example against Iran, and having a credible and increasing threat employed against China.  Trump’s threats against Canada, Greenland and Panama are testament that any continuing action he approves against Russia will not be for want of aggressive imperialist intentions but from recognition of these constraints on the projection of US power.  Liberals detest him most because he too openly reveals the naked imperialist interest behind the arrogant and hypocritical rhetoric about democracy.  One Financial Times columnist warned (Musk’s war on America’s allies) that if Musk’s support for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is also that of Trump ‘the west is as good as dead.’ And this is without taking into account the threats to Canada and Denmark, in which even the most loyal lap dogs of the United States are treated with contempt, opening their leaders to justified criticism from their own populations.

Objectively then, Western imperialism faces challenges, not only from without – the failure of most of the population of the world and their governments to support its proxy war – but also from within, as the price of the war imposed by the US on Europe is further exposed by Trump’s threats.  While European NATO countries froth at the mouth at possible Russian and Chinese damaging of undersea cables in the Baltic and threaten direct action, we are supposed to forget the US destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines and these same countries looking the other way before calling off their ‘investigations.’

These contradictions should open possibilities for socialists to point out the real nature of US Imperialism and NATO, of the consequences of their governments’ support for the war, and the hypocrisy and fraud that is bourgeois democracy.

But then enter the pro-war left.  It declares that the occupation of Ukraine is a potential prelude to the invasion of Eastern Europe and that the war is one for democracy, forgetting that socialists oppose bourgeois democracy with that of the working class.  They pretend US imperialism can support the cause of democracy in Ukraine but not in Palestine, while we await without baited breath their reconciliation of this claim with Trump’s latest threats.  They support imperialism’s supply of weapons to Ukraine, which they portray as democratic even while it has banned opposition parties, censored opposition media, restricted workers’ rights and called off the scheduled Presidential election.

They do so while claiming that this does not require rearmament, even while European imperialism empties its arsenals, also claiming that no expansion of NATO is involved even while it supports Ukraine in a war that is all about its ability to join it.  It even complains that Western imperialism has been too reticent in supporting Ukraine – ‘the supply of arms to Ukraine has been insufficient and slow’ it says.  The demand is made that ‘Governments, including NATO countries, should provide the weapons necessary for Ukraine to win’ while it is claimed that ‘there is huge pressure on Ukraine by Western Imperialism to sue for peace and accept annexation.’

The article just quoted references the role of socialists in the First World War without having the faintest awareness that it is painting for Ukraine the same ‘stab in the back’ narrative that the Nazis employed in Germany after the war that helped advance their rise to power.  But of course, this left has already denied the role of the fascist forces in Ukraine that even the bourgeois media sometimes reports, and that one Ukrainian leftist has recently explained.

The Economist noted in its last issue that ‘the share of Ukrainians who view Bandera favourably reached 74% in 2022, up from only 22% ten years earlier.’  Volodymyr Ishchenko noted that ‘in France the far right, mainly the National Rally, Le Pen’s party, is way less extreme than those movements we discuss in Ukraine. Le Pen’s party probably doesn’t use Nazi symbols, and has a more sophisticated attitude towards the Vichy collaboration during the Second World War. They’re trying to detoxify themselves. It’s not like this in Ukraine and you mentioned Stephan Bandera, who is glorified openly; even more so, the Waffen SS is glorified, particularly by people in Azov. The scale of extremism of the Ukrainian far right is way higher than the western one . . . Unlike the major far-right parties in the west who are working on parliamentary status, the power of the far right in Ukraine has always been their capacity for street mobilization and the threat of violence . . . we need to think not only about the nominal far-right but also about the complicity of the Ukrainian and western elite in the whitewashing of Ukrainian far right and ethnonationalism.’  To this could be added the whitewashing of Ukrainian nationalism by the pro-war Western left.

Forward to part 2

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (58) – Marx’s claim to originality

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‘The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.’

‘The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people. (Marx, Capital Volume 1, Chapter 32 p. )

Marx explains ‘how the development of the social productivity of labour presupposes cooperation on a large scale; how the division and combination of labour can only be organized on that basis, and the means of production economized by concentration on a vast scale; how instruments of labour which, by their very nature, can only be used in common, such as systems of machinery, can be called into existence; how gigantic natural forces can be pressed into the service of production; and how the production process can be transformed into a process of the technological application of scientific knowledge.’

