The world is facing a Zeitenwende, an epochal tectonic shift, according to the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which he claims means that Germany and the rest of the EU, United States and NATO needs to protect “our open societies” and “stand up for our democratic values”.

The US Government-backed National Endowment for Democracy has reported the view that there are three possible outcomes of this Zeitenwende, or inflection point, as Joe Biden put it:

‘1. a reinvigoration and reinvention of our existing international liberal order.’

‘2. Chinese-led illiberal order.’

‘3. or the breakdown of world order on the model of Putin’s “law of the jungle”.’

The first primarily involves ensuring the strategic defeat of the second, while the second requires the failure of the first, and the third involves in various forms the results of both of these failing.

This is portrayed as a battle between democratic and autocratic systems, so while recognising that “we might all have become capitalists (with the possible exception of North Korea and a tiny handful of other countries) . . . it makes a huge difference whether capitalism is organized in a liberal, democratic way or along authoritarian lines.”

The realpolitik involved in these sonorous pronouncements is admitted by noting that in the ‘democratic’ alliance against autocracy “What’s crucial in the year ahead is for democracies to unify in a common cause to shape the global future alongside moderate, modern non-democracies that seek a more secure, prosperous, and just world.”

What we have then is not a battle of democracy against autocracy but competition between shifting capitalist alliances sharply exposed by the war in Ukraine, which the genocide of the Palestinian people has demonstrated has nothing to do with democracy of even the most diluted capitalist kind.  Far from democracy being advanced by the war in Ukraine and support for the Zionist state, the former has been employed to justify shrill predictions of war across Europe and the need for massive rearmament, while the latter has involved damning those who oppose genocide as violent antic-semitic extremists who must be violently prevented from exercising their right to march and protest.

While for many new generations this is something new, it is far too familiar to anyone with any historical understanding not to recognise.  When the world is described as turning upon competition between rival capitalist blocs, with the eruption of regional wars and threats of a much greater conflagration, we would have to be suffering from amnesia not to recall the precedents.

In World War I a rising German industrial power sought its own colonial outlets, which required domination of Europe and defeat of the existing British and French Empires.  In Asia Japan sided with these old colonial powers and the United States but then itself sought its own Empire that brought it into conflict with the old European Empires and the US in the next war.  It is uncontroversial to note that World War II was the continuation of World War I because both had the same fundamental causes even if the latter is more commonly retold as a war against fascism and Japanese barbarism.

The same dynamics lie behind the war in Ukraine and the defence of the Zionist state by its Western sponsors; also accompanied with the same ideological garbage of defending democracy against autocratic China and a barbaric Vladimir Putin.  In turn China claims only to seek its own freedom for development as a new centre of expanding capitalist accumulation, while Russia claims simply its right to its own sphere of influence, which can only come up against that of its Western imperialist rivals.  Or vice versa, if you prefer.  Having sought alliance with Western imperialism through NATO membership, Russia, like Japan before WWII, has decided that this alliance is fundamentally anti-Russian and is now in a war against its Ukrainian proxy.

Democratic capitalism in World War II did not cease to demonstrate the hypocrisy of its liberal regime through its determination to hold on to its Empires regardless of the local desire for independence. So, the end of the war witnessed the French and the Dutch etc. – following their own occupation – fight to impose their own on their colonial possessions. Today, the claims of democratic capitalism against the Russian Bear and Chinese Dragon are similarly fraudulent as the West supports a genocidal Zionist state and uses its mass media to claim that this State is really the victim.

The Second World War was facilitated by the defeat of the revolutionary uprisings of the working class in Germany and Central Europe and the defeat of mass struggles in Italy, France and Britain etc. in the inter-war period.  In Spain the democratic revolution was defeated by fascism because the struggle was led by forces that demanded that the workers go no further than support a democratic capitalism that would rather see the victory of fascism than open the door to socialist revolution.  The same calls are made today to rally round the more ‘progressive’ capitalist parties in order to defeat Le Pen, Trump and Sunak etc. except that we have already gotten Macron and Biden to show that if you vote for the ‘lesser’ evil you do indeed get evil.  In Britain the Labour Party leadership has demonstrated that democracy in its own party is to be strangled and Brexit made ‘to work’ while no promise of genuine reform is too mild not to be betrayed.

The dynamics of war are therefore the same now as they were prior to the First World War and prior to the Second.  What is very different is the absence of a working class movement able to challenge the prospect of capitalist war and promise a socialist alternative.  There is no working class alternative Zeitenwende, so no fourth alternative to the triumph of one capitalist hegemon or the other, or the mutual destruction of both.

The small left that claims to be the inheritor of the old revolutionary working class movement has swallowed the lie that Western imperialism is defending democracy in Ukraine and that the Ukrainian state should be defended because it is a capitalist democracy.  It therefore supports one of the imperialist blocs.  A smaller section within Europe supports Russia simply because it opposes the current imperialist hegemon, even though this policy simply means support to the rivals for such a status.

Competition between rival imperialist blocs cannot lead to some sort of accommodation that respects the interests of all of them in a ‘multi-polar’ world, for that is not the purpose of capitalist economic or state competition.  The bloody history of the last 150 years demonstrates that this competition rejects any limits, and that even with only a single imperialist superpower war is ever present.  Now, with the relative decline of that superpower we are returning to circumstances akin to World War I and II, so that what is at stake is not a new accommodation of regional alliances, or limited regional wars, but a global conflict.

If the fourth alternative is to be rebuilt those that are still Marxist in more than just name must set out what this is, which brings us to the ideas contained in permanent revolution.  These began with the struggle for democracy by the working class, was made famous by the requirements of the revolutions in Russia in the first decades of the twentieth century, and now stand as the banner of the camp opposed to imperialist rivalry and to the ruination of the world that it threatens, already signposted in Ukraine and Palestine.

Forward to part 2