The last Innovation Cycle, which brought the microchip revolution, peaked in 1985. It acted to raise productivity, create a relative surplus population, release capital, and massively raise the rate of profit over the next 20 years. As Marx describes in Theories of Surplus Value, such periods are marked by net output rising faster than gross output. But, eventually, as all of the old fixed capital has been replaced by the new machines/technology, that basis of raising productivity dissipates. In the period of intensive accumulation, one new machine replaces two or three older machines, as these older machines wear out. The new machine also requires only one operator, often less skilled, than the two or three operators of the old machines, who are now also replaced. But, now, in the period of extensive accumulation, to increase output, requires not the replacement of existing machines/technology and workers, but the addition of more machines/technology and workers. Productivity growth slows, the relative surplus population stops growing, net output no longer grows faster than gross output. Both net output and gross output rise at a faster pace than in the earlier period, but, now, that is because gross output itself grows faster, capital accumulation expands at a faster pace.
As I have described before, this could be seen clearly, in the late 1990's, and into the early 2000's. The catastrophists, of course, could not accept the idea that capitalism/imperialism could ever be in a condition other than impending crisis, as they anticipated “the next recession”, induced by a continually falling rate of profit. I also, detailed why they were wrong, despite the global financial crisis of 2008, which actually disproved their theories. The 2008 global financial crisis, rather like that of 1847, was a consequence of rising interest rates causing asset prices to drop sharply, and the reason interest rates rise, in such a period, as Marx sets out in Capital III, is because the system has entered a period of more rapid growth, and capital accumulation. It is that, which explains the actions of the global ruling-class, since 2008. It also, explains the real basis of NATO's illegal war on Iran.
The global ruling-class, as owners of fictitious-capital, over the last 40 years, became addicted to speculative capital gains. Those capital gains were simply the other side of the coin to falling interest rates/yields. The revenue produced by the ownership of loanable money-capital is interest, just as the revenue produced by the ownership of land is rent, and the revenue produced by the ownership of industrial capital is profit. Dividends are just the name given to the interest paid on the money-capital loaned in the form of share purchase. As set out earlier, as interest rates fell in a secular downward trend after 1982, the ruling-class saw, on the one-hand, its paper wealth, in the form of financial and property assets, expand astronomically, as huge asset price bubbles were inflated. On the other hand, it saw the yields on those assets drop significantly, as the other side of those higher asset prices.
That did not require the actual revenue to fall, whether it was rent or interest/dividends. If you get £100 of interest/dividends on a bond/share that costs you £1,000 to buy that is a yield of 10%. But, the same £100, if the price of the bond/share rises to £2,000 is a yield of only 5%. The same thing with rent. If you own land/property that produces £10,000 of rent a year, it is a yield of 10% if the property cost £100,000 to buy, but only 5% if the price of the property rises to £200,000. Considering Marx's point referred to earlier, if a disproportionate amount of money goes into the ownership of loanable money-capital (i.e. into the purchase ownership of shares, bonds etc.) then this money-capital is devalued, and manifest in a corresponding rise in the price of those assets, and fall in yields/interest rates.
If you are part of the ruling-class, and your ownership of those financial and property assets runs into billions of Dollars, the fact that yields drop to insignificant levels does not matter. Even a yield of 1% on $100 billion is $1 billion of revenue per year. But, if you are a pensioner from the working or middle-class, a pension pot of $250,000 would, on the same basis, provide you only with an annual revenue of $2,500, and so inadequate to live on. But, the other side of those low yields, was the rise in asset prices. If you could cash in a part of the value of the asset, or borrow against it, that appeared to be as good as getting a yield from it, and, in the case of property, with less effort. It appeared there was no need, even to have the trouble of having tenants in properties, if year after year, the property rose in price by 10%, giving a notional £10,000 on a £100,000 property. Nor did it seem to matter if the money used to buy shares was used by companies to invest in real capital accumulation. Indeed, the latter itself became a hazard to those rising asset prices.
The introduction of national laws and rules, by the capitalist ruling-class, which created a “level playing field”, like all bourgeois right, is, as Marx describes it inThe Critique of The Gotha Programme, a right not to equality, but inequality.
“But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.”
Marx is not even talking about the conditions existing under commodity production, or capitalist production, here, but about the conditions that would exist under socialism, in its initial phases. It is the critique of the fundamental flaw in the concept of meritocracy, which, inevitably entrenches the existing natural abilities of some as against others. Under capitalism, there is no material basis for society seeking to go beyond this “equality of right”, which inevitably means an inequality of outcomes, given the actual “inequality of being”. It is the fundamental flaw of welfarism, which purveys the idea that such “equality of outcome”, or, at least, a mollification of inequality can be achieved, by a complex, inefficient, bureaucratic and costly system of taxes and benefits, itself requiring huge numbers of people involved in its administration, who could have been more usefully employed.
And, this is true in terms of imperialism too. The developed, capitalist economies, with their existing masses of fixed capital, let alone their more advanced technology, produce commodities whose individual value is much lower than that of the same commodities produced by less advanced capitalist countries, that have less fixed capital, and less advanced technology. But, in the world market, as in every market, commodities are sold not at their individual value, but at their market value (if we ignore the question of prices of production), as Marx sets out in Capital I and III. The large, monopoly-capitalist (imperialist) producers, can always sell their commodities at lower prices, and so undercut their smaller competitors.
The large, monopoly-capitalist (imperialist) producers, thereby, obtain surplus profits (rents), even though they often sell their commodities at prices slightly below that of their smaller competitors, and despite the fact that they can, as Engels described above, and as Marx set out in Capital I, pay their workers much higher wages, and provide them with better conditions. Marx noted that European textile workers, were paid wages only half that of English textile workers, and yet English textile production persistently undercut the European producers, and provided higher profits for English producers.
