The Hypocrisy of NATO's Illegal War On Iran - Part 11

Britain was drawn into the EEC/EU, precisely because of these objective laws of history and material conditions. The conditions which had enabled it to become the foremost mercantile power, replacing the Netherlands, in the 17th century, and to become the hegemonic industrial power, in the 19th century, a manifestation of that law of combined and uneven development, had dissipated by the 1970's. Indeed, for much of the twentieth century that process of relative decline was underway, and accelerating.

Although, the mythology, itself clung to by the petty-bourgeois nationalists, persists that it was Britain that won the war of 1939-45, the reality is far different. A resurgent German imperialism again sought to assert its leading role in the formation of a single European state, just as it had done in 1914-18. Indeed, despite all of the moralistic nonsense, about the 1939-45, European war, being about a fight of democracy against fascism, it was really just a continuation of the unresolved contradictions of the 1914-18 war. What is more, that resurgent German imperialism was not going to be stopped by a relatively declining British imperialism.

Sections of the British ruling-class knew it. Some sought to appease German imperialism, having already, in the 1920's, welcomed the coming to power of Mussolini in Italy, and, in the early 1930's, Hitler in Germany, as a means of quelling a rising working-class, and its bulwark, the USSR. It sought to divert the gaze of German imperialism East, towards war with the USSR, as it had done several times in the past. During the 1930's, it was just as likely that Britain might have allied with Nazi Germany against the USSR, as that it would ally with France, and later the USSR, against Germany.

Much to the chagrin of France, Britain agreed the Anglo-German, naval pact in 1935, enabling Nazi Germany to rebuild its navy beyond the limits set by the Versailles Treaty. Britain, still the dominant, but declining, power in Europe, undoubtedly saw a war between Germany and the USSR as to its advantage. That was not just for the reason set out above, especially with the prospect of Japanese imperialism nibbling at the USSR in the Pacific, following its advances in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, opening the possibility of a return to the wars of intervention that followed the 1917 Revolution. It would, also, drain German imperialism, in such a war, where it would bear the brunt of the fighting, giving British imperialism a breathing space, and the ability to continue to exploit its colonial empire for a while longer, largely unhindered.

Of course, that was not in France's interest. Nor, indeed, the longer term interest of Germany. In the era of imperialism, based on the creation of surplus value by industrial capital, as opposed to the era of colonialism, based on the realisation of profits from unequal exchange, the focus of capital shifts from the search for cheap primary products to pillage, and protected markets, to sell into, to the need to expand the size of the domestic market, to create multinational states. That was what European history had come down to in the century prior to WWII, and its necessity became all the greater, as the fundamental contradictions sharpened.

In the absence of an ability of the existing imperialist nation states in Europe being able to peacefully come together to create such a multinational European state, its creation, inevitably came down, again, to the continuation of politics by other means – the forcible creation of such a state under the dominance of the most powerful state. France, suffered from a similar weakness as Britain – a flabbiness that came from a long reliance on robbing its colonies via unequal exchange. Germany, which had few such colonies, had, from the start, to rely more on the development of its own large-scale industrial capital, and it was that which made it the most dynamic industrial power in Europe.

When World War came out of its phoney war stage, it was that, which enabled German imperialism to quickly dispose of the flabby old, colonial powers of France and Britain, rolling over France, in short order, and, likewise, expelling the British forces in the embarrassing defeat at Dunkirk, which, in turn, left Britain, isolated and effectively defeated, by 1940.

Back To Part 10

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The Hypocrisy of NATO's Illegal War On Iran - Part 10

In the post-war period, US imperialism had an incentive to encourage the dominant nation states in Europe to achieve this task of creating a multinational EU state without further wars between them. After all, US multinational corporations now operated globally, particularly in Europe, and benefited from that same level playing field of a European single-market. It similarly benefited from a creation of such a single market in the Asia-Pacific Region, under the dominance of its new ally Japan, where, again, US multinationals operated.