The development of the forces and relations of capitalist production through the socialisation of labour, necessarily includes the development of the working class, the decline of petty bourgeois (including peasant) production, and the redundancy of the capitalist class (as set out previously) and are the basis of the contradictions of capitalism that are expressed in class struggle.

This is what Marx claimed, against others, was his distinctive contribution:

‘Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. That the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.’ (Marx letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, Marx Collected Works Vol 39, p62 & 65)

Through this class struggle the working class is the agency by which the cooperation created by capitalism is made fully conscious, organised and reaches towards completion, through conscious planning of the instruments of production that are of such a scale that they can only be used in common.  Through this cooperation production is developed to address the needs of the producers, the working class, in the activity of their production, consumption, and the all-round development of human capacities.  The application of scientific knowledge will be carried out by the working class in the interests of the majority and not for the benefit of a narrow class of capitalists.

The redundancy of the capitalist class is consummated, the working class itself is abolished and with it class itself.  Since the new society can only realise the interests and wishes of its majority, it is clear that the creation of such a society can only be a conscious process; it cannot as for capitalism, be the outcome of a mainly unconscious process of largely elemental economic developments.  It needs a conscious historical agent, conscious of its task and how it might be achieved, collectively and freely in an egalitarian manner. How could a whole class, the vast majority within a capitalist society, do it in any other way?

In the Preface to the 1888 English edition of ‘The Communist Manifesto’, by which time Marx had died, Frederick Engels explained why it was not ‘The Socialist Manifesto’:

‘By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced  to the  position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who by all manner of tinkering professed to redress, without any danger to capital  and profit,  all  sorts  of social grievances, in both cases men outside the working class movement, and looking rather to the ‘educated’ classes for support.’

‘Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of a total change, called itself Communist.  It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce the Utopian communism of Cabet in France, and of Weitling in Germany.  Thus, in 1847, socialism was a middle class movement, communism a working class movement.   Socialism was, on the Continent at least, ‘respectable’; communism was the very opposite.  And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that ‘the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself, there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take. Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating it.’

Back to part 57

Forward to part 59

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 57 – towards ‘Aufheben’

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We see from the previous post that capitalism, as a transitional mode of production to socialism, is a progressive development, recognition of which is one of the hallmarks of Marxism.  This, however, is not how Marxism is normally understood by its enemies, by those unfamiliar with it and even by some of its friends and self-styled adherents.

Certainly, some of these will accept that this is true in relation to previous societies, whether understood as feudalism, some form of Asiatic mode of production, or older tribal societies, but, it is argued, this is no longer the case.  Capitalism has conquered the world, is now in decline and/or in its ‘death agony’, as declared by Leon Trotsky.  Marx lived when only a small number of countries were capitalist in any developed sense and today it is the irrationality and barbarity of capitalism that predominates.

There are a number of problems with such a view but in this post we will mention only three.  First, Marx’s view is that capitalist progress is not a serene, tranquil and untroubled process.  It is not one of harmony and uniformity but one of antagonism, generated by contradictions that are often expressed in palpable horrors.  It was ever thus, and today’s horrors engendered by the system are neither new nor preclude progress in the sense set out in the previous post.

Secondly, capitalism continues – albeit with its waste and degradation of humanity and the planet – to develop the forces of production and therefore the foundations for socialism.  This includes massive expansion of the working class, without which capitalism does not exist.  The sense of progress set out by Marx therefore continues even as it lays waste to nature and humanity, not least because these forces can be developed in such a way to further the protection of both.  The alternative view is that the new society must start from somewhere very far away from being able to address these tasks and can only begin to develop the forces necessary after capitalism is overthrown, which ironically calls into question the current possibility and imperative to do so that is so much a part of this view.

Thirdly, a one-dimensional understanding of modern capitalism as regressive can easily elicit appeals to the past, to older models of society or more primitive capitalist forms, which Marx had to reject in his own day, but that are continually proffered, becoming obstacles to the replacement of capitalism by socialism.  These include opposition to the centralisation and concentration of productive forces in the name of ‘anti-monopoly’ capitalism; to the growth and development of these forces on the grounds of planetary limits, or to the internationalisation of capitalism on the grounds of the protection of ‘national sovereignty’, against ‘globalisation’ etc.  There are many other examples.