Demanding that less developed economies abide by the same rules and regulations and standards as the advanced capitalist economies, within the confines of a continuation of global capitalism, is as utopian as the welfarist demands for equal outcomes, for unequal individuals. It is simply a manifestation of that petty-bourgeois, social-democratic, managerialist ideology that the interests of capital and labour are the same, and require only a negotiation as to the process of distribution. It imposes the false concept of the idea of “the people”, as though the entire historical process of the differentiation of that “people”, into “bourgeois” and “proletarians”, that took place at an accelerating pace, from the 15th century onwards, had never occurred.
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.
The Zionist state in Israel has bombed Qatar. It is just the latest expansion of its war of annexation of the region, backed by US imperialism, designed to substantially increase the geographic size of Israel, so as to create a more viable state, but also, to be able to dominate a regional politico-economic bloc, as set out in the Abraham Accords. The idea that the US/Trump did not know it was going to undertake this attack is ridiculous.
As other commentators have noted, the underlying message of Trump's statement after the attack, in which he set out his agreement with the idea of taking out Hamas' leadership – even though they were in Doha discussing his supposed peace proposals – but that he was unhappy about the location of the attack, is that, had it been successful, he would have been boasting about his involvement in it. The obfuscation of Trump and his press spokesperson, Caroline Leavitt, about who knew what and when, speaks volumes. The idea that Netanyahu would launch such an attack without having the backing of Trump, on whom he depends, as both become leaders of isolated rogue states, is not tenable. If Trump really was upset about the attack, he could respond by stopping the supply of US weapons to the Zionist state. But, of course, he, as well as Starmer, and other European governments are not going to do that, because, in the words of German Chancellor Merz, the Zionists are doing their dirty work for them.
The Zionists had to fly further to attack Doha than they did to attack Tehran, so the idea that they could have done this without the US, and its extensive forces and allies in the area knowing about it is, also, inconceivable, even if they had not been involved in it well before. When Iran attacked the US airbase in Qatar following the US bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, the US, despite much less warning, was able to shoot down most of the incoming missiles. They would have had more than enough time to track and destroy the Zionist attack on Doha. But, even before that, the US has extensive intelligence operations across the globe, including inside the Zionist state, its military and so on. If they did not know about it, what does it say about the competence of those intelligence agencies. That is before we even mention the US control over global telecommunications and internet systems.
No, its clear that the US and Trump knew about this attack in advance, and simply waited to see if it was successful before determining their response to it. As with the bombing of the Iranian nuclear facilities, it shows that for all Trump's talk about the Democrats involvement in forever wars, he has been captured by the US state, and is himself becoming the vehicle for such US involvement.
The blatant nature of the Zionist attack has put their western allies in somewhat of a public relations bind, as global opposition to the genocide being conducted by the Zionist state grows by the day. The UK is, of course, marked by its own sheer hypocrisy as it proscribes Palestine Action for opposing the genocide, and arrests hundreds of grannies for having the temerity to protest that decision, whilst the day after the Zionist bombing hosts the President of Israel, who ought to be arrested the minute his feet touched the ground, and remanded to stand trial for war crimes in the Hague!
The media has tried to minimise the coverage of the bombing, and the coverage instead of the Polish interception of Russian drones just inside its territory has been blown up out of all proportion, to distract attention. There is not any suggestion, even from NATO or Poland that Russia had targeted Poland with these drones. Why would it? It is winning its war in Eastern Ukraine, but only very slowly. Why would it, then, even consider the possibility of stretching its forces even further into an all out war with NATO? On the contrary, with the US lukewarm even in its support for Ukraine, and the EU split, and presenting only a “coalition of the whistling” it would be crazy for Russia to engage in such a provocation. Far more likely that this relatively small number of drones, out of the near 1,000 it is now sending into Ukraine a day, either were shot down inside Ukraine and landed in Poland, malfunctioned, or else were deliberately sent off course by Ukrainian/NATO electronic jamming.
The simple question of who benefits, here, provides the most obvious answer.
In the media coverage of events in Syria, over the last week, the Islamists and jihadi terrorists have often been referred to as revolutionaries. Paul Mason, in his usual, sloppy superficial analysis, also, talks about the “Syrian Revolution”. But, Islamists are not revolutionaries, and what is happening in Syria is not a revolution.
A revolution is what happens when a society undergoes a revolutionary shift from one level of social development to a higher level of social development. As Marx and Engels describe, this“social revolution”, goes on behind Men's backs, driven by material conditions and social laws, just as the process of biological evolution occurs. The Law of Natural Selection drives biological evolution, and The Law of Value, drives social evolution. The Law of Value drives society to raise productivity, which drives technological development, which revolutionises the method and relations of production, which revolutionises the social relations that rest upon them.
These new social relations, drive a change in the political and juridical superstructure that rests upon them, as the state becomes the state of the new ruling class, and a new political regime arises, through which this new ruling class, acts to control that state. The establishment of this new political regime takes the form of a “political revolution”.
But, what is happening in Syria, much as happened previously in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, as well as previously in Iran, is not a revolutionary transformation, either socially or politically, but the opposite. It is a counter-revolution! Describing it as such, does not imply or require Marxists to, then, defend the Assad regime. We do not proceed on the ridiculous basis that our enemy's enemy is our friend. Nevertheless, we can also, on the basis of understanding the nature of Islamism, and looking at even recent history, also, conclude that, bad as Assad's regime was for workers, what replaces it is going to be much, much worse.