This was not the same as having its own single-market, because each of these large, new blocs had their own historic development, and so their own existing sets of rules and standards to be harmonised. But, at least, a US corporation operating in the EU, or in Japan, would operate on the same level playing field as every other capital operating there. In so far as the need to expand trade between these blocs, that was the role of the new international bodies set up after WWII, such as GATT/WTO, IMF, World Bank and so on.

The determinant, as I have set out, elsewhere, of where this multinational, industrial capital invested, is the stage of national economic development. Economies, such as Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan, as well as South Korea, were already adequate to support the investment of large-scale industrial capital. Similarly, imperialist capital had little reason to invest in large parts of Africa, because it lacked sufficient development of its infrastructure and so on. The role of Africa and the Middle-East, as with much of Latin America, after WWII, remained, for a long-time, solely as a source for primary products, and export market for manufactured goods. But, as Trotsky noted, the process of combined and uneven development, proceeds at an accelerated pace.

“The law of uneven development of capitalism is older than imperialism. Capitalism is developing very unevenly today in the various countries. But in the nineteenth century this unevenness was greater than in the twentieth. At that time England was lord of the world, while Japan on the other hand was a feudal state closely confined within its own limits. At the time when serfdom was abolished among us, Japan began to adapt itself to capitalist civilization. China was, however, still wrapped in the deepest slumber. And so forth. At that time the unevenness of capitalist development was greater than now. Those unevennesses were as well known to Marx and Engels as they are to us. Imperialism has developed a more “levelling tendency” than pre-imperialist capitalism, for the reason that finance capital is the most elastic form of capital.”

(Speech To The Fifteenth Congress)

In the developed, imperialist economies, this process, in the 1980's, also, in part, driven by the crisis of overproduction of capital in relation to labour, and need, therefore, to seek out new global supplies of exploitable labour-power, led to a relative decline in those economies, and rise in some of those new industrialising economies such as the Asian Tigers. In the old imperialist economies, that same process of slower capital accumulation, and falling interest rates, in the 1980's, and its attendant rise in unemployed labour, led to the void being filled by small capitals – the return of the petty-bourgeoisie.

The petty-bourgeoisie has grown by 50% since the end of the 1970's. That fact played a significant role in the transformation of the main bourgeois parties - Conservative and Labour in Britain, for example – from being conservative social-democratic parties, into being reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalist parties, as well as the rise of new, overtly reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalist parties, such as Reform. Trump represents the same trend in the US. The reactionary, utopian nature of that trend, in respect to Europe, is clear, that it seeks a return to the global competition between small nation states in an era in which that competition has become one of huge, continental sized, multi-national states.  It is the idiocy of Brexit.

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Forward To Part 11

The Hypocrisy of NATO's Illegal War On Iran - Part 9

The state is the executive committee of the ruling-class, but, this ruling-class itself, in relation to any given state, is geographically defined. Prior to the development of the bourgeois-nation state, the ruling-class, a feudal landlord class, derived its revenues, and power, from the ownership of land. Similarly, it mobilised armies of retainers, and the greater the number of subjects it had, the greater number of retainers it could muster.

As noted earlier, it is the development of commodity production, and consequent expansion of the market that creates the dynamic in which these old geographic limits become a fetter. But, the process by which this fetter is burst asunder, is, also, one which sees competition between different fractions of the new (bourgeois) ruling class, to assert their dominance. The most obvious example, previously cited, is the role of the Prussian bourgeoisie in asserting itself, in the forging of the German state.

But, similarly, the extension of this same process, the creation of multinational states, as the expression of the objective necessity of capital, in its imperialist stage, to operate in an ever expanding single-market, with a level playing field, a single set of rules, regulations, taxes, and currency, takes the form of a struggle of existing powerful nation states for dominance within it. Frequently, that struggle breaks out from the realm of economic and political struggle, into military conflict. These conflicts are driven by the objective needs of industrial capital, and the state in each existing geographical unit continues to seek dominance.

