Could Labour Drop To Fourth in Gorton & Denton By-Election?

The establishment seem to be apoplectic at the thought that the Greens look set to win the by-election in Gorton and Denton, tomorrow.  On the one hand, we have the far-right wing of the establishment such as The Daily Mail, which has followed Trump down the rabbit hole of absurdity, and is now claiming ridiculously, on its front page that the Greens are going to offer illegal migrants a free house.  The claims of the Mail, are an hysterical extension of its long-standing racist lies about preferential treatment for immigrants, going back decades, as it now fears that, not only are the Greens going to beat Labour,, but are set to, also, beat Reform

On the other hand, we have the centrist elements of the establishment, similarly concerned that the Greens might beat Labour from its Left, and might, also beat Reform.  The centrists have no desire for a Reform victory, but they certainly would prefer it over a win for the Greens.  For the last 6 years, Starmer has tagged along behind first the Tories, and, then, their reincarnation as Reform, in a continual ratchet to the reactionary, nationalist Right.  The narrative was created that Reform could only be defeated by Labour, despite the fact that voters were presented with just different shades of reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalism and the prospect of increasing attacks on workers' living standards and rights, following Brexit, and attempts to distract them by the usual appeals to rally around the flag on the basis of ridiculous claims about imminent invasion.

A win for the Greens shatters that narrative, and what scares the establishment is that its quite clear that with the Conservatives now destroyed, Labour is headed to the same fate.  The race in Gorton and Denton, formerly a rock solid Labour seat, is solely between Reform and The Greens.  The question is only which of these two parties come out on top, and how badly Labour does, further down the ballot.  Labour further destroyed its chances by blocking Burnhan from standing, in the interests, purely of Starmer's Blue Labour faction, which has wrecked the party, and, is now, reaping the consequences, as it loses its grip.  The same factionalism and cronyism has led to the current scandals around Epstein and Mandelson, which look set to gradually draw in all of those that were a part of that Mandelson cabal.

What the establishment and pundits have failed to recognise is that class based politics, continues to dominate, and to determine voting.  The reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, which, as a class was the bedrock of the Tories/Conservatives has simply shifted to Reform, which is nothing more than a rebranding of the Tories.  The aspiring, professional middle-class fraction of Conservative support, which was the support base of the social-democratic wing of the party, typified by the likes of Heath, Heseltine and Clarke (the Wets) and, consequently, of the interests of large-scale capital, and the EU, has moved to its rational home in the Liberals.  As Blue Labour has abandoned even that kind of conservative, social-democracy, it is unable to attract either those sections of the middle-class, in the way Blair did, or to attract the working-class, on the back of a pursuit of progressive social-democracy, as it did under Attlee, Wilson/Callaghan, or Corbyn.  That working-class/middle-class vote has now gone to the Greens.

According to numerous reports, local Labour activists in Gorton and Denton have already acknowledge that reality, and given up.  Why on Earth, would any rational Labour activist waste their time trudging the streets to advocate a vote for someone and something that the vast majority of them, also, do not support.  Its not like in the past, when activists might do that to support a given candidate, using the contact with voters to, set out their own disagreements with the leadership, and encourage the to join the party, and assist in a struggle to transform it, as for example, we did with the Socialist Campaign for A Labour Victory, in 1979.  Today, Starmer's Bonapartist Blue Labour regime has prevented any such struggle within the party, as seen with the mass expulsions, the imposition from above of candidates, and the blocking of Burnham.  No amount of high profile flying visits to the seat will change that reality, as they try to shore up an illusion.

The progressive working-class vote in the constituency has already moved to the Greens, and all those former Labour voters, can, now, see that to beat Reform the Greens offer the only hope.  They look set to fulfil that hope, which is why the establishment in both its far-right and centrist factions have united to try to stop the Greens.  Labour, has tried to attack the Greens from the opposite direction, with its own sets of lies.  Rather than joining in with the racist lies of the Daily Mail, about Greens giving free houses to illegal migrants and so on, Labour instead have focussed on The Greens opposition to the genocide being committed by the Zionist regime against Palestinians.  Its not that Blue Labour has not mimicked the racist policies of Reform, the Tories and the Mail, but that they know that, in this seat, echoing those particular lies would be likely to lose it even more votes.