Opposition boils down to opposition to the socialisation of the forces of production, to the progress that capitalism has involved, and upon which future socialism depends.  In this view, opposition to capitalism cannot rest on what capitalism has achieved but on its purely negative aspects, such as its exploitation and oppression.  We have seen that it is precisely in the expansion of surplus labour, on exploitation as a result of the socialisation of labour, that socialism is possible.  It is not capitalist crises, or its inhuman oppression or its tendency to war and destruction that will give rise to socialism but to the contradictions of the system of which these are expressions.  Capitalism is essentially still the antagonistic system riven by contradictions analysed by Marx in the middle of the nineteenth century.  Were it not, we would not be expounding his alternative as still relevant.

Marx did not in the least minimise the horrors of capitalism but did not reduce his opposition to capitalism to its deleterious effects, as the sole grounds for creation of a new society or the incentive to do so.  To maintain a belief in socialism while abandoning his analysis necessarily involves invoking some other grounds, and since this means abandoning the material premiss of the world as it exists, it usually involves invoking principles or ‘values’ – moral claims – that cannot support it.

In 1849 Engels wrote that: “Justice”, “humanity”, “freedom”, “equality”, “fraternity”, “independence”—so far we have found nothing in the pan-Slavist manifesto but these more or less ethical categories, which sound very fine, it is true, but prove absolutely nothing in historical and political questions. “Justice”, “humanity”, “freedom” etc. may demand this or that a thousand times over; but if the thing is impossible, it does not take place and in spite of everything remains an “empty figment of a dream”. (K Marx and F Engels, Democratic Pan-Slavism, Collected Works Vol 8 p 365)

What Marx and Engels demonstrated was that ‘the thing’ – socialism – is possible because it is based on the development of existing society itself and can unfold out of it.  This does not make it inevitable in the sense that this unfolding is an unconscious, inescapable process, but that it is precisely a conscious process, derived from a consciousness of what exists and its evolution.

This was expressed very early in Marx’s political development when he wrote that he did not want to ‘dogmatically anticipate’ the new world but wanted ‘to find the new world through criticism of the old one’.  The task was to ‘develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles’ and wanted to ‘merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to’.  In a letter in 1843 he wrote that ‘It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, according to this being, it will historically be compelled to do’.

This consciousness cannot not stop at the obvious iniquity of capitalism, which Marx didn’t fail to note; the bourgeoisie, he noted, had never ‘effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation’, but that through its ‘development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world . . .‘  (K Marx, The Future results of British rule in India, Collected Works Vol 12 p 221 and 222)

He states in Capital Vol I that ‘within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital.’

‘But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock.’

‘It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.’ (Marx, Capital Vol I chapter 25 section 4)

Marx damns the capitalist system for its exploitation and mutilation, for its domination and stultifying effects on the worker and family, and for its gross inequality, but still ‘the social productiveness of labour’ is raised.

Back to part 56

Forward to part 58

Part 1

Nationalism planning for a United Ireland

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The Belfast paper – The Irish News – has a column every Saturday by Patrick Murphy that regularly flagellates Sinn Fein for its hypocrisy and incompetence, sectarianism and corruption, its elevation of the cause of a united Ireland over a united people, and the constitutional question over questions of economic and social equality and poverty. Most of all it is criticised for its nationalism, even its betrayal of it through its recognition of the legitimacy of the ‘two traditions’ in Ireland, which translates as two nations and thereby betrays its own stated goal of a united nation.

Sinn Fein is not the only target and the SDLP and Southern parties get a lashing now and then as well.  It’s a bit repetitive, even if accurate in its own way, and his style can sometimes be irritating.  Anyway, the irony is that for all his economistic denunciations of nationalism, he is actually a bigger nationalist than the SDLP, Southern parties and Sinn Fein.

His bête noir is the European Union, which he sees as robbing Ireland of its sovereignty with Irish membership akin to allying with the British Empire against Germany in World War I, betraying Connolly’s entreaty to ‘serve neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland’. Of course, he has no difficulty is demonstrating the imperialist character of the EU and its current complicity in the imperialist and Zionist genocide in Palestine etc.  But he is no Marxist and so is unable to appreciate that his belief in a sovereign independent Ireland is a pipe-dream; a reactionary attempt to turn the clock back to a world of independent nation states that also ironically never existed and will never exist.  A recent article by Boffy sets out what is going on here.