When the Shah of Iran's regime fell in 1979, Marxists could shed no tears over the removal of a brutal dictator, who had been put in place, and for a long time, kept in place, by US imperialism. On the contrary, many Marxists saw the popular revolt against the Shah, also, in revolutionary terms, and, to begin with, it had some potential to become such, though the relatively low level of capitalist development of Iran, made that problematic, without it being part of a much wider revolution in the region, including in what was, then, the USSR. And, this problem, did indeed, play into the reality that what transpired in Iran, was not a revolution, but, ultimately, a counter-revolution, as the Islamists under the leadership of Khomeini, seized control.
A social revolution requires that the social relations of production are revolutionised, and raised to a higher level. That did not happen in Iran, just as it has not happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya, and now in Syria. On the contrary, if anything, the established state-capitalist relations of production, have been set back, not only to the level of private capitalist relations, but to the conditions prior to that, those of petty-bourgeois commodity production and exchange, and the old Asiatic clerical despotism. As happened in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, even the bourgeois development that leads, via the bourgeois national revolution, to the creation of the bourgeois nation state, is reversed, as these competing petty-bourgeois, clericalist, semi-feudal forces cause the society to degenerate into fiefdoms, and warlordism.
A political revolution, requires, similarly, that the political and juridical superstructure, the political regime, be brought into line with the new social relations created by the social revolution. The British state became a capitalist state, around 1689, reflecting the fact that capitalist social relations had become dominant, but the political regime, did not become revolutionised until 1832, when the effects of the Industrial Revolution, had made that dominance overwhelming, and the bourgeoisie, backed by the industrial proletariat, imposed itself on the old landed aristocracy. Along the way, not only such political revolutions, but also political counter-revolutions, can occur, as with Thermidor in France, and in Russia.
However brutal the regime of the Shah, the reality was that it objectively developed the productive forces in Iran, as part of its role as an agent of US imperialism, and as imperialism invested industrial capital in that development. Primary concern with the political regime, and its brutality, rather than these objective material conditions, and social relations, is the method of moralists and liberals, not Marxists. The reality of Iran, since the Shah, is that it not only has replaced one brutal regime for another, but has also, via that regime, undermined the development of the productive forces, and social relations that had already arisen. It is not such a stark contrast as that which occurred with Pol Pot, in Cambodia, where an attempt was made to reverse capitalist development in favour of petty-bourgeois, peasant production, but, the principle is the same.
The reality of the Shah' s regime, as with that of the Baathists in Iraq and Syria, as well as that of Nasser in Egypt, and Gaddafi in Libya, is that these were “modernising” regimes, usually state-capitalist in nature – the regime in Afghanistan, prior to the Taliban was similar, as with that in Ethiopia - which, inevitably, given the conditions in which they existed, took the form of Bonapartism, just as, indeed, did the modernising regimes of Bismark in Germany, and Louis Bonaparte in France.
Indeed, given the material conditions in the Middle-East and North Africa, the lower level of development, and history of colonialism, the numerous cross-cutting cleavages of ethnicity, and religion, it was even more inevitable that modernising regimes would take this Bonapartist form. None of that has changed, and rather it has become even more intensified, as the descent into chaos in Libya, since 2011, has shown, and as the continued fragmentation in Iraq, despite the external unifying force of Iran, via the majority Shia population, demonstrates.
As I wrote some time ago, having flattened Gaza, and rolling over the rest of Palestine, and, now, having, also, flattened Lebanon, destroying Hezbollah, the Zionist state inevitably, turns its attention to Syria, which it already occupies in the Golan Heights, and which it has been intensifying its attacks upon, as with its bombing of Damascus, of its airports and airbases etc.
The fact of the attacks by the Islamists in Syria, at this time, was no coincidence immediately after the collapse of Lebanon, and destruction of Hezbollah. The Islamist forces are connected to Türkiye, but are descendants of Al Qaeda, and, in Gaza, Israel has also been giving such forces control, in relation to the distribution of what little aid gets in, as well as acting as general enforcers. Of course, Israel did the same thing, originally with Hamas, which it encouraged, as an opponent of Fatah, in Gaza. As with Libya, HTS represents very few social forces, having around the same level of 17,000 fighters as that of the jihadists in Libya, in 2011.
Syria is now doomed to go through a similar period of chaos, disintegration and warlordism as that which has been inflicted on Libya, and Afghanistan. No doubt, many of those celebrating in the streets are themselves associated with those Islamist forces of reaction, as in Libya, many will also be people who are blindly welcoming the fall of one dictator, but without thinking about the day after, when what they face will be even worse. Others probably understand that it will be much worse, but are too fearful not to demonstrate their enthusiasm for fear of losing their heads, as many already have done in areas where the jihadists have taken over.
The situation in Syria is even worse than in Libya or Afghanistan. In Libya, US/NATO imperialism was able to carpet bomb the regime to destroy it, leaving the jihadis of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group – who themselves had previously been fighting the US in Iraq – backed by the Gulf Monarchies, and their Special Forces, to sweep its remains from the ground. It didn't take long for that to descend into chaos and warlordism, but their were no other, external parties on the ground, and Libya, unlike Syria, was not occupied by, or on the border of Israel.
In Syria, Russia has a military base on the Mediterranean, which it will be keen to maintain, though, having established its old warm water naval base in Crimea, that is less imperative, now. That base is in an Alawite region, and the Alawites are likely to come under sectarian attack and face pogroms from the now dominant Islamist forces. The US, still has troops in Syria, and uses the Syrian Kurds as a proxy for its interests. But, those Kurdish forces are also opposed by Türkiye, which sees them as a threat in relation to its own Kurdish region, and their demands for a Kurdish state. The Kurds in Syria, as in Iraq, will be thrown under the bus by US imperialism, just as they strung the Palestinians along with talk about a Two State Solution.
