Even the miserable, western bourgeois media have been led to discuss the fact that US imperialism, and, thereby, NATO, which is its military instrument, its global body of armed men, which has sought to exercise a monopoly of violence, has engaged in an illegal war against Iran.
In reality, its not the fact that its war against Iran is “illegal”, that concerns dominant sections of the ruling-class, whose concerns are being voiced by sections of the media, but that, like many other aspects of the actions of the Trump regime, they are unthought out, haphazard, and counter-productive. Trump's regime is a mafia regime, focused on the personal enrichment of the Trumpf gang.
Its not that western imperialism is horrified at the fact that US imperialism has engaged in an illegal war against Iran, and is dragging the rest of NATO into it, because NATO has repeatedly engaged in illegal wars, infringing “international law”, whatever that is supposed to be. International law, like national law, is simply a codification of the objective rules required to ensure the interests of the ruling-class. The state acts as the “executive committee” of that ruling-class, establishing a system of laws and rules that advance and defend the interests of that class, even at the expense of individual members of it.
It establishes a “level playing field”, but, of necessity, that level playing field protects the interests of those best able to take advantage of it. As Engels put it,
“Thus the truck system was suppressed, the Ten Hours’ Bill was enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced — much against the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured brother. Moreover, the larger the concern, and with it the number of hands, the greater the loss and inconvenience caused by every conflict between master and men; and thus a new spirit came over the masters, especially the large ones, which taught them to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of Trades’ Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes — at opportune times — a powerful means to serve their own ends. The largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class, were now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. And for a very good reason. The fact is that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all importance and had become actual nuisances; and to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites. Thus the development of production on the basis of the capitalistic system has of itself sufficed — at least in the leading industries, for in the more unimportant branches this is far from being the case — to do away with all those minor grievances which aggravated the workman’s fate during its earlier stages.”
(Preface to the English Edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England)
A level playing field, establishing laws of conduct, in place of a free for all, chaos and arbitrariness, including, therefore, rules, regulation, minimum standards, and even planning, which the largest capitals had, already, had to adopt for their own effective operation, was wholly in the interests of those large capitals, and acted to disadvantage the smaller less efficient capitals, let alone the petty-bourgeois and peasant producers. Was that a “bad” thing, as the likes of the petty-bourgeois socialists such as Sismondi or Proudhon, argued, or as today's “anti-capitalists” argue? Morally, if you look at the immediate effect on that large mass of those small producers, certainly, a case could be made for saying that it was “bad”, but, as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky set out, this petty-bourgeois moralism ends up being not just utopian, but is also reactionary.
Utopian, because the very same material conditions, and social and historical laws that led to the competition of independent, small commodity producers, becoming increasingly differentiated into larger and smaller producers – what in other contexts is seen as a process of self-organisation, in other words, it is not consciously organised, but arises spontaneously behind their backs, as a result of these unconscious processes and historical laws – are also the same laws that lead to the larger commodity producers becoming capitalist producers, and, then, those capitalist producers being divided into the large, dominant capitalist producers, and the small capitalist producers and petty-bourgeoisie, subordinated to, and ultimately dependent upon the large capitals. As Lenin put it, quoting Hilferding approvingly,
““It is not the business of the proletariat,” writes Hilferding “to contrast the more progressive capitalist policy with that of the now bygone era of free trade and of hostility towards the state. The reply of the proletariat to the economic policy of finance capital, to imperialism, cannot be free trade, but socialism. The aim of proletarian policy cannot today be the ideal of restoring free competition—which has now become a reactionary ideal—but the complete elimination of competition by the abolition of capitalism.””
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