By coincidence the Saturday issue of The Irish Times has an article by the Taoiseach Simon Harris setting out the need for the Irish State to defend its current success from the potentially devastating effects of a Trump presidency through some sort of ‘diplomatic offensive’.  This can only involve reminding Trump of how useful the Irish state is for the United States – “Ireland’s offering is one that speaks to Trump . . .”  Since what speaks to Trump most of all is willing and obsequious servility, the Irish are well practised in ingratiating themselves with US presidents, getting the opportunity to do so every St Patricks day with a ridiculously over-sized bowl of shamrock.  What handing over the bowl by the Irish Taoiseach symbolises is the handing over of the country to its true and ultimate chieftain.

The idea of Patrick Murphy that Ireland could genuinely be an independent and sovereign state, against the United States and outside of the European Union, is so divorced from reality it has been abandoned by every other Irish nationalist party.  Irish socialists should not take on the burden of trying to claim it and should instead recognise the ending of the era of nation states as heralding the ending (very painful ending) of capitalist nation states and inevitably of the nationalist ideology that is sustained by them.

The decline of nation states and agglomeration of super-states and imperialist alliances, demonstrated by the US and China and by NATO and BRICS, is an expression of the development of the productive forces of capitalism upon which the possibility of socialism rests.  The intensifying competition and rivalry between these imperialist states and their alliances poses an existential challenge to the interests of the working class, which, as Marx said, has no fatherland but can only assert its interests as an international class.

This means opposition to imperialist war, which currently means opposition to the imperialist conflict in Ukraine and the country’s proxy war on behalf of western imperialism against Russia.  It means rejecting the idea that an old slogan, and one not understood, of self-determination can be proclaimed as justification for supporting one or other side of this imperialist rivalry and the war it has generated.

That consciousness, including political consciousness, often lags behind economic and social development is nothing new and partly explains why many on the left have become enthusiasts for one imperialist alliance or the other.  This leads to hypocritical claims of opposition to oppression by the other side while ignoring the oppression of the favoured imperialism.  So, for example, the United States is claimed to be the key enemy of the working class of the whole world, including of Russia and China, while the role of these states in oppressing their own working class is a “separate question”, as one apologist for these states put it to me.

But let’s get back to the Murphy column in The Irish News.  He notes the recent ‘plan’ by Sinn Fein minister Conor Murphy to create 10,000 new student places centred on Derry.  He notes that it is based not on the purpose of new university facilities and what their wider role might have for development but mainly on where they will be sited.  Along with nearly all Stormont ‘plans’ it doesn’t have the money behind it to make it happen but promises to at least have some.  In this respect it is better than the new Health Service three year plan, recently announced while the first year was already three-quarters over and which promised new stuff if it had the money and cuts in the meantime.  This didn’t stop it being welcomed.

One of the many criticisms of the Conor Murphy plan was that it was a Northern Ireland plan that will reach full fruition by 2032, by which time his party leader has promised that Northern Ireland will not exist! Oh dear, nationalists revealing that they don’t believe their own hype?  I have to admit I almost laughed out loud.

Sinn Fein has been banging the drum on the ‘conversation’ about a united Ireland for years, demanding that the Irish government and everyone else start planning for it, lest the project suffer from the same lack of preparation as Brexit.  And here it is presiding over plans that ignore it!  Repeated calls for plans are followed by silence and their complete absence. Why? Because any plans would immediately confront obstacles that no one wants to talk about; assurances no one would believe, and promises that would invite the response of ‘why don’t you do that now then?’

Behind the empty rhetoric is the reality that nationalism itself has nothing to offer, which the utterly incapable Stormont regime has demonstrated in spades.  For socialists, the national question and a united Ireland is an Irish democratic revolution which cannot promise radical economic and social advance outside of an accompanying socialist revolution. All the limitations to an independent and united Ireland set out above would apply.

At most it is the act of uniting the country alone that would be justified as a democratic advance itself and during ‘the Troubles’ this was how it was implicitly understood.  Now, it is claimed by nationalists that it will have all sorts of other economic and social benefits that Sinn Fein says everyone else must plan for but which it can’t convincingly demonstrate exist and can’t plan for itself.  Instead, what political arrangements that are touted are flimsy and insubstantial – a new flag or national anthem – or actually undemocratic – some mechanism to guarantee continuing unionist power and influence.

All around us we see the pervasiveness of nationalist thinking and the failings of its nostrums.