And, despite the fact that Polansky is himself Jewish, Blue Labour think that with their ridiculous attacks on his opposition to the genocide, a genocide that Starmer and Blue Labour has denied exists, and which they have armed and supported, they will turn some of those voters against the Greens in that constituency.  No doubt they have blindly looked back to the former Labour MP for Manchester, Gerald Kaufman, but, had they looked more closely, they would have seen that Kaufman was, also, a critic of the kind of politics that the Zionist regime has been undertaking.

Blue Labour has destroyed the Labour Party, much as the same petty-bourgeois nationalists have destroyed the Conservative Party.  In the latter case they have emerged like the monster on Alien, out of the stomach of the Conservatives, now, as Reform, that reality shown by the number of Tory MP's like Jenrick, Jenkyns and so on that now, litter its ranks.  At some point, the same is likely to be true with Blue Labour, as, having destroyed Labour, those elements also, join Reform.  A look at the journey travelled by many of those associated with the likes of Glassman, in the ranks of Spiked Online, shows how easily that is done.

So, the banner of social-democracy has now fallen, by default, into the hands of the Greens, or, in Scotland and Wales, the SNP and Plaid.  To beat Reform, the working-class, and progressive, professional middle-class, now, rationally, have only those parties as a means of doing, so in elections.  In places, the Liberals may, also, offer a similar alternative.  The tragedy, once again, is that socialists have not risen to the task of filling that void.  The labour vote in Gorton has collapsed, and the beneficiaries are the Greens.  To defeat Reform, it will need to collapse completely.  Given the reactionary, anti-working-class nature of Blue Labour, that should not be hard to envisage, and the question now is, will Labour even be able to muster enough votes to beat the Liberals into third place. 

French Government Falls As Social-Democracy Falters Amid New Global Debt Crisis - Part 2 of 9

This was not a crisis-free capitalism. As Mandel describes, for example, in “The Second Slump”, there were, in fact, five cyclical recessions in the period after WWII, even before the “Second Slump” that began in 1974. But, unlike the previous cyclical recessions, or the slump of the 1920's and 30's, social-democracy even seemed to have got the measure of that, as a result of its increasing planning and regulation of the economy, utilising Keynesian demand management techniques, and combining fiscal and monetary policy. As Mandel notes, it did not prevent recessions, such as that of 1957, but it did significantly curtail the severity and duration of them.

Social-democracy, via these same methods, and under the auspices of the hegemony of US imperialism, sought not only to plan and regulate the national economy, but also the global economy. It established international, para state institutions for that purpose, such as The World Bank, IMF, GATT/WTO and so on, not to mention the UN and its various funds and organisations that performed like a global welfare state. All of those institutions were fundamental elements to the creation of a global economy, and single global market. Within that process, also, reflecting a combined and uneven development, Western Europe achieved the goal of economic union, by voluntary agreement, in the form of the EU, to compete with the US, which had formed into a large federal state via its Civil War. Similar politico-economic blocs were established in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

So long as US hegemony remained, this was all fine, because all of these institutions and all of the global planning and regulation, designed to create order, and a rules based system, were, of course, mostly to the benefit of the dominant economies, particularly the US economy, and its multinational companies. Even within these large multinational blocs, the old tensions remained. Germany and France dominate the EU, and gradually came closer, as symbolised by the alliance between Chirac and Kohl, but as Marx and Engels describe in relation to business trusts and cartels, they tend to fracture in periods of crisis, requiring the establishment of a single centralised power, which in the case of blocs like the EU, means the establishment of a single centralised state. It is why British imperialism, tied to US imperialism, has always been at odds with the EU.