Iran also has interests in Syria, although, with the destruction of Hezbollah, and collapse of Lebanon, those interests have mostly disappeared, along with it. Its main concern was to be able to ferry arms to Hezbollah. Now, that will become concentrated on Iraq, and so expect US imperialism to refocus its attention, there, in the near future too. Russia and China, will inevitably see their client in Iran, as weakened by these developments, and so expect them to shore up their support for Iran, with greater trade and investment, as well, as, of course, a much greater level of military support in air and naval defence systems, as the period of phoney war between US/NATO imperialism and Chinese~Russian imperialism continues and intensifies.
As Syria descends into a failed state, chaos and warlordism, the Zionist state will use the opportunity to invade and annex it further, using its standing line of a “right to self-defence”. But Syria is too big a bite for the Zionist state to swallow whole, and nor does it need to. The Zionist state only needs to clear sufficient territory to occupy, so as to create a large enough state to operate in, as it then, establishes normal relations with the surrounding Arab states in Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf, which are already US client states.
The Islamists are not revolutionaries for another reason. When the bourgeoisie undertook its revolution, it was, as set out above, based upon its capitalistic transformation of the relations of production. When the proletariat undertakes its revolution, it is similarly on the basis of its transformation of the forces of production. The Islamists, at best, are forced by reality to conserve the existing productive relations, whilst seeking to impose earlier social relations upon them, or else, at worst, seek to revert to those earlier productive relations themselves.
The bourgeoisie, whose social power resided, with their economic power, in the urban areas, mobilised the social forces brought into existence by the new productive relations, in the urban areas, to carry through their political revolution. The industrial proletariat does the same thing, in relation to the socialist revolution. But, what characterises the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, is that they lack any such centralised economic and social power, and as with the various peasant revolts, or the Peasant War, as undertaken by Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, or Castro, what they carry through is not a mass popular revolution, and certainly not a proletarian revolution, but simply a rural guerrilla war. Such is the nature of the terrorism, and rebellion of the Islamists in Syria, as in Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The Zionist state, in Israel/Palestine, has extended its war of annexation, as I said it would. Zionism, as a reactionary nationalist, racist and colonialist ideology, of itself is forced to continually seek to expand the territory over which it exercises its remit, much as European colonialism did in the Mercantilist period from the 17th to the end of the 19th century. But, the Zionist state, in Israel/Palestine, is not just such a reactionary nationalist/colonialist state, it is, also, an imperialist state, based upon large-scale monopoly capitalism, closely tied to the state, and to global imperialism, primarily US imperialism. It serves a similar purpose, for US imperialism, in the Middle East, that the Ukrainian imperialist state serves in Eastern Europe.
In both cases, the interests of EU imperialism coincide with that of US imperialism, and yet, also, differ from those of US imperialism. US imperialism is concerned with its global strategic hegemony, exercised via its huge military machine that dwarfs every other military on the planet, and via its NATO imperialist alliance, through which it, also, exercises its domination over those subordinate imperialist allies in Britain, the EU, Japan and elsewhere. It is concerned to limit and control the expansion of Chinese imperialism, and its imperialist alliance with Russia, and the other imperialist and sub-imperialist powers within BRICS+.
The Ukrainian imperialist state enables US imperialism to fulfil that function in Eastern Europe, using it as an unsinkable aircraft carrier, with an endless supply of Ukrainian workers blood, to keep Russia tied up on its western border. Its aim, though one it has not been successful in achieving, was to undermine Putin, and open the door to further insurgencies, within the Russian Federation itself, to break it apart, and, thereby, to put in place its own client regimes, much as it thought it had done with Yeltsin, so as to have access to the vast resources of Russia.
The Zionist imperialist state in Israel/Palestine, is used by US imperialism to check the growing influence of Chinese imperialism in the Gulf, and to an extent in North Africa, as well as the influence of Russian imperialism, with its historic links to Iran, Syria, and the role it is playing via the Wagner group in Sudan, Mali and elsewhere.
The interests of EU imperialism are somewhat different. EU imperialism is primarily concerned with creating, a large single market, which is why it created the EU in the first place. It seeks to continually expand the size of that single market, to meet the needs of capital in the EU, which must operate on an ever larger scale, to compete with the mammoth imperialist capitals in the US and China. But, a single market requires the states within it to all operate on the basis of common laws and so on, which requires them to be free of the kinds of corruption that many states in Europe suffer. Before, being allowed to join, states in Europe have had to go through a probationary period in which they became more aligned with the EU. It means that the EU could have closer relations with a range of states on its periphery, without them being EU members, and yet, from which EU imperialism gained advantages, as with its deals with Russia, for the supply of cheap oil and gas.
EU imperialism has gradually expanded its single market Eastwards, with Ukraine being the next state to be drawn into its orbit, though, as with Turkiye, it was never likely to gain membership of the EU any time soon, given its huge levels of corruption. The EU had the potential to continue that course of imperialist expansion via increased trade and cooperation, including with Russia, but such an expansion would not have been in the interests of US imperialism. It would have strengthened both EU imperialism and Russian imperialism, at the expense of US imperialism, and would have weakened the ties and subordination of EU imperialism to US imperialism. It is EU imperialism that has borne the cost of the imperialist war in Ukraine, not only via the huge costs of arms and other aid supplied to Ukraine, but also as a result of its reduced trade with Russia, and a huge rise in its energy and food costs resulting from its boycott and sanctions against Russia.