First steps for the left in the new Dáil

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When the Dáil met following the general election the order of business included the nomination of a new Taoiseach and the position of a new Ceann Comhairle (Speaker of the Dáil).  The latter became part of the horse-trading between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and the Independent group of TDs (who are FF/FG in all but name) so that the three of them could form a stable administration.  With no principled difference between any of them the issues were all about divvying up the spoils of office, which included the role of Ceann Comhairle.  This comes with a salary of €255,000 a year, which is greater than that of the Taoiseach.

The Independent group let it be known that this was one bauble that they wanted and the two main parties thought about it.  Their wish was granted and their nominee, Verona Murphy, was approved following, rather appropriately, the proposal of Michael Lowry.  Murphy had previously lost the support of Fine Gael as a candidate following remarks about asylum seekers needing to be “deprogrammed”, as they may have been “infiltrated by Isis”, and further comments claiming that Isis had “manipulated children as young as three or four”.  Lowry had long ago been removed as a candidate of the Fine Gael party following a number of scandals.

This has passed without much fuss as par for the course for bourgeois politics in Ireland. Unfortunately, the Socialist Party TD Ruth Coppinger missed the point by stating that “in rallying behind its selection for Ceann Comhairle, it could be the first and last rally for women that the next government is likely to do when it comes in.”  The point of Murphy being the first woman to be elected Ceann Comhairle was really beside the point, but pretending to make it so reflected the influence of identity politics on Coppinger and the Irish left.

More importantly, Coppinger registered her abstention on the more significant business of the nomination of Mary Lou McDonald of Sinn Fein as the new Taoiseach, “simply because we do not have a real prospect of an alternative government.”  It is beyond doubt that Coppinger will vote many times over her next few years in the Dáil on motions that will have no chance of being passed or against others she will have no chance of stopping. Why is this an obstacle now?

If her rationale was a cop-out, People before Profit’s support for a Sinn Fein Taoiseach made no sense at all.  Its leader, Richard Boyd Barrett, stated that “People Before Profit will be supporting the nomination of Deputy Mary Lou McDonald, not because we agree with Sinn Féin – we disagree with it on many things, not least its refusal to rule out coalition with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – but because we believe parties on the left have an obligation to end 100 years of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and put together the first left-wing government this State has ever seen.”

Besides the absurdity of supporting an alternative government based on a party you do not agree with, or doing so on the assumption that this is a ’party of the left’ – what exactly constitutes being left-wing? – how could this party ‘put together the first left-wing government this State has ever seen”? So focused and fixated is People before Profit on ‘ending 100 years of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael government’ that what it is replaced with appears to be utterly secondary – even admitting Sinn Fein’s potential to go into coalition with either (or both?) of them anyway!

If Coppinger’s remarks were an admission of failure of the ‘left-wing government’ project, Richard Boyd Barrett’s were a judgement on the retrograde consequences of pretending to pursue it in circumstances in which it is impossible.  The only good thing in this case about writing a blank cheque for a Sinn Fein government is that it cannot cash it.  While Coppinger cops out on what is a question of principle – what sort of administration a Sinn Fein Taoiseach would preside over? – Boyd Barrett votes in principle for a principle he cannot possibly support – a Sinn Fein Taoiseach leading a government that is not committed to opposing either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael participation within it.

The whole performance is political theatre, which – with the season that is in it – is a pantomime.  Grubby deals accompany political posturing that reflects no good on any of the participants and is of no educational value at all to workers looking in.

People before Profit’s Paul Murphy says “What should the left do now? Rule out coalition with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and put forward left-wing policies”; except the first has been determined irrelevant by the recent election while ‘putting forward left-wing policies’ begs the question of what is meant by ‘left-wing’ and what is meant by ‘policies’?

People before Profit stood on a manifesto saying that “The first step in bringing about fundamental change will be the formation of a Left Government – one that excludes FF and FG.”  That is now stuffed, with no elections likely for a few years, even were it the case that working class struggle should revolve round them, or that it need start with the actions of TDs in the Dáil.  Were we now to take them at their word we would have to wait to the next general election to take “the first step in bringing about fundamental change.”

Such change does not come from parliament, not from ‘left’ governments and not even from the state, which People before Profit seems to pretend is governed by the first two.  The first step is never the action of ‘left’ governments, parliaments or the capitalist state but from the independent action of the working class.

