The line that it was okay to criticise the actions of Israeli governments was always a lie, as every such criticism led to the same claims of them really being a cover for anti-Semitism, but if its not possible to criticise the actions of the Zionist state, a Bonapartist state, headed by Netanyahu, but governed by its Zionist ideology, as it visibly and undeniably commits genocide in Gaza and, increasingly the West Bank, when would such criticism be valid, and not characterised as “anti-Semitic”?!
The contradictions have fully matured, and erupt violently, as appearance and reality collide. It has been erupting on the streets of the world's major cities, every weekend for months, and, now, it is erupting on college campuses in the US, Australia and elsewhere, reminiscent of the student protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960's. For regular readers of this blog, that should come as no surprise, as it is what has been analysed for years, on the basis that we are in an equivalent phase of the long wave cycle as that of the early 1960's.
Bourgeois-democracy is a sham, and a fraud. It was most easily seen to be so, in the early 19th century, when it took the form of liberal-democracy that only gave the vote to the owners of property. That led to an inevitable demand for a widening of the franchise by workers, and other sections of the masses, the petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry. The means of engaging in the struggle for the extension of those bourgeois-democratic rights, by workers, however, were inevitably proletarian, not bourgeois.
The Chartists, in Britain, for example, pursued their aims by the organisation of General Strikes, and mass mobilisations, and, for some, the mobilisation of independent, proletarian, armed struggle. It was precisely those methods that Marx and Engels advocated, as they warned the workers against being suckered in by the claims of their erstwhile allies amongst the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie. It was the same approach taken by the Bolsheviks, in 1905 and 1917, when, in pursuit of the demand for a bourgeois-democratic, republic and convening of a Constituent Assembly, they argued for the creation of soviets/workers' councils, as independent organs of workers self-government.
But, capitalism, as it entered its imperialist stage, towards the end of the 19th century, dominated by large-scale, socialised, industrial capital, was not only able to accommodate the demands of workers for higher real wages, as productivity rose sharply, but it actively encouraged it. It needed ever larger markets, and workers formed the largest section of society. Moreover, these higher real wages helped to reinforce the idea, promoted by social-democracy, that labour and capital had the same common interests that could be advanced, more or less harmoniously, given the occasional falling out, and need for diplomacy and compromise, mediated by a growing, social-democratic, professional middle-class, whose job was to manage such relations, on behalf of the good of “society”.
Liberal bourgeois democracy, had become a fetter on the free and rational development of bourgeois-democracy, just as the monopoly of private capital had become a fetter on the rational development of capital itself. The latter fetter was “burst asunder”, as Marx puts it, in Capital I, by the development of socialised capital in the form of the cooperatives, and more extensively in the form of the joint stock companies/corporations. Alongside this development, liberal democracy gave way to social-democracy, based upon the delusion of universal suffrage, and the idea that power resides in elected parliaments, rather than in the hands of the permanent state, its civil service, bodies of armed men, judiciary, and its ideological apparatus operating through the schools and universities, the media, and religious and cultural organisations.
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