The effect of that on European workers, with social-democratic parties, and even sections of a social-imperialist “Left” backing such imperialist war, has provided the material conditions for a further expansion of the far-right, whose forces had already grown as a consequence of the 50% growth of the petty-bourgeoisie over recent decades.
The EU had, also, developed similar economic relations with the economies of MENA that they had done with the economies of Central Europe, following the collapse of Stalinism. That created a corresponding path of economic development, and eventual expansion of the single market into the Middle East and North Africa. It is again clear why such a development would not be in the interests of US imperialism, as it further strengthens EU imperialism, and establishes closer ties with those oil rich states that the US had dragged away from the old European colonial powers, after WWII.
The Iraq War, fought on the basis of an obvious lie about WMD, was fought by US and UK imperialism, and opposed by most of the EU, to the ire of the US. It led to chaos in Iraq, and rise of the jihadists, which spread into Libya and Syria, destabilising the region and its economic development, and along with it the relation to the EU. As with the war in Ukraine, it was the EU that bore the cost, not the US, as not only did it result in this economic dislocation, but large numbers of refugees found their way into EU countries, providing yet another bit of grist to the mill of the far-right.
But, as I wrote, some time ago, the interests of both US and EU imperialism coincide in seeing the need for the Zionist state in Israel/Palestine to deal once and for all with what it sees as the Palestinian problem. The EU, in order to get back to those kinds of relations it sought to develop prior to the Iraq War, and the chaos it spread across the Middle East and North Africa, needs Israel to establish “normal” relations with its Arab neighbours, as the basis of forming some form of common market. US imperialism, also, seeks such a development, because, with its client state, Israel, being the most powerful, and dominant state in any such common market, and with closer ties to the EU, it draws those states away from the growing influence of China and Russia.
The fact that the Zionist state has been able to cross every red-line supposedly put down by the Biden regime, with impunity, that it laughs in the face of “the international community”, and its “rules based order”, not only ignoring the rulings of that “community's” courts, the ICJ and ICC, but has done so with US backing, which has similarly supported the ridiculous claims that the courts rulings were a result of it being “anti-Semitic”, shows just how much the genocide being committed by the Zionist state is being done with the full support of US and EU imperialism. Its no wonder that when the reactionary nationalist regime of Starmer and Blue Labour, found itself losing Muslim members and voters, as a result of its own support for that genocide, it responded, in typically racist and colonialist fashion, by describing it as simply “shaking off fleas”!!!
The genocide being committed, in Gaza most visibly, but also underway in the rest of Palestine, exposes the sham nature and hypocrisy of the calls for a two-state solution. The reality is that two states have existed in Israel and Palestine, but it provided no solution. The Palestinian state is recognised by 145 countries, representing 75% of UN members. What those who talk about a two-state solution mean is actually, US recognition of that state of Palestine, and of course, although US imperialism, itself, continually talks about such a solution being the only way forward, it continually prevents such a solution, by voting against recognition, and by continuing to support the Zionist state in refusing to accept the existence of such a state.
Palestine is a state, and another state, the Zionist state in Israel, has simply acted to impose itself on it, via its military might, a military might made possible by, and supported by, US and EU imperialism. The existence of a state, can no more provide a solution for Palestinians than could the existence of a state for Poland prevent Hitler's armies invading it, and annexing it! To believe otherwise, in the age of imperialism, is to believe in bourgeois-liberal fairytales. As Marx put it,
“They forget, however, that club-law too is law, and that the law of the stronger, only in a different form, still survives even in their “constitutional State.””
(A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy)
The Zionist state, with the full support of US, UK and EU imperialism, has carried out genocide in Gaza, it rapes and tortures Palestinians across the whole of Palestine, and publicly defends such rape and torture, and it backs and promotes Zionist settlers in annexing further Palestinian land in the West Bank, as it also, rapes and murders Palestinians to drive them from that land. As I wrote previously, it is carrying out a similar process of extermination of Palestinians to that conducted by European colonialists in the Americas, and Australasia. But, that is only the start of the planned annexations by the Zionist state, as I also noted. It is already beginning the process of expanding that war of annexation into Lebanon, and Syria.
For months, it has been attempting to provoke Hezbollah into a more overt attack, but without success. Its bombing of Beirut, which signifies a qualitative stepping up in those attempts, and the assassination, thereby, of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, was justified on the basis of a claim that Hezbollah had launched a missile strike on Majdal Hams, in the Israeli occupied, Golan Heights, which killed twelve people. There are a number of points to raise about that. Firstly, as the Syrian representative to the UK noted, the Golan Heights are Syrian, not Israeli territory. The Zionist state illegally occupies that territory, just as it has illegally occupied Palestinian territory. As an occupying force, the Zionist state has no right of self-defence.
Secondly, those killed, not only were not Israeli citizens, but Syrians, they also, were not Jewish citizens, but Druze Christians. In fact, when Netanyahu turned up in Majdal Shams, those Druze residents heckled him, and gave him a hostile reception, because they see him, and the Zionist state as the occupiers, and responsible for their plight.
Hezbollah have also, from the start, rejected the Zionist claim hat they fired the rocket, and its not clear why they would do so. It has, however, given the Zionist regime a pretext to hugely expand its war in the region. Similarly, its assassination of Ismail Haniyeh while he was in Tehran for the inauguration of the new Iranian President, not only breaks international law, but also shows that the Zionist regime backed by US imperialism has no intention of negotiating a ceasefire, as it continues its genocide.