It is not the role of the ‘left’ to lead in the Dáil while the working class is a supporting act outside.  Some part of the People before Profit thought process knows all this but has not the first idea how to operationalise it.  Even were it only able to identify it at a very general level, it would be a good first step to doing the first thing about it, a good New Year’s resolution perhaps.

A beautiful wonderful victory in Syria?

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Photo: OMAR HAJ KADOUR/AFP/Getty Images

The sudden and ignominious collapse of Bashar al-Assad revealed an utterly bankrupt regime so hollowed out that its army would not fight for it, its Russian and Iranian supporters could not save it, and it prepared for its own collapse by reportedly transferring $250mn to Moscow. Its passing is no cause for mourning, but it is no cause for rapturous celebration either.

The overthrow was achieved mainly by the reactionary Islamist Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) and other militia groups, including the Turkish-sponsored Syrian National Army (SNA).  HTS is the previous al-Qaeda affiliate in the country and its leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is still subject to a bounty of $10mn by the US while the HTS is considered a terrorist organisation.

This hasn’t stopped western imperialist governments from swiftly moving to recognise the regime.  Why wouldn’t they, since they did so much to enable its victory?  Unlike some simpletons on the left who have welcomed the fall of the Assad regime, the imperialist powers recognise that this involves putting someone else in his place.

Now the Western media is questioning the designation of HTS as terrorist and Abu Mohammed al-Jolani as a wanted man.  The BBC has carried articles – ‘From Syrian jihadist leader to rebel politician: How Abu Mohammed al-Jolani reinvented himself.’  In reality, reinvention is only possible with the connivance of the Western media, such as the BBC itself.

The state broadcaster was only following its government, which has promptly raised the possibility of taking HTS off the terrorism list.  The US also moved quickly to claim that it had made “direct contact” with HTS, as if this was something new, as a start to securing the stability of imperialist interests. The EU announced it would meet the new government to ensure “it goes in the right direction” while threatening Georgia (which has actually had elections) with possible sanctions. It appears some elections are bad and some terrorists are good.

The reported role of Ukraine in assisting the Islamist victory is a pertinent reminder of its role as an ally of Western imperialism, previously in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Mali.  This may seem unsurprising, but it hardly corresponds to the pretence of the country as an innocent bystander, forced into a purely defensive war.  If Russia is successfully expelled from Syria, how will this advance the particular interests of Ukraine? Where might all the expelled Russian forces be deployed to?

The role of Ukraine is also a reminder how quickly and successfully western imperialism kisses the frog and makes a handsome prince.  In Ukraine the neo-Nazi Azov movement, subject to US sanctions, became freedom fighters when they received US weapons.  HTS is well on the road to such beatification.

Most importantly, the role of Ukraine illustrates the overthrow of Assad as an episode in a wider inter-imperialist conflict that is setting light to different hot wars that threaten to escalate into a single world-wide catastrophe.  On one side, Western imperialism illustrates its ‘progressive’ credentials through support for Islamist reactionaries while, on the other, ‘anti-imperialist’ certificates are endorsed by support for a vile dictatorship, the establishment of military bases on the Mediterranean, and facilitating the robbing of the country by the fleeing dictator.

The left supporters of a ‘multipolar’ world have the inevitable results of this project thrown in their faces – a world of competing and antagonistic imperialist rivalries in which war is inescapable.  Syria is dramatic demolition of the illusions contained in support for a multipolar world within which there are unipolar states.  The multipolar dismemberment of Syria is the multipolar world writ small.

Yet somehow, compared to others on the left, even these illusions seem half sane.  For these others, this world-wide inter-imperialist conflict is so circumscribed and defined by their support for Ukraine that it becomes no more than background noise.  Their effective capitulation to Western imperialism arrives via the road of bourgeois democracy, or the claims made for it, that they extol even as its content is evacuated in reality.  This now reaches grotesque levels in their support for the overthrow of Assad that in linear fashion tail ends Western imperialism.

Even the ideologues of imperialism offer a more accurate and honest view of the HTS than this left.  Foreign Policy notes that they are “cut from the same cloth as Assad” and that protesters against their regime in Idlib who described Jolani as a “tyrant . . . were directed to mass graves of those killed inside prisons—eerily resembling allegations against the Assad government.”