Marx and Engels noted that, in the 19th century, when the state intervened to establish laws such as the Factory Acts and so on, the main beneficiaries of that, were not just the workers, but also the large-scale capitals, because they could afford to operate on that basis, and, indeed, as Robert Owen and others had shown, these ways of operating, actually raised productivity and with it profitability. It acted to further spur capital concentration and centralisation, and hasten the demise not just of the petty-bourgeois producers, but of the smaller private capitals themselves. The further development of that large-scale, socialised capital, now organised by armies of professional middle class managers, administrators, bookkeepers, technocrats and so on, on the basis of scientific management, standardisation, regulation and planning, all borrowing from the methods of the encroaching new socialist society, however, was all still conducted on the basis of meeting the needs of capital not labour, and, when it came to the global order, it was still done for the benefit of US capital.

But, the contradictory nature of capitalism, in its imperialist stage, is also, characterised by the development identified by Robert Owen, even before it was more scientifically analysed by Marx and Engels.

Back To Part 1

Forward To Part 3

French Government Falls As Social-Democracy Falters Amid New Global Debt Crisis - Part 1 of 9

Social-democracy is inherently contradictory. It is the last form of bourgeois-democracy, prior to its replacement by socialism. It represents the political and ideological reflection of the contradictory and transitional form of capital in its imperialist phase, dominated by large-scale, socialised capital. It is based on the lie that the interests of capital and labour are ultimately the same, and only need to be negotiated, in the short-term. It has been the dominant form of bourgeois-democracy since the latter part of the 19th century, when large-scale, socialised capital expropriated private capital (the expropriation of the expropriators), and became tied to the capitalist state, which it required to increasingly plan and regulate the economy, on an ever widening and deepening scale.

Because it is based on that contradiction, and ultimately the lie, whenever the contradiction sharpens, during a crisis, social-democracy always, itself, faces a crisis, because it must always prioritise the interests of capital over those of labour, whilst social-democracy itself can only continue so long as it has the support of the millions of workers that retain their illusions in it. It must either move forward, further strengthening the social position of the workers, as the personification and collective owners of the socialised capital, (which it only ever does up to the point where the long-term interests of capital are challenged), or it must leave the field. In essence, this is the conclusion drawn by Marx, as early as 1850, and contained within the theory of permanent revolution.

In practice, as I have set out elsewhere, the USSR/Stalinism, and Nazi Germany/fascist Italy etc., also reflected this fundamental contradiction social-democracy sans democracy. All of these phenomenal forms attempted to deal with that contradiction by implementing measures designed to accumulate real industrial capital within the context of the dominance of large-scale socialised capital, and so did so via all of those methods borrowed from the oncoming socialist future, i.e. the planning and regulation of production, on an expanded scale. In the age of imperialism, that expanded scale, also, means on an expanded geographic scale. The choice becomes socialism or barbarism, which, in the age of thermonuclear weapons, means socialism or the end of humanity.

As I wrote at the start of the Ukraine War, which itself is a manifestation of the current global crisis, and need to create even larger single markets, leading to intensifying competition between global imperialist blocs, which is leading to WWIII, unless checked by the global working-class, via socialist revolution, it would undoubtedly call into question whether western social-democracy could survive it. The answer appears to be clearly no.

In the post-war period, social-democracy seemed unassailable. Economies expanded rapidly as did living standards, not just in terms of more necessities, but an ever-expanding range of goods and services, including welfare states providing “free” education and health and social care, and social security in relation to ill-health, unemployment and retirement. This was a “progressive” social-democracy, which was not only based on this expansion of large-scale, socialised industrial capital, but, in turn, sought to facilitate its further expansion, by continually expanding the realm of planning and regulation of the economy. The welfare state, whose outlines were established in Prussia in the early 19th century, enhanced by Bismark in Germany in the late 19th century, and formalised by Chamberlain, Beveridge,  and others, in Britain, in the early 20th century, is part of that apparatus of planning and regulation, in relation to the planned supply of labour-power.

Forward To Part 2

Starmer's Vile, Racist Government

Starmer's Blue Labour Government truly is a vile, obnoxious, racist grotesque. It has nothing to do with social-democracy, nor even with the kind of Labourite governments of the past. Indeed, it has nothing to do with the ideas, values and interests of the vast majority of Labour Party members, and voters of today, which indicates why it won so few votes at the election, why even that support has dissipated, and it is about to get wiped out in the Spring local elections, and why this formation itself cannot survive.