The Zionists are seeking to expand the war, and provoke a response from Hezbollah and Iran, in order to step up the scale of the war, and draw in US imperialism, which, as well as UK imperialism, has already been drawn into active military involvement, as well as providing the weapons required by the Zionist regime. Those claiming that US imperialism does not want such an escalation have not been paying attention. At every stage, they have claimed not to want an escalation of the war in Gaza, and yet, each red line crossed by the Zionist regime has resulted only in further backing, further arms, further justification of its actions, and more US and British war ships being sent to the region ready to back it further when such escalation occurs.
There are a series of contradictions faced by bourgeois-democracy, each of which is inter-related, and many of which arise as a result of the solutions utilised for previous contradictions, themselves creating new contradictions. This is very like the situation described by Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy, that resulted from Proudhon's method, and that is not surprising, because the method of social-democracy, is pretty much that same method.
The fundamental contradiction is that socialised capital, as a transitional form of property, is objectively the collective property of workers, but is controlled, not by workers but the ruling-class of money-lending capitalists (coupon clippers) whose wealth now exists in the form of fictitious-capital, not this real industrial capital. As Marx sets out in Capital III, the interests of these two forms of capital are immediately antagonistic. The money-lending capitalists (shareholders, bondholders etc.) seek to maximise their total return from interest/dividends and capital gain, but that is antagonistic to the interests of real industrial capital that seeks to minimise the amount paid as interest, or other forms of capital transfer, in order to maximise profit of enterprise, so as to maximise capital accumulation.
The collective owners of socialised capital (the workers) do not control it, and the state, as the state of the ruling class of coupon clippers/speculators, ensures they can never control it, short of a pre-revolutionary situation, of dual power, in which the workers, organised in soviets/workers' councils, impose workers control, arms in hand. Yet, that use of force (albeit legal or legislative force) that prevents workers exercising that control, and vests it with the shareholders, does not change the underlying contradiction of the antagonistic interests of these two forms of capital. Even where social-democracy reached its zenith, in the 1970's, with the introduction of co-determination, most noticeably in Germany, it was again just a repeat of the sham of bourgeois-democracy, transplanted into industrial democracy. The elected worker directors are always in a minority, and so simply give cover for a continuation of the domination of the shareholders.
So boards of Directors continued to denude retained profits for capital accumulation, and instead used those profits to finance excessive dividends and interest payments, capital transfers to shareholders, the buy back of shares to raise share prices, as well as exorbitant remittances to those Directors, including the use of share options and so on that further tie them in to shareholder interests as against the company interest. This condition was hidden in the 1990's, because the technological revolution of the 1980's, so raised productivity, and brought about a moral depreciation of fixed capital, rise in the annual rate of profit, and release of capital, that even as profit was drained into these unproductive revenues, the mass of realised profit grew to such an extent, and the mass of physical output grew so much that the aforementioned condition arose that 25% of all human production is accounted for in just the first ten years of the current century.
But, as the proportion of profits going to rent and interest payments, particularly, (but also taxes) grew, at the expense of retained profits, so asset prices rose. The growing mass of interest/dividends did not go back into financing additional capital accumulation – which simply retaining profits would have done more effectively – but went instead into a demand for existing shares, bonds and property, pushing up those asset prices, as monetary demand for them grew faster than a, now, constrained supply of them. That fuelled further speculation, on the basis of the now familiar fear of missing out (FOMO). Moreover, not only was it the recipients of these revenues that ploughed money into such speculation, but a proportion of wages also went into it, and, in the case of property, increasing amounts of money was simply borrowed for that purpose.
The solutions, and consequences of this fundamental contradiction, were as follows.
Asset prices inflated to astronomical levels acting as a drag on the real economy, and capital accumulation, contrary to the claims about so called “wealth effects”.
The ruling-class of coupon-clippers/speculators, became more concerned with the capital gain element of total returns than with the revenue element, whether in the form of interest/dividends or rents.
When asset price bubbles burst, as in 1987, 2000 and 2008, the state, as protector of the immediate interest of this ruling class, acted to reflate those asset prices, both by devaluing the standard of prices, and by damaging the real economy to slow the demand for capital, in order to reduce rates of interest.
One solution to the need to expand the mass of profit, so as to facilitate the continued increase in interest/dividends and rents, without a proportional increase in capital accumulation, was to shift production to other lower cost countries in Asia, notably China, and this process got underway in the 1980's, creating a new contradiction, now being seen, as China, is rising as an imperialist power in its own right, combining with Russia and BRICS+ to challenge the old imperialist hegemon.
This process of “deindustrialisation” begun in the 1980's, and shift of production to China etc., led to a weakening of large-scale socialised capital, in the developed economies. At the same time, it created conditions for a rapid growth of the petty-bourgeoisie, reversing the trend of the previous 150 years. Most of this petty-bourgeoisie was itself deprived and precarious, taking the form of the self-employed, white van man, or small business sweating other labour, including family labour. It was concentrated in the old decaying urban areas, decimated by deindustrialisation, the so called “Red Wall” constituencies. Its petty-bourgeois nature brought with it all of the reactionary ideology of that petty-bourgeois layer.
Its strength resides, like the peasantry, in its numbers, significant only in electoral terms, not in its socio-economic strength. It does not control large masses of property or the state, as the bourgeoisie does, and nor does it have the industrial economic power that the working-class possesses. But, it does have the large numbers (around 15 million in Britain) to vote. That voting power, enabled it to seize control of the Tories, and, thereby, to push through Brexit, against the interests of both the ruling class, and the interests of large-scale socialised capital, and, thereby, of its collective owners, the working-class.