“In Syria it is kind of a monster-versus-monster conflict,” said Aron Lund, fellow with Century International. “Ordinary Syrians don’t have any choice in regard to who rules them. Groups come to their area with guns, and people just have to get along. Depending on who you are and where you are, either Assad or HTS may have pockets of support, but neither side allows any real free expression or elections.”

HTS success was achieved with the assistance of its many foreign Jihadi fighters and was at least partly the result of Turkish and US sponsorship.  It was accompanied by and enabled another invasion by the Zionist state with massive destruction of the weapons and military facilities of the Syrian state.  All this leaves no room for repeating false phrases about ‘self-determination’ as employed in support for Ukraine.  Neither can Islamic fundamentalism be held up as some sort of democratic movement of any kind.

An interview with a Swiss Syrian, Joseph Daher, posted by this left, notes that “We have to face the hard fact that there is a glaring absence of an independent democratic and progressive bloc that is able to organize and clearly oppose the Syrian regime and Islamic fundamentalist forces.”

He goes no to say that “Looking at HTS and SNA’s policies in the past, they have not encouraged a democratic space to develop, but quite the opposite. They have been authoritarian.”

Yet on Facebook, two of the pro-war and pro-Ukraine left said this about the events in Syria:

“Assad is gone! Victory beautiful wonderful victory to see a tyrant crushed like that. Damascus is under the control of the rebels.” 

And:

“The butcher Assad’s departure to Moscow is a great day for the Syrian people and it is hard to conceive of a new government which could be more brutal, reactionary and corrupt. The hope is that the urban movement which nearly brought down the dictatorship is able to take power.”

A “beautiful wonderful victory” for Islamic fundamentalism, one sponsored by Western imperialism and accompanied by another invasion by Israel! 

“A great day for the Syrian people” –how more wonderful could it be?  How greater a day could the Syrian people enjoy than to be subject to the rule of Islamic fundamentalists?

In the interview, Joseph Daher says that ‘Only the self- organization of popular classes fighting for democratic and progressive demands will create that space and open a path toward actual liberation” but that “the main obstacle has been, is, and will be the authoritarian actors, previously the regime, but now many of the opposition forces, especially the HTS and SNA; their rule and the military clashes between them have suffocated the space for democratic and progressive forces to democratically determine their future.”

So where does the “hope” come from that “the urban movement which nearly brought down the dictatorship is able to take power” as a result of this new “main obstacle”?

Daher goes on to say something that the left supporters of Ukraine, and now Islamist rebels, have set themselves against: “To choose one imperialism over another is to guarantee the stability of the capitalist system and the exploitation of popular classes.”

There are many ways of arriving at this, but celebrating the victory of HTS throws all the light you need in order to see the even greater betrayal involved in supporting Ukraine and its war to join NATO.

The Irish general election (2 of 2) – what lies beneath

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When five political commentators were asked for the main moment of the election campaign, they all mentioned the TikTok Taoiseach’s snubbing of a disability care worker when he was on one of his many walkabouts.  It “cut through” to the public, as the saying goes, and probably did lower the Fine Gael vote a little.  However, in the grand scheme of things all it demonstrated was the irrelevance of the campaign, which has been described as a non-event.  Unlike recent general elections in many other countries, the incumbents were returned to office, providing evidence of political stability that does not exist elsewhere.  This stability rests on uncertain foundations.

The election was called following a large give-away budget of tax reductions and increased state spending, followed by a campaign where everyone promised even more tax cuts and increased spending.  This included the previous austerity-merchants in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Halfway during the campaign, when Sinn Fein joined the club, Fine Gael launched hypocritical denunciations that it was about to break the “state piggy bank”.

On the surface, the only difference between the governing parties and the different varieties of opposition was how much they would spend. People before Profit claimed that their clothes were being stolen by everyone, at least for the election, while media commentators claimed that the widespread consensus on increased state intervention showed what an essentially leftwing country Ireland was.  Since PbP argues that such intervention is an expression of socialist politics these claims would be right – if PbP was also right, which it’s not.  The view of politics as a spectrum from left to right implies no fundamental difference between the government and opposition but only shades or degrees of difference.

If this didn’t provide the grounds for major change, and the existing alignment of party support made it unlikely, the most important reasons for continuity are the foundations of the state itself and the economic success that has satisfied a significant part of the population, if only on the grounds that it could be a lot worse and recently was.  The ‘left’ appeared as wanting to share the gains more equally.  Unfortunately, those seeking equality inside the Irish state have to reckon on the giant inequality outside on which it would have to be based and which determines it.