Social-democracy has, in the past, defended its use of immigration controls as being part of an overall attempt to plan and regulate the economy, in the same way that it seeks to plan and regulate investment, prices and so on. A workers' state would, of course, plan and regulate all of those things, including immigration, as part of attempting to plan and regulate the economy in general. It is one of those characteristics of social-democracy/imperialism that signifies its nature as a transitional form between capitalism and socialism that it is forced to borrow these future forms, but as Marx and Engels note, in Anti-Duhring, its use of these future forms continues to be for the benefit of capital and capitalists, not for society as a whole. It continues to use these methods of planning and regulation in order to maximise profits. This signifies the difference between social-democracy and socialism.

When social-democracy talks about immigration controls, just as when it talks about import controls, or wage and price controls, it is never about the use of such measures as part of an attempt to plan and regulate the economy on behalf of the entire society, but only to benefit the maximisation of profit, and the beneficiaries of those profits, including the ruling class owners of fictitious capital that derive their revenues of interest/dividends, rents and taxes as deductions from that profit. The use of price and wage controls, for example, are always premised on the idea of fighting inflation, but inflation is a result of the state depreciating the currency/standard of prices. Higher prices, including a higher price for labour-power, are a consequence of inflation, not the cause of it. So, when the state introduces such controls it is always, really, just a cover for them seeking to depress wages, so as to protect or boost profits.

The use of import controls, is similarly justified on the basis of protecting jobs in the domestic market, as Trump is doing, now, but the real basis of the insecurity of those jobs, under capitalism, is the operation of the capitalist system itself, and the inefficiency of the given domestic capitalist production compared to its foreign competitors. In other words, it is a result of the failure of the domestic capitalists to invest in technology sufficiently to compete. Particularly for developed economies, import controls such as tariffs are never used as a means of enabling such investment to take place, but inevitably are used to simply subsidise the inefficient production of the domestic capitalists, enabling them to stay in business, and draw their profits, without having to invest in additional capital to raise their productivity. The resulting higher prices, simply get passed on to domestic consumers, the majority of whom are workers.

Immigration controls are very similar to import controls. For the domestic capitalists, and their governments, they throw the blame for the failure of the domestic capitalist economy on to foreigners, and away from the real cause, capitalism, and the particular deficiencies of the domestic capitalists to invest. The real purpose of such immigration controls, as with import controls, is not to effectively plan and regulate the economy for the benefit of society, but to protect and maximise the ability to produce and extract profits for the domestic capitalists, at the expense of the rest of society, of which workers comprise around 70%.

Although protectionism was common, in the past, as capitalist economies were dominated by merchant and financial capital, aligned with landed property (Mercantilism), and operated on the basis of appropriation of surplus value via unequal exchange, most visibly in the colonial empires, the overturning of those relations, as industrial capital became dominant, and it swept away those old monopolies, colonial empires and protectionism, as imperialism was based upon the production of surplus value, ushered in a new era. 

After WWII, it was not just that this imperialism established multinational companies on a widening geographical basis, to industrialise economies, and, thereby, to directly exploit labour-power, but it also established transnational para-state institutions, to try to establish a level playing field for capital, wherever it settled, a level playing field, and set of international rules, which, of course, by its nature, benefited the biggest, most efficient capitalist companies, and the states that stood behind them, i.e. primarily the US.

In the post-war period, many developed economies also lacked workers, as a new long wave expansion got underway. The US, had only come into being as an industrialised economy on the back of mass immigration of workers from Europe during the 19th century, and it continued to depend on immigration, increasingly from Mexico and Latin America, to fill millions of low paid, unskilled jobs. Germany filled similar jobs with “guest workers” from Türkiye, France from its former colonies, as did Britain. In the 1950's, Britain was desperate for workers from the Caribbean, for example. There was no question of immigration controls at these times, as capital needed labour, in order to enable the continued production of surplus value.