However, as, also, noted earlier, the ruling bourgeois-class, today, is not the ruling bourgeois class of industrial capitalists it was in the 19th century. Today's ruling class is not a bourgeois class of owners of industrial capital, but of owners of fictitious-capital (shares, bonds, and their derivatives), and it is from that they derive their huge revenues, in the form, not of profits, but of interest, rent and increasingly, as this process becomes decadent, from realised speculative capital gains. The owners of industrial capital, today, (other than from the dwarfish industrial capitals, owned by the petty-bourgeoisie) are the associated producers, as Marx described them, i.e. the workers and managers within each company. They only need to realise it to assert their rightful control over each company, to demand the extension of the struggle for political freedom and democracy begun in the 18th century, to its completion, in the struggle for economic freedom, and industrial democracy.

Similarly, the ruling bourgeois class of owners of fictitious-capital, is, now, objectively, a global class. It can buy shares, bonds or property anywhere in the world, and does so, just as it can live anywhere in the world, and does so. What it cannot do, is to break the link between its own revenues (interest, rent) from its ownership of this fictitious-capital, and the source of those revenues, which continues to depend on surplus-value being produced by industrial capital, and which takes the form of profit.

It has tried to do so, by continually increasing the proportion of profits going to dividends/interest from 10% of profits in the 1970's, to 70% of profits, today. But, that simply reduced real capital accumulation accordingly, and so reduced the increase in production of surplus value, compounding the problem. So, in response, as rising interest rates, then, led to astronomically inflated asset prices crashing, every few years, starting as far back as 1987, it could only respond by inflating the currency supply to depreciate the standard of prices, and reflate the asset price bubbles. As with the old feudal landlord class, which not only became socially redundant, but also became a decadent parasitic excrescence on society, so too, today with the bourgeois ruling-class owners of fictitious-capital.

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 1

The Enlightenment philosophers appealed to Pure Reason. Only the rational was real.

“A rational state, a rational society, were to be founded; everything running counter to eternal reason was to be remorselessly done away with.” (p 327)

But, what appeared to be rational was only a manifestation of the world view of the rising bourgeoisie. A premature, and inevitably confused, example of that came with the English Civil War. But, the consequence of the, as yet, immature condition of the bourgeoisie meant that, having seized power, it did not know what to do with it, and soon resorted to the Protectorate of Cromwell, as an uncrowned King. It was another 100 years before the bourgeoisie had developed enough to take control of the state, and to install its own constitutional monarch via The Glorious Revolution.

Even then, this was not a total victory for the bourgeoisie. It was a victory for the the commercial bourgeoisie and financial oligarchy, in alliance with the landed aristocracy, based on Mercantilism, and the creation of a colonial empire. As Engels points out, it was only after 1848 that the industrial bourgeoisie asserts its dominance, and, in alliance with the industrial workers, defeats that old alliance of the landed aristocracy, commercial bourgeoisie and financial oligarchy. A similar pattern emerges in France, later, but in a more condensed sequence.

“The state based upon reason completely collapsed. Rousseau’s Social Contract had found its realization in the Reign of Terror, from which the bourgeoisie, after losing faith in its own political capacity, had taken refuge first in the corruption of the Directorate, and, finally, under the wing of the Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest. The society based on reason had fared no better. Instead of dissolving into general prosperity, the antagonism between rich and poor had become sharpened by the elimination of the guild and other privileges, which had bridged over it, and of the charitable institutions of the Church, which had mitigated it.” (p 327-8)

It was these birth pangs of the new bourgeois society that enabled sections of the old feudal ruling class not only to effectively snipe at their successors, but to periodically appeal to the workers and petty-bourgeoisie against them. It was what enabled the likes of Sismondi to expose in stark tones the inevitability of an overproduction of commodities, in turn, plagiarised by Malthus, to justify his calls for the parasites of the landed aristocracy, church and state to have greater revenues, for the benefit of society, to avert such overproduction. The role of the guilds formed the basis of other forms of reactionary socialism, as with William Morris and the Guild Socialists.