The largesse of recent budgets, and the promises of more during the election, rest on the existence of the Irish state as a tax haven where many US multinationals have decided to park their revenue for tax purposes alongside some of their real activities.  Over half of the burgeoning corporate tax receipts come from just ten companies, with the income taxes of their employees also significant.  Trump has threatened tariffs on the EU, which threatens the massive export by US pharmaceutical firms to the US, and has promised to reduce corporate taxes, which also reduces the attractiveness of the Irish state to multinational investment.  It is not so long since the shock of the Celtic Tiger crash, so very few will not be aware of the vulnerability of economic success and the finances of the state.

This vulnerability was ignored in recent budgets and election promises while the electorate is blamed for seeking short term gains that are all the political class can truthfully promise.  Failure to invest in infrastructure has weakened the state’s long term growth with the major shortfalls ranging wide, across housing, health, transport, childcare and other infrastructure such as energy and water.  This has led to calls for increased state expenditure as the existing policy of throwing money to incentivise private capital has fallen short even while the money thrown at it has mushroomed.  Bike sheds in Leinster House costing €336,000, and a new children’s hospital that had an estimated cost of €650m in 2015, but costed at €2.2 billion at the start of the year – apparently the most expensive in the world – are both examples of the results of a mixture of a booming capitalist economy and state incompetence.

The consequences are an electorate that wants change but doesn’t want or can’t conceive of anything fundamental changing.  Government and opposition differ on degree but avoid the thought of challenging the constraints their lack of an alternative binds them to.  Trump is only one of them; Irish subservience to the US has already destroyed all the blarney about Irish support for the Palestinian people.  Gestures like recognition of a corrupt Palestinian state are nauseating hypocrisy beside the secret calls to the Zionist state promising lack of real action; selling Israeli war bonds to finance genocide by the Irish central bank, and the three wise monkeys of the three government parties ignoring the use of Irish airspace to facilitate the supply of weapons employed in the genocide.

The Irish state is not in control of its destiny and its population is aware of its vulnerability.  For a left that bases itself on the capacity of the state this is a problem; involving not just the incompetence, the bottleneck constraints on real resources, and the international subservience to Western imperialism.  The fundamental problem is in seeing the state as the answer.  Were the Irish state stronger, it would have joined NATO and more directly involved itself in the war in Ukraine; it would have intensified its support to US multinationals, and perhaps been a bit better at building bike sheds and a children’s hospital.  

Parts of the left seems to think the current Irish state can oppose NATO, oppose war and perhaps tax US multinationals a bit more.  It is, however, currently on the road to effective NATO membership; is more or less unopposed in its support for Ukraine in its proxy war; and already taxes multinationals on a vastly greater scale than almost any other country I can think of. 

The left doesn’t have an alternative ‘model’ because its alternative isn’t socialist, but simply development of the state’s existing role, presided over by some sort of inchoate left government, the major distinguishing characteristic of which is that it doesn’t include Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.  This is so anaemic a strategy it avoids all the above reasons why it has minority support.

The terms in which this is popularly understood do not go in the direction of a socialist programme because of the generally low level of class consciousness, but a genuinely socialist path requires rejection of the current statist approach of ‘the left’.  That this too is currently very far away reflects not only the very low level of class consciousness but also how the forces that are responsible for this have also debased the left itself, especially the part that thinks itself really socialist.  Instead, we have the stupidities arising from the commonality of increased state intervention among all the parties repeatedly declared to be proof that Ireland is a left wing country.

These constraints explain the difficulty in creation of a left alternative to a Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael government; the fragmentation of the left and its Oliver Twist policies of simply asking for more.  There are numerous permutations possible before any purported left government would arise, with Sinn Fein, Independents, Social Democrats, Labour Party, and others all willing to go into office with either (or both) of them.  About the least likely is a ‘left’ government (in any meaningful sense) that excludes them and is composed of Sinn Fein – the austerity party in the North – and the Labour Party and Social Democrats whose whole rationale (as the good bourgeois parties that they are) is to get into office – they don’t see the purpose of being involved in politics if you don’t.

All the calls for a ‘left’ government free of the two uglies is based on the same bourgeois conceptions.  Even if only on the grounds of the Chinese proverb – to be careful what you wish for, the failure in the election to achieve such a government is not grounds for mourning, even if the result invites it.

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