Indeed, immigration controls are something that has only significantly come into existence since the 1960's. Until that time there was pretty much an ability for a free movement of labour across the globe. In Britain, the first attempt at significant immigration controls was the Aliens Act of 1905, and its fairly open purpose was an attempt by Anti-Semitic Tories and fascists to prevent the immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe who were seeking to escape the pogroms being conducted by the Tsarist regime in Russia. The 1793 Aliens Act, which was a much smaller affair, was introduced to, similarly, prevent French refugees coming to Britain, following the revolution, and, again, its main intention, as part of the Anti-Jacobin Wars, was to prevent French revolutionaries entering Britain, under cover.

So, when the Labour Government introduced immigration laws in the 1960's, it did so, apologetically, whilst attempting to justify the measures, with meaningless talk about them being “non-racist” immigration controls. The Blair/Brown government, of course, needed large-scale immigration in the early 2000's, as the growing economy, in a new period of long-wave expansion, faced severe skilled labour shortages, which were filled from the EU. That government, at the same time, attempted to assuage a growing racist outcry, by focussing its attention, not on immigration, but on refugees, and asylum seekers. It did so, itself, in the most outrageous way that acted to conflate the two things, and so, also fuelled the racist narrative of the likes of the BNP, UKIP and their Tory fellow travellers. But, none of that is comparable to the openly racist, dog whistle politics of Starmer's Blue Labour government, which is entirely consistent with its own jingoistic, narrow nationalist agenda.

Unlike previous Labour governments, Starmer's government wears its racist credentials proudly on its chest. Its well publicised and staged mass arrests of immigrants in the last week, were a more vicious and brutal version of the kinds of racist actions undertaken by Theresa May's government, which were attacked by Labour at that time, and occur at the same time as the similarly vicious acts of the Trump regime, in launching raids on immigrant communities in the US. This latter coordination is also, no doubt, no coincidence, as Starmer seeks to curry favour with the fascistic regime of Trump, just as he has, over recent months, sought to curry favour with the fascistic government of Meloni in Italy.

Starmer and his racist, Blue Labour government claim that they seek to close down the criminal gangs involved in people smuggling, across the Channel. Of course, no socialist, social-democrat, or even Liberal can oppose smashing the criminal gangs. But, the actions this last week had nothing to do with that. They were raids on the poor victims of those gangs, not the gangs themselves. If Starmer wanted to undermine the gangs and their criminal activity, the best way to do that is not to criminalise immigration in the first place! If anyone who wanted to come to Britain, whether as a refugee, or as an economic migrant, was free to do so, and safe channels existed for that purpose, then, there would be no basis for the gangs to exist. Nor would it be necessary to have asylum seekers being kept for months or years, at taxpayers expense in hostels whilst they waited a decision on their application. They could, instead, be working, paying taxes and contributing to society with their labour, and paying rent or mortgage to provide their own shelter and so on.

In any case, the number of migrants coming as refugees or asylum seekers in small boats across the Channel is tiny compared to the number of legal migrants coming into the country to work on visas. When Farage, Johnson, Hoey, Mann and other proponents of Brexit conned large numbers to vote for it on the basis of “controlling the borders”, by which they meant stopping immigration, they, of course, did not mention that the result would be that immigration would, in fact, increase! The difference is, of course, that previously, before Brexit, that migration was mainly of EU citizens, coming to fill vital roles, whereas, now, they have been replaced by migrants from the Indian sub-continent and elsewhere. The former had far greater rights and protections than have the latter, which is, of course, one reason that the petty-bourgeois nationalists prefer it. In undermining those workers rights, they seek to undermine all workers rights, in the interests of the small employers. All EU workers not only have greater rights, as a result of EU laws, but they have the potential to act as a single, EU labour movement to demand even greater rights and protections.

When the racists of the BNP, UKIP, Reform, and now Blue Labour argue for immigration controls, they do so on the basis of arguments that are contradictory. They say that immigrants take “British” jobs, whilst simultaneously claiming that immigrants come to simply obtain benefits. They say that they cause shortages of houses, NHS beds, school places and so on, whilst saying that they simultaneously take “British” jobs in building, healthcare, teaching and so on. One of the most ridiculous claims is that “Britain is full up”, or that its a tiny cramped island. Ridiculous because residential property accounts for only 1% of land use in Britain. Compare that to the 2% used just for golf courses!