“As far as the small capitalists and small peasants were concerned, the “freedom of property” from feudal fetters, which had now become a reality, proved to be the freedom to sell their small property, which was being crushed under the overpowering competition of big capital and big landed property to these very lords, so that freedom of property turned into “freedom from property” for the small capitalists and peasant proprietors.” (p 328)

Back To Part II, Political Economy, X – From The Critical History

Was This TACO Trump Again?

Trump clearly blinked first, leading commentators to see this as yet further confirmation of the TACO Syndrome (Trump Always Chickens Out). As the time arrived for Iran to capitulate to his latest childish tantrum, and it didn't, he and US imperialism, were left with the option of carrying out his promise to end Iranian civilisation in just 4 hours – which could only be done via a widespread nuclear attack on a country that is as big as France, Germany, Spain and Britain combined, and with a population of over 90 million – or else to back down. Given the childish nature of Trump, and the fact that, in the end, he and his friend Netanyahu, are implementing the interests of US imperialism, albeit in their own, moronic fashion, I would not have been surprised had it been the former rather than the latter.

Trump blinked first, but maybe not last. He blinked because, everyone knew that his threat was either empty, or just as fatal for US imperialism, its Zionist and Gulf allies, and for Trump, as it was for the Iranian regime. Already, the propaganda wheels have come off the western imperialist, i.e. NATO wagon. The claims of it being a purely benign, “defensive” alliance, that its global military adventures, thousands of miles away from its own territory, were, merely, it acting as a global policeman, to uphold international law, and a rules based order, were always pompous bullshit, believed only by the most gullible, or the campists who were prepared to tightly close their eyes to reality, as they chose to align with the western “democratic-imperialist” camp, as the means of fulfilling their own moral imperatives, having accepted their own impotence, and long since abandoned the working-class, as the revolutionary agent of historical change.

The façade of international law, of the so called rules based order has been stripped away, as has the veneer of bourgeois-democracy itself, most notably in the US and UK, where governments and the state, responded to growing protest at the genocide being committed against Palestinians by the Zionist state and armed, funded and politically defended by western imperialism, with the most brutal repression, on campuses across the US, and in Britain by the ridiculous labelling of Palestine Action as a “terrorist organisation”, leading to thousands of police hours being taken up to arrest peaceful grannies, sitting in protest. That began not with Trump, but under Biden, and was given the full-throated support of Starmer and his government. It has cratered support in the electorate for Trump, but not yet clearly manifested itself as a support for those to the Left of the Democrats. It has destroyed the Labour Party, but again, has created only support for the Greens, who in the latest polls, now have a clear lead over all the other parties.

NATO and its media propaganda machine have spent the last 4 years spelling out the idea that Putin's invasion of Eastern Ukraine was “illegal”, because they shot first. The facile nature of such claims was made clear by Lenin and others more than a century ago, when they were made by the imperialists in relation to Germany. Lenin noted,

“Imperialism camouflages its own peculiar aims – seizure of colonies, markets, sources of raw material, spheres of influence – with such ideas as “safeguarding peace against the aggressors,” “defence of the fatherland,” “defence of democracy,” etc. These ideas are false through and through. It is the duty of every socialist not to support them but, on the contrary, to unmask them before the people. “The question of which group delivered the first military blow or first declared war,” wrote Lenin in March 1915, “has no importance whatever in determining the tactics of socialists. Phrases about the defence of the fatherland, repelling invasion by the enemy, conducting a defensive war, etc., are on both sides a complete deception of the people.” “For decades,” explained Lenin, “three bandits (the bourgeoisie and governments of England, Russia, and France) armed themselves to despoil Germany. Is it surprising that the two bandits (Germany and Austria-Hungary) launched an attack before the three bandits succeeded in obtaining the new knives they had ordered?””

