Review of Predictions For 2025
Prediction 1 – The Theatre of War Moves To Syria
As I wrote in the addenda to this prediction, it was already confirmed by the time it was posted. The fall of the rotten Assad regime brought in an even more rotten and reactionary Islamist regime, as well as the inevitable chaos and communal conflict, as the country disintegrates, much as seen previously in Libya, and elsewhere. All to clearly, events appear to be following a well worn path, described previously in relation to the analysis of the Balkan Wars at the start of the 20th century, set out by Trotsky, and which led up to World War I. The rapidity of that fall probably took the Zionist state and US/NATO imperialism by surprise too, and that has led to a certain amount of sitting on their laurels during the last year.
The Zionist state quickly moved to colonise more land in Syria, as is its nature as a colonialist/imperialist state. The rapidity of the fall gave a certain amount of stability to the Islamist regime that took over in Damascus. Western imperialism, and its media mouthpieces which had previously noted the Islamist nature of the jihadists, quickly absolved it, much as all of the coverage of the corrupt and illiberal nature of Zelensky and his regime, prior to 2021, was quickly ditched when they sought to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.
But, simply denying and attempting to hide the reality does not change it. The inevitable communalist and sectarian chaos is still unfolding in Syria. However much western imperialism tries to put lipstick on the reactionary, Islamist pig in Damascus, it does not change its nature, nor the contradictions that involves. Those contradictions have continually broken out inside Syria, as competing powers, using local communalist rivalries, jostle for influence. As with the aftermath of the Iraq War, it has also opened up space for a revival of ISIS in Syria, and it also has its own reactionary agenda. US imperialism, even in the last few weeks has seen its forces attacked by ISIS, giving it the pretext for more open intervention.
The front lines in the region have clearly shifted, just as, formerly, they shifted in Europe with the aggressive military expansion of US/NATO imperialism Eastwards, right up to Russia's borders, which inevitably provoked the military response into Ukraine by Russian imperialism, backed by its own imperialist bloc. Empires based on territorial expansion, created by military power, always become weaker, as they expand further. Its one reason that colonialism was superseded by modern imperialism, which rests, fundamentally, not on force, but on the power of industrial capital to conquer, by purely economic means, global markets, and, thereby, to exploit the global working-class, whilst offering it the prospect of rising living standards, security and the illusion of bourgeois-democracy/political freedom.
So long as US/NATO imperialism faced no real global economic competitors, the former dynamics gave it free rein, hence the rapid development of globalisation from the late 80's, into the 2010's. The petty-bourgeois moralism of much of the Left, meant it failed to analyse that expansion in Marxist terms, and, instead, simply presented it as being a continuation of the old forms of colonial imperialism that existed up to the 20th century, resting upon the use of military force. Whilst, of course, the use of overwhelming military might by US imperialism, in Vietnam, for example, gave credence to such a view, and certainly, in the 1960's, and early 1970's, facilitated a rapid growth of that petty-bourgeois Left, as it swam in the voluminous current of “anti-War”/Anti-Imperialist” protest, the reality was that force played only a subsidiary role in the expansion of imperialism, and globalisation in the post-war period. Indeed, as in Vietnam, the use of military force, more frequently proved itself to be inadequate, and even counter-productive. Imperialism has expanded rapidly in Vietnam, after the defeat of the US military.
The expansion of imperialism, of the dominance of monopoly capital, as Marx and Engels first described, and as Lenin later analysed, is a massively progressive development. Globalisation, the creation of an inextricably connected world economy, which that imperialism created in the 1980's and after, is, also, a massively progressive development. It is the fundamental basis, the creation of the material conditions required for Socialism. As Lenin put it,
““. . . State-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs”.”
But, just as the reactionary, petty bourgeois moralism that has dominated much of the Left after WWII, saw monopoly capitalism as something to be opposed rather than welcomed, on a national basis, so too, it opposed globalisation. The reality of imperialism was that it expanded rapidly, much as industrial capitalism itself had done on a national basis, precisely because it was able to provide billions of labourers with higher living standards, even as it exploited them more intensively. It rescued billions of them from the idiocy of rural life.
Marx and Engels pointed out that large-scale, industrial capital, inevitably takes the form of socialised capital, which is the collective property of the associated producers, whether that is in the form of a cooperative or a joint stock company. It is, they note, the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism. The struggle, by the end of the 19th century, even, was, therefore, not to engage in some moralistic, Sismondian opposition to the development of this monopoly capitalism, but to bring about the required extension of the democratic struggle from the political sphere to the industrial sphere, to engage with “the property question”, and to ensure that just as workers achieved political rights, so, now, they obtained their rightful democratic control, in each enterprise, over their collective property.
