The global working-class, today, is several times larger than it was ahead of the First World War. It is also economically and socially stronger than it was in 1914. The working-class is now the largest class on the planet, the vast majority of proletarians are literate, and have at least a minimum level of health and education. Many, in the developed economies, own property, including fictitious capital, though the huge expansion of private debt is designed to strip it from them.
Yet, the working-class is weaker politically today than it was in 1914, and it is that weakness which makes the international labour movement impotent in situations like Syria and Ukraine, as it was previously in the Balkans, in the 1990's, in Iraq, Libya, and indeed in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and so on.
The result has been the same, essentially, in each case. It is, contrary to the hopes of the liberal interventionists, including those who claim to be Marxists, that once the Bonapartist regimes, which arose because of significant cross-cutting cleavages, within these respective societies, are overthrown, those very same cleavages and contradictions explode. The result can never be some kind of peaceful liberal democracy, let alone social democracy, because no single social class is strong enough to exert political power in its own name. Instead, what arises is a continual war of contending factions of armed groups, at best until one is able to assert dominance, a la the Taliban in Afghanistan, or else until society collapses into being a failed gangster state as with Somalia.


The real basis of WWI was not a need to carve up the globe, but a drive to establish a single European state, in which this big industrial capital could operate, just as Prussia had brought that about in Germany. As Trotsky pointed,
“Let us for a moment grant that German militarism succeeds in actually carrying out the compulsory half-union of Europe, just as Prussian militarism once achieved the half-union of Germany, what would then be the central slogan of the European proletariat?
Would it be the dissolution of the forced European coalition and the return of all peoples under the roof of isolated national states? Or the restoration of “autonomous” tariffs, “national” currencies, “national” social legislation, and so forth? Certainly not.
Would it be the dissolution of the forced European coalition and the return of all peoples under the roof of isolated national states? Or the restoration of “autonomous” tariffs, “national” currencies, “national” social legislation, and so forth? Certainly not.

Precisely in case of a stalemate in the [First World] War, [it could be argued from a bourgeois point of view], the indispensability of an economic and military agreement among the European great powers would come to the fore against weak and backward peoples, but above all, of course, against their own working masses. [This] would mean the establishment of an imperialist trust of European States, a predatory share-holding association. And this perspective is on occasion adduced unjustifiably as proof of the “danger” of the slogan of the United States of Europe, whereas in reality this is the most graphic proof of its realistic and revolutionary significance. If the capitalist states of Europe succeeded in merging into an imperialist trust, this would be a step forward as compared with the existing situation, for it would first of all create a unified, all-European material base for the working class movement.
The proletariat would in this case have to fight not for the return to “autonomous” national states, but for the conversion of the imperialist state trust into a European Republican Federation…”
In fact, it would have achieved, by similar means, only what the US Civil War had achieved 50 years earlier, and the material forces underlying it were exactly the same.
Forward To Part 2
Forward To Part 2
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