That cut off another solution for bourgeois-democracy that of reducing costs and raising the rate of turnover of capital, by abolishing national borders and creating larger single markets, such as the EU.
As globalisation stalls, the world returns to the conditions prior to WWI, in which powerful nation states sought to advance their own interests at the expense of others, by dominating the economies around them. But, now, it is large, continental sized politico-economic blocs engaged in such conflict, which drives towards WWIII. That is the context of the proxy wars in Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, Africa, and increasingly the South China Sea/Pacific.
The method of the Left, though it continues to call itself “Marxist”, is, in fact, metaphysicalrather than dialectical, it is, largely moralistic rather than materialist, and so cannot identify and analyse flux, leaving it mechanically applying old categories and formulas, rather than analysing current reality. These failings have left the working-class without any effective leadership over the last 80 years, strengthening the position of social-democracy. But, social-democracy, wracked by the contradictions set out above, has also arrived at a point of crisis, and, in order to try to contain that crisis, it has had to resort to increasing degrees of Bonapartism, to make appearance and reality hang together.
The Bonapartist regime of Starmer inside Blue Labour is a clear example of that, but the same applies inside the US Democrats, and across European social democracy. That same Bonapartism is manifest in the social-democratic state too, and the current overt abandonment of the façade of bourgeois-democracy, in order to justify genocide, and deny the masses the right to speak out against it is just the latest, most visible manifestation of it. There is a clear yellow line connecting the use of claims of “anti-Semitism” against the Left over recent years, to justify witch hunts, deny free speech, and to justify Zionism, with the current utilisation of those same tropes to suppress the global opposition to the Zionist genocide in Palestine.
The astronomical levels of liquidity thrown into circulation, via QE etc., are an indication of that underlying crisis of social-democracy, as are the astronomical levels of asset prices, that bear no resemblance to the underlying valuation of real capital, and its profitability. Its most surreal expression was negative yields, with more than $20 trillion of bonds, globally, at one point, having negative yields! That was not because the amount of interest being paid was small, it wasn't, it was huge, as with the amounts paid as rents and taxes. It was simply a function of the astronomical level to which the price of assets be they bonds, shares, or land had been inflated. In other words, 100/1,000 is 10%, but if the 100 increases to 700, whilst the 1,000 rises to 70,000, it is only 1%!
The nature of socialised capital, identified by Marx, as a transitional form of property, implies and necessitates change, transition from one state to another, but the nature of the Left's metaphysical philosophical method, means that it cannot theorise or grasp this process of transition. In one form, its either capital or not capital, utilising the method of the syllogism, manifest in the idea that the change of state occurs in one leap, effected by the proletarian revolution, pace 1917, and in another, this change occurs superficially, at least, by the action of the capitalist state, via an act of nationalisation, for example.
But, the objective laws of capital, continue to grind on, behind Men's backs, even though they have been churning at subterranean depths for the last 40 years, breaking through the surface every so often, as they have resulted in rising employment, rising wages, feeding through into increased aggregate demand, fuelling economic growth, and a demand for additional capital, causing interest rates to rise, and asset prices to drop, as most visibly occurred in 2008. The capitalist state, as the state of the ruling class, whose form of property is fictitious capital, has tried to reconcile this contradiction.
In 2010, it implemented austerityto slow economic growth, so trying to slow the growth in employment, and consequent rise in wages. The goal was two-fold. By holding back the rise in wages, it held back any squeeze on profits, and, secondly, by holding back the expansion of employment and rise in wages, it held back the expansion of demand for wage goods, which, in turn, dampens the role of competition in driving firms to accumulate capital so as to increase their supply. By reducing that demand for capital accumulation, it holds down interest rates, and so enables asset prices to remain inflated.
Why does it do that, because, contrary to the model used by the Left, which sees capital in the terms of its early 19th century form, in which capitalists are the private owners of real industrial capital, dependent on maximising profit, the ruling class, today, is rather that class of “coupon clippers”, owners, not of real industrial capital, but of fictitious-capital, identified by Marx and Engels in Capital, and Anti-Duhring.
This ruling class, rather than seeking the maximisation of industrial profit, seeks the maximisation of its total returns from interest, rent and capital gains. For more than 20 years, it could maximise its revenues from interest and rent, at the expense of retained profits, because, in the 1980's, the technological revolution, raised productivity, and the rate of profit, as well as creating a huge release of capital, as vast amounts of fixed capital suffered a massive moral depreciation. This reality, is also in complete contradiction to the idea, clung to by much of the Left, that capitalism is in some kind of period of decline or decay. On the contrary, in that period, it has been at its most dynamic, since its inception.
But, as with every such long wave cycle, this period in which the new technology raises productivity, as existing equipment gets replaced by new equipment (See Marx in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 23), and the rate of profit rises along with a release of capital, (intensive accumulation), runs out. At some point, all the old fixed capital has been replaced by the new. The rise in productivity slows, and, to increase output, it is no longer a matter of replacing old equipment with newer equipment, but of adding additional equipment itself (extensive accumulation). And, added equipment means additional workers, even if relatively fewer additional workers than would have previously been required using the old technology.
That point arose around 1999, and as I have set out many times before, going back to the early 2000's, this period after 1999, and up to the global financial crisis of 2008, saw a huge expansion in output, again confounding the claims of the catastrophists that capitalism, globally, was in some kind of terminal decline or decay. The simple fact that, of all of Man's output, in his entire history, 25% of it occurred in the first decade of this century, illustrates that point.