(Trotsky – Lenin On Imperialism)

That was not seen by Lenin and Trotsky as a reason to defend, let alone support, the actions of German imperialism, but merely to point out the hypocritical and lying nature of the claims by Britain and France. There was no need to side with either of these two camps, but, instead to side with the independent camp of the global working-class, whose position should be to turn the guns on their own respective ruling-class, to turn the world war of nation against nation, into a global class war of proletariat against bourgeoisie, as Marx had called for in “Wage-Labour and Capital”.

Russia had openly said that if NATO sought to expand into Ukraine, it would be seen as an aggressive move, preparatory to war, back in 2007, at the time that Saakashvilli, who sought to ingratiate himself with NATO and the EU, by wrapping himself in those flags at every press event, and by his attacks on ethnic Russians in South Ossetia, gave Putin the reason to annex South Ossetia. The idea of a pre-emptive invasion of Ukraine by Russia has been repeatedly dismissed as “illegal” by NATO imperialism and its apologists.

But that same justification has been used by Trump and Netanyahu for their bombing of Iran, and of Lebanon, Syria etc. What really upsets western imperialism/NATO is that the moronic nature of Trump, and of Netanyahu, exposes all of the carefully crafted veneer to their global military strategy. Trump/Netanyahu do not bother with all the old claims about upholding “international law”, or a “rules based system”, or “liberal intervention” to prevent atrocities. Why would they? They are not “liberals”, i.e. “neo-liberals/conservative social-democrats”, of the type that constructed the global order, after WWII, for the benefit of large-scale, multinational capital. They are petty-bourgeois nationalists, proponents of a system that died even by the end of the 19th century.

Trump makes clear that what he wants is simply a return to colonialism, which itself died along with the economic system that created it – mercantilism. The return of those ideas, is simply a reflection in the mind of the fact that, as western industrial capitalism has relatively declined, over the last 40 years, a decadent class of billionaire owners of fictitious-capital has grown alongside a 50% growth of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie. Trump is emblematic of it.

He openly says he “wants the oil”, he wants to “make a fortune” from robbing it from the people of Venezuela, or Iran. He has fantasies about becoming a new George III, who the Americans overthrew as their King, in the American Revolution, 250 years ago. George III, of course, had his own mental health issues, as, clearly does Trump. Trump's statements about seizing Greenland/Iceland and so on both reflect his moronic nature, but, also, expose the underlying conflict between US imperialism, and its NATO subordinates within EU imperialism. Its partly why those EU subordinates in NATO have continued to de facto support Trump's war against Iran, whilst denying they are doing so.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a comment on James O'Brien's LBC YouTube video, which had asked whether the Iran War was just a distraction, used by Trump, from the Epstein files – itself a symptom of that decadence of the billionaire class that has settled on the surface of the ruling-class like scum. O'Brien at the time asked the question whether, in that case, Trump would look for an off-ramp. I pointed out, in my comment that whatever Trump's personal motivation, the fact remains that US imperialism locked in a global imperialist struggle with a rising Eurasian imperialism, whose influence is growing in the Middle-East, embarked on the Abraham Accords, so as to promote the Zionist state, and ensure that it, along with US other allies in the region, Egypt, the Gulf monarchies etc., to create a politico-economic bloc that is friendly to the US-EU, and able, thereby to resist the advances of China.

The genocide against the Palestinians is fundamental to that plan, but, so too is the neutering of Iran, which acts as the proxy for China-Russia, just as the Zionist state does for NATO. Consequently, whether Trump again chickened out again or not, last night, the reality is that the task of US imperialism and of Zionism is not done. The Iranian regime may have made a big mistake in agreeing a ceasefire and opening the Straits of Hormuz, because as seen last year, and as the Iranian people seem to understand, once the oil has flowed again, and the financial markets have made trillions for the billionaire class, in a relief rally, US imperialism and its Zionist ally will be back to finish the job.