It is undoubtedly true that, under capitalism, the capitalists and their state, use immigration as a quick and easy way of recruiting additional labour, when labour shortages exist, rather than training additional skilled workers, or investing in technology to raise productivity. But, for the same reason, when the capitalists or their state seek to limit immigration it is never out of a concern to protect the employment or wages of domestic workers. Just as with import controls, the capitalists never use immigration controls alongside large-scale investment in training and technological development. On the contrary, it is only when, despite immigration, and other means of increasing the supply of labour, they still face labour shortages, and see wages rising, squeezing profits, that they begin to seriously engage in technological development, so as to replace labour with fixed capital. The purpose of that, again, is not for the benefit of society, but is to replace labour, increase unemployment, and so reduce wages and boost profits. Indeed, rather than such investment going along with rising employment and wages, or training of skilled workers, the opposite occurs.

The role of immigrant labour is no different than the role of domestic reserves of labour. For example, in the 1950's, a lot of the increase in labour supply came from married women being drawn into the workforce. Some chauvinists opposed that too on the basis that these married women only “worked for pin-money”, and so undermined male wages. Similarly, the children born as part of the baby-boom, began to enter the workforce from around 1960, increasing the supply of labour-power, and so acting to suppress wages. But, at a certain point of the long-wave cycle, as all of these additional workers, whether married women, former rural labourers, new young workers, or immigrants, also form additional demand for goods and services, and firms have to compete to satisfy that demand by additional capital accumulation, and employment, the effect is not to depress wages, but to raise them, as the labour supply does not rise to meet the demand for it. Only then, as capital faces a crisis of overproduction of capital, relative to labour supply, does it invest in a new technological revolution.

In the late 1970's, and early 1980's, the introduction of all of that new technology acted to replace skilled labour with unskilled labour, operating the new machines. That unskilled labour was inevitably paid lower wages. The increased productivity saw the workforce grow more than employment, so that unemployment rose, putting downward pressure on wages. It was during that period that the Thatcher government, in Britain, ended all of the various apprenticeship schemes for training skilled workers, and, likewise, in the US, Ronald Reagan faced down a strike by highly skilled Air Traffic Controllers, by sacking them all, rather than pay them a decent wage. The US has never been able to recruit sufficient skilled Air Traffic Controllers ever since.

Since Brexit, immigration into Britain has increased, not because of “illegal migration”, but because British firms have needed additional labour, and faced a big hole in obtaining it, as EU workers had left. Starmer's, reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalist government has taken over the advocacy of Brexit, and so has to also accept the consequences of it in relation to the destruction caused to the economy, as it stagnates, as it faces the continued crumbling of the infrastructure of roads, buildings and so on, of which Grenfell as well as RAC concrete are symbols, as well as the crisis in finding sufficient workers to staff hospitals, care homes and so on. All of these jobs can only be filled by continued large-scale, legal migration, but to divert attention from that, Starmer's vile racist government focuses on a tiny number of poor refugees, crossing the Channel.

And, of course, a large part of those refugees are a result of the wars waged by NATO in the Middle East. The most grotesque manifestation of that is the NATO backed genocide conducted by the Zionist regime against Palestinians. Now, when Palestinians seek to escape that genocide by coming to Britain, which bears direct responsibility for it, Starmer particularly, Starmer vies with Farage and Badenoch as to who can be the most vile, in rejecting their attempts to come to Britain under the same terms as those offered to Ukrainians. Of course, the difference in attitude is clear, the Ukrainians have white skin, and blue eyes.  Ukraine is part of the NATO imperialist alliance in its global war against China/Russia, whereas the Palestinians are the victims of that global inter-imperialist conflict.

Now, in a further illustration of the vile, reactionary racist nature of this government, Starmer has said that any migrants entering the country illegally, will be banned from becoming citizens, in the future. That is racism and vindictiveness taken directly from the manual of the likes of Donald Trump, to whom they are cosying up, as well as of his British sycophants, such as Farage. No decent social-democrat, Liberal, let alone socialist can vote for such openly racist, and reactionary politicians. So, it is no wonder that, as Starmer attempts to turn Blue Labour into an equivalent of UKIP, Labour voters are abandoning the party in droves. Unfortunately, the Left has failed to either stop the collapse of the Labour Party into this petty-bourgeois, nationalism, or to provide any kind of credible alternative to it, leaving progressive voters with the choice of being drawn to the superficially more attractive Liberals, Greens, and in Wales and Scotland, Plaid and SNP.