But, it was this economic expansion that spelled the end for the model of conservative social-democracy that had existed over the previous 20 years, starting with Thatcher and Reagan, and ending with Brown and Bush. Everything that has happened since 2008, is merely an attempt to deny reality, and to cling to that old model at an ever increasing cost, and ever more authoritarian means. And, again, contrary to the model used by the Left, in which this is all done in the interests of capital, rather than the interests of the ruling class, the measures undertaken have increasingly damaged the real economy, and damaged real industrial capital. It illustrates the extent to which, as Marx and Engels theorised more than a century ago, that ruling class of coupon clippers, whose interests are antagonistic to real capital, have become a reactionary fetter on the development of capital itself.
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.
The chaos caused in Libya spread into Mali and other parts of North Africa, and, again, it has opened the door for rivals to fill the void, most notably the role of the Russian Wagner Group, as China, also, continues to expand its economic reach. Similarly, US imperialism promotes the Zionist genocide against the Palestinians, because, much as with Sherman's genocide against the Native Americans, and the European Colonialists' genocides against indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, it is necessary to establish its unchallenged position, as a Zionist state “from the river to the sea”, as its doctrine commits it, and as the laws of capital, in the age of imperialism requires it to do. Only then can it begin to create that wider politico-economic bloc with the other US clients in Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states, free from the repeated rebellions of the Palestinians, and the support for them amongst the Arab masses that obstructs the actions of their rulers.
Such a development is also in the interests of EU imperialism. Indeed, it is more so than for US imperialism, in the longer run, because a stabilisation of the region, and its economic growth, will mean far greater trade, and investment opportunities for EU imperialism, as its closer neighbour. So, it is no wonder that the political representatives of US, UK and EU “democratic imperialism” have been prepared to move heaven and earth to support the genocide undertaken by Zionism in Palestine, and to claim that black is white, as they try to deny it is happening. For years, they have equated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, a strategy used even more intensively and fraudulently, in recent years, as they sought to attack the Left, for example, against Corbyn and his supporters.
In the 1930's, when that same “democratic imperialism” was seeking to dupe the masses into support for its imperialist wars against Germany and Japan, it did so by claiming that it was engaged in a war for “democracy”, all the while holding millions of colonial slaves in chains! As Trotsky noted,
"Three hundred fifty million Indians must reconcile themselves to their slavery in order to support British democracy, the rulers of which at this very time, together with the slaveholders of “democratic” France, are delivering the Spanish people into Franco’s bondage. People of Latin America must tolerate with gratitude the foot of Anglo-Saxon imperialism on their neck only because this foot is dressed in a suede democratic boot. Disgrace, shame, cynicism – without end!"
(Phrases and Reality)
It does so, today, aided not only by the likes of imperialist politicians such as Biden and Starmer, but also, of social-imperialists of the type of the USC, and its components such as the AWL, who play the same role, today, in that regard, as did the Stalinists and centrists in the 1930's. They have been complicit in this narrative of imperialism, including in its use of anti-Semitism witch hunts in the labour movement. But, to do that, they also had to claim that it was okay to criticise the actions of Israeli governments, even though, in practice, nearly every such criticism was met with the same charges of anti-Semitism.
The line that it was okay to criticise Israeli governments, rather than the racist, colonialist ideology of Zionism, which underpins that state, was also meant to enable imperialism to pressure those Zionist governments, such as that of Netanyahu, which were seen as too maverick, uncontrollable, and representing the same kind of petty-bourgeois interests as those of Trump, Truss, and so on. It is the same motivation that leads to liberal Zionist newspapers such as Ha'aretz, to stand against Netanyahu, and to ridiculously claim that he has failed in his aims in Gaza. He has failed their aims, not his, and not the rationale of Zionism, as now manifest, in its requirement for a final solution against the Palestinians.
Londoners were prevented from going freely about their business on Sunday, as roads were closed, when 50,000 runners in the London Marathon occupied some of the roads for several hours. Christians seeking to cross the road to get to their local church, people wanting to get to their local pub, and others were told that it was unreasonable for them to be able to simply disregard the barriers, and to simply try to walk through the 50,000 runners. That was particularly the case given that some of those trying to do so so, were also known to be hostile to the event itself.
This restriction on Londoners freedom came just a day after police had also told a Jewish man, Gideon Falter, of the pro-Zionist, Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, who similarly wanted to walk through a large demonstration protesting against the Zionist genocide going on in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. In an edited video released by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, who just happened to also have someone there to witness, the confrontation between Mr. Falter and the police, he was seen being told not to do so, before being arrested. What the video omitted, but was shown in a further video, released to Sky News, was that before that, the police offered to escort him by a different route across to the synagogue, he said he wanted to get to, but that he refused. As he said, why should he have to do that, and similarly, why should not people be free to walk across the path of people running the London Marathon?
Why would anyone think that someone trying to do that, having brought someone along to film them doing so, was simply trying to be provocative? God forbid such a thought. In fact, I am all in favour of having such events policed and marshalled by their organisers. I doubt that had Mr. Falter simply wanted to merge into the demonstration, and make his way across it to the other side, he would have had any problem. There were after all many other “visibly Jewish” people taking part in the demonstration against Zionist atrocities, and one more would have attracted no attention.
What would have attracted attention, of course, would be if someone was protesting against the march itself, was shouting anti-Palestinian or pro-Zionist remarks, defending the genocide being committed against Palestinians. What that would have provoked is not a response against someone for being Jewish, but as with someone protesting against the Marathon, by trying to march through it, of simply being a bit of a dick. In the case of someone vociferously protesting in favour of the Zionist genocide against Palestinians, or seeking to deny its existence, rather like Nazi Holocaust deniers, it would not be surprising if the response to that was itself rather forceful.