It is why they opposed the petty-bourgeois, moralism of Sismondi who sought to hold back the rapid development of industrial capitalism, and, later, opposed the petty-bourgeois, moralism of Proudhon and his followers, who sought to oppose the economic struggles of the workers in the trades unions, because they saw it as antagonistic to the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie, whose interests they represented, with their reactionary, utopian views of a world of small commodity producers, a view also adopted by the Narodniks in Russia, and which also forms the basis of the Third Worldists/Maoists in the post WWII period. But, Marx and Engels, and later Lenin, whilst recognising the role that economic/industrial struggle plays in organising the workers as a class, also opposed the limitations on the further development of the class that Economism, trades union consciousness, also, involved. It is most clearly set out in “Value, Price and Profit”.
Huge amounts of political energy was wasted by the petty-bourgeois Left, in the last 70 years, opposing the expansion of monopoly-capitalism/imperialism, both within the national economies, and across the globe. Millions of former peasants and small commodity producers, however, flocked to the towns and cities in order to be exploited by global multinational corporations, and did so, not because they were forced, but because they saw the prospect of a much better standard of living. When the moralistic Left opposed colonialism, they were, in fact, pushing at an open door, and when, the old colonial empires collapsed, in the post-war period, they simply sought to continue as though the world had not really changed, understandably, as such a view implied a continuation of those mass mobilisations in which they had grown rapidly in the 50's, and 60's.
The progressive mobilisations, against colonialism and militarism, became reactionary mobilisations against monopoly-capitalism/imperialism, and its corollary of globalisation, which has raised productivity to unprecedented levels. The consequence is easily seen when the reactionary mobilisation against it, resulted in Brexit, for example. It has resulted in terrible economic consequences for the British economy, and for the living standards of British workers. A similar process is occurring, now, with the impact of Trump's Tariffs, in the US, which act as an additional drain on US profits. Similarly, the decision of EU leaders to boycott Russian energy has drained surplus value from European capital, and slowed its economy further, which will intensify as the EU pumps even more billions of Euros into funding the means of destruction to continue fighting the war against Russia.
Those that continued to frame their world view on the basis that the main enemy of US imperialism was China, failed, also, to recognise that, economically, it is the EU that continues to pose the biggest threat to US capital. Trump has simply been more open about it, just as he has also been more open in renaming the US Department of Defence to what it has always been, the Department of War. The period of US hegemony has ended, and consequently, the period in which it could expand its capital simply on the basis of the dominance of its capital, has also ended.
In the 1950's, for a short period, the central planning system in the USSR, faced with the need for a rapid industrialisation of its economy, outperformed its imperialist rivals. But, it never achieved the same performance as those rivals, when it came to the production of consumer goods, and the general living standards of its workers. So, although Stalinism was able to compete with US imperialism when it came to the production of capital goods, a lot of which, also, went into he production of military production, and competed with it, in terms of the space race, as well as the development of a science and technology, it never presented a challenge to US imperialism economically.
The idea that imperialism had to create welfare systems, and raise living standards of workers to prevent them being attracted to the offerings of the East is ludicrous. The border guards shooting people trying to escape were all on the Eastern side. The EU subordinated itself to US imperialism, not because it was economically challenged by Russia/COMECON, but, because, particularly in its devastated condition, it felt militarily challenged by Russia. Those conditions have gone.
The idea that Europe is militarily challenged, today, by Russia is hilarious. For four years, it has been bogged down in a war, just in Eastern Ukraine. True US/NATO imperialism has backed Ukraine massively to conduct its proxy war against Russia/China, including the use of its own special forces inside Ukraine, but China has likewise backed Russia, as it recognises that a defeat for Russia, would simply mean the war coming even closer to its own border, as US/NATO imperialism seeks to encircle it. A Russian military unable to quickly win in Eastern Ukraine, is not in any position to be considering any of the ludicrous schemes for an invasion of Europe that the western military-industrial complex propagandists are proposing, as a means of stirring up war fever, and justification for even more of workers taxes to be spent on war, rather than rebuilding shattered public services and infrastructure created by nearly two decades of austerity to pay for the bailing out of financial and property speculators.
We are told that Russia has been testing the West's borders with drones flying over various locations, and even Russian fighter jets. Maybe they have, or maybe they have not. That Lavrov invited European states to shoot down any Russian fighters actually over their territory, indicates where the balance of probability lies. The media continually refer to Russian jets or Russian ships near to British territorial waters, but near to is not inside. Given the expansion of NATO forces up to the Russian borders, it is clear what the context is.
US imperialism cannot simply expand on the basis of the dominance of its industrial capital any longer. The dialectic of that expansion is playing out. It is, now, the rising power of Chinese industrial capital that is asserting its dominance. So, US imperialism is led to resort increasingly to a defence of its global positions by military might.
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