In reality, those parties are only superficially more progressive. What is more, they lack the link to the labour movement that the Labour Party has. The fight to rebuild, and provide a truly progressive alternative, must start, not with a concern for the ballot box, but with the need to rebuild the organisations of labour from the ground up. We must ask why it is that the trades unions, for example, have allowed their party to be hijacked by a tiny bunch of petty-bourgeois, nationalists, racists, and jingoists, financed by millionaires based in tax havens, not to mention the role of Zionists, and Zionist organisations such as BICOM.

Although we can understand and sympathise with Labour voters who abandon the party at the polls to vote Green, Liberal, or even for the heterogeneous list of Independents, no way forward can come from that route. It is necessary to wage a political struggle within the labour movement to defeat the Right, Centre and Soft Left, a struggle that can only be completed within the Labour Party itself, as the current political wing of the movement. We cannot say where the dynamic of that struggle may lead. It may lead to a recognition that the current Labour Party cannot be retrieved, and, certainly, without the trades unions committing to such a goal, it will be impossible. In that case, it would be necessary to build a new Workers Party, just as the trades unions did, when they split from the Liberals at the start of the last century. The political struggle waged by Marxists, now, within that context, will shape the nature of that future party, and our goal cannot be simply a Labour Party Mark II, nor even a more left-wing social-democratic party, but must be the formation of a mass, international socialist, i.e. communist party.

Alternatively, the struggle, now, may result in the defeat of the far-right, nationalists of Blue Labour. As I have set out, elsewhere, my analysis suggests to me that the Blair-Rights will, themselves, seek to ditch Starmer, when the Spring Elections show just how low Starmer has laid the party. They will seek to merge the party with the Liberals and social-democratic wing of the Conservatives a la Change UK, to form a new centre-right, opposition to Reform/Tories. The trades union bureaucrats will be likely to go along in the hope of salvaging the electoral fortunes of Labour, and to provide a lesser-evil to Reform/Tories. They will hang themselves, via such a Popular Front, as, when they can, the politicians will ditch the connection to the unions.

The task of Marxists is to warn of that danger, and to organise, now, to prevent it. Conservative social-democracy has had its bite at the cherry, and has completely failed. It has no more answers than does the right-wing populism, and petty-bourgeois nationalism of the likes of Farage and Starmer. Only a clear Marxist programme, founded on the promotion of the interests of workers, and of the working-class as a global class can offer a way forward.

Genocide Joe Denies The Reality We All Can See

The International Criminal Court has called for arrest warrants to be issued for Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as a result of the genocide the Zionist state is undertaking in Gaza.  Netanyahu of course, claimed that the decision by the Chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, who was Israel's preferred choice for the post, was yet another example of "anti-Semitism".  Netanyahu's attorney, Genocide Joe Biden, of course, has backed his claims, denying the reality of the genocide we can all see with our own eyes, and again illustrating the sham nature of bourgeois-democracy, and its so called rule of law, and international rules based system.

The bourgeois-democracy is a democracy designed only to ensure the continuation of the social dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the rule of law, consequently the rule of the laws created by the bourgeoisie, in the interests of the bourgeoisie, interpreted by the bourgeoisie, and enforced by the bourgeoisie's state.  The international rules based system, is likewise a system of rules created by the dominant sections of the bourgeoisie, in its most powerful imperialist states, for the benefit of those states, and enforced by those states.

Of course, occasionally, even the sham bourgeois-democracy throws up a spanner in the works, an elected government that challenges those interests, though the whole working of the system, and of the state, makes it very difficult.  Occasionally, even the bourgeois courts might throw up a ruling that the bourgeoisie does not like.  But, there are a multiplicity of mechanisms to neuter such events.  The reaction of Genocide Joe, illustrates one of them, which is the ruling class that makes those rules, can simply ignore the very rare decisions that do not go their way, whether in elections, or in court rulings.  They have the power, the control of the state, of the bodies of armed men, to be able to do that.

So, unfortunately, although everything Owen Jones says in this video is true, his conclusion from it is false.  The US will not arrest Netanyahu and his gang if they go o the US, because that gang is carrying out the interests of US imperialism, via its genocide against Palestinians.  As genocide Joe once said, himself, if Israel didn't exist, the US would have to create it, and, indeed, it is, in reality, a creation of US imperialism.  Having, the ICC acknowledge what all the world can see, but that imperialism, and its Zionist gauleiters seek to deny, is useful, but the idea that anything will come of it, simply by public opinion being mobilised is just another bourgeois-democratic delusion, pure bourgeois formalism.  Nothing will, ultimately, come of it, unless, the working-class is mobilised to overthrow capitalism.

The same bourgeois formalism is what stood behind the delusion of the so called two-state solution, the reality of which is also being exposed as every day passes.  We now have Ireland, Spain, and Norway being the latest states to join the majority of other states in the world, that acknowledge the reality, obvious to all, that what exists is, already two states - Israel and Palestine.  Yet, the existence of those two states has provided no solution for either the Palestinians, nor the Israeli Jews.  Certainly, as Trotsky warned, back in 1940, it can offer no progressive solution, only a continued conflict, and carnival of reaction on both sides of the border, between them.

The idea that two states could provide a solution is based on pure bourgeois formalism, of the idea that just having some piece of paper, some acknowledgement in bourgeois, international law of the existence of a state, would ensure that those within it could live their lives in peace, and harmony with other states.  It is the same idea of bourgeois-democracy, and of social-democracy, purveyed by Stalinism, in the concept of "Socialism In One Country", of gaining "breathing space", as set out in the "stages theory".  It is delusional, because the imperialists have no reason to simply observe such niceties, when they have the power to override them, when it is in their interests to do so.

All of the arguments put up by the Zionists and their imperialist sponsors are nonsense, as set out, in this video.

But, it doesn't matter.  The US, and most of its subordinate allies in Europe will not arrest Netanyahu and his gang.  In those European states where that might happen, they will simply be told to stay away.  The US, despite being the main sponsor of the delusional notion of the two state solution, continually refuses to do the basic thing required for it, of recognising the existence, even, of a Palestinian state!  That has been the basis of its argument for ignoring the ICC ruling, on the basis of jurisdiction, completely at odds with its argument, and immediate support for the ICC's issuing of arrest warrants against Putin!

What is far more likely, is that the arrest warrants against the leaders of Hamas will be executed, and it is they that will be hauled before the court.  After all, as one elected politician from those imperialist states put it, "the ICC was created for Africa, and thugs like Putin", not to actually put the genocidal thugs allied to US imperialism in the dock.  It may be that, at some point, Netanyahu, will be sacrificed by US imperialism, as it has done with its henchman before, but not before the goal of exterminating the Palestinians has been achieved, leaving the road clear for the Zionist state to establish normal relations with Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf states.

The fact that a majority of countries recognised the existence of two states, does not change the reality that one of those states, Palestine, is not allowed to function, and will not be allowed to function, as a separate state, by the Zionist state, and its US sponsor.  It certainly does not change the reality for the Palestinian (and wider Arab), as well as Jewish working-class, these states are viciously anti-working-class states that offers no progressive solution for them, and on the basis of Zionism and reactionary nationalism, keeps the working-class of the region irreconcilably divided, and subordinated to the ruling class, and its state.

And, so the fact that all of this becomes more apparent with each day, as the sham nature of bourgeois democracy crumbles, as it tries to deny the reality that everyone can see with their own eyes, and resorts increasingly to a denial of basic bourgeois democratic freedoms in the West, so as to suppress the criticism of it, that does not change the fact that, without overthrowing capitalism, all of this furore, will itself, eventually subside, and things will roll on as before, with the ruling class and imperialism having achieved its aims.  The idea that it will not is just an application of the deficient strategy of the Left over many years of "more militancy", and "build a bigger demo".  

So, whilst its useful to expose the sham nature of bourgeois-democracy, its rule of law