Joe Biden is President of the most powerful imperialist state on the planet by far. Yet, he has just returned from bowing the knee before some of the worst butchers in the Middle East, including those of Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The butchery of the Zionist state, against Palestinians, the US has always legitimised, but, only months ago, when Biden was seeking election, he had been led to have to speak out against the Saudi's gruesome kidnap, torture and dismembering of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The US, and US President's, clearly do not have to demean themselves in front of these barbarians, nor is it a case of a tail wagging the dog. US imperialism simply chooses to act this way, because it is easier and cheaper to do so, in order to enlist the support of butchers and barbarians as its allies. It rather exposes as extremely facile the arguments of social-imperialists like the AWL, or Paul Mason, that this “democratic imperialism” is somehow, a lesser-evil, more benign form of imperialism than that of states like Russia or China, and still more ludicrous the idea that this “democratic imperialism”, as the enemy of our enemies, such as Putin or Xi, is somehow our friend!
Biden, and his imperialist allies within NATO, have denounced the actions of Putin in Ukraine. Those denunciations might not ring so hollow were it not for the fact that US and NATO imperialism has carried out all of the same actions, and more, over the last 70 years, that Russia is charged with now. There is no country, in no continent on the globe, that US imperialism has not seen itself having the right to invade, or intervene in, to pursue its own goals. There is no butcher or autocrat they have not been prepared to support to achieve those goals. Their mantra was always, “He may be a bastard, but, at least, he's our bastard”. Nor is their any element of human rights, of democracy, or standard of decency that they have not been prepared to breach to that end. As even one of the Saudi Royals put it, the US can hardly give lectures on morality, following its butchery in Iraq and Afghanistan, its torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and so on. And, now, the US poodle, Britain, is again charged with using SAS death squads in Afghanistan to murder unarmed people.
But, that is just the latest episode in the long history of butchery by British imperialism, whose charnel house preceded that of US imperialism by several centuries. Its symbol is the blood soaked butcher's apron of red, white and blue that Starmer, as much as the Tory reactionaries, seek to wrap themselves in, and which fantasists like Paul Mason believe can be laundered, and waved as an emblem of peace, harmony and democracy!
Putin and Xi are no friends of workers. Quite the contrary, and Putin's actions in invading Ukraine have simply given more grist to the imperialist mill, solidified reactionary nationalist support in Ukraine around its own corrupt and brutal ruling class, as well as within surrounding states, as witnessed by the further extension of NATO, just as, previously, the actions of NATO, in continuing its expansion and arms build up around Russia's borders, and its openly stated aims for the New American Century, could have no other effect than to provoke a nationalistic response from within Russia and China. But, just because Putin and Xi are no friends of workers, it does not mean that Biden and NATO are either. The fact that they form two extremely heavily armed opposing camps, does not mean that workers have to choose one of them to attach themselves to. Our mantra is that, for workers, the main enemy is at home, and neither of these camps of butchers are our friends. Instead, we choose the independent, third camp of the proletariat, as Lenin and Trotsky argued prior to WWI.
The irony of Biden's position is that, in pursuing economic war against Russia, which, by encouraging EU countries to boycott Russian oil and gas, pushed up global oil and gas prices to extreme levels, has contributed to the rampant inflation in the US that was already ballooning, due to the vast oceans of liquidity pumped into the economy by the Federal Reserve, at a time when supply had been curtailed by idiotic lockdowns, and when liquidity was used to finance fiscal transfers to consumers, as income replacements, enabling them to increase monetary demand for goods and services that lockdowns had prevented from being provided! That runaway inflation, in the US, along with the other hapless and hopeless aspects of Biden's time in office, looks set to see the Democrats hammered in the midterm elections in the Autumn. His bending the knee to the feudal butchers of Saudi Arabia, is his desperate attempt to provide a quick fix for that, by trying to get them to pump more cheap oil, so as to reduce global energy prices, and try to save his own electoral skin.
Those same policies of economic war against Russia, are crippling social-democracy in Europe too. As still the largest imperialist competitor to it, the US is not too unhappy to see the EU bear that burden, but the consequence, in conditions where the EU faces the same problems of inflation, from the same causes of massive excess liquidity pumped into the system, first to inflate asset prices, and then to pay for the idiocy of lockdowns, is that it is also being destabilised, as an increasing strike wave across the continent mobilises, as workers refuse to bear the cost of that inflation, in the way they have been forced to bear the cost of bank bail-outs and so on in past years. If Germany were asked to cut off its gas supplies, the effect will be to break the European social-democracy that is the basis of the power of the global ruling class, in Europe.
But, the same applies in the US, and in Japan and elsewhere. The liberal bourgeoisie, which forms the global ruling class, has repeatedly failed to deal with the resurgence of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie. On the contrary, since the 1980's, the policies pursued by the ruling class, as a degenerate bunch of coupon clippers, happy to draw interest and dividends, and more recently to live off inflated capital gains, has created conditions in which that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie has grown significantly. Its expanded social base and influence enabled it to take over conservative parties like the Tories, and the Republicans, and to create or expand other petty-bourgeois nationalist parties like the FN in France. These forces that should have been consigned to the dustbin of history, are resurgent.
In the US, Trump may well be indicted before the next Presidential elections, but Trumpists are likely to win a majority of seats in Congress this Autumn, and, come the next Presidential elections, the doddery Biden is not likely even to stand, and whoever the Democrats choose will have to live with the responsibility for Biden's failures, much as the French Socialist Party had to do after the Presidency of Hollande. This time, instead of the oafish Trump as their opponent, they may be faced with a representative of that petty-bourgeois reaction who is far more serious a threat.
Workers cannot rely on the liberal bourgeoisie as any kind of force to deal with that petty-bourgeois reaction, any more than we can rely on "democratic imperialism" as an ally against the likes of Putin and Xi. Their first response is to reach for their weapon of choice, which is the power of their state, as they have done in the US, in confronting those Trumpists that mobilised on January 6th, in their farcical coup attempt. But such methods, by the state, are not those that workers would use. They will themselves be authoritarian and Bonapartist, impacting upon workers freedoms and rights at least as much as those of the petty-bourgeoisie. They have had two years practice for that with lockdowns, even now telling workers to stay locked up in doors, to avoid enjoying a bit of decent weather. It has a high degree of confidence in being able to manipulate a populace it sees as mindless drones.
In conditions where workers are themselves mobilised into industrial action to protect their living standards, as inflation soars, that strong state will increasingly turn its attention also to trying to constrain workers resistance. The forces of social-democracy will also play a counter-revolutionary role in that process, and already are, seeking to limit workers demands and objectives, calling on them to moderate pay claims, and so on, to accept cuts in their living standards, as well as trying to divert their activity into the passive channels of bourgeois parliamentary elections, thereby, demobilising their own direct action.
But, in fact, it is in precisely this action, itself made possible by the changed material conditions of expanding economic activity, growing employment and demand for labour, etc., that provides the best hope of defeating the forces of petty-bourgeois reaction. It is the working-class itself, organised within the labour movement, creating and renewing its own organisations and political leadership, in Europe, now, especially, on an international basis, that creates the conditions for undermining and defeating the ideas of reactionary nationalism, whether those of Brexit, or those of social patriotism as fermented in relation to Ukraine.
As against the imperialist butchers of all camps, and against the attempts of the social-pacifists, social-patriots and social imperialists, to reduce workers to mere cheerleaders of one camp or another, to channel our growing resistance into safe bourgeois-democratic channels, the proletariat as itself a global class, must again assert its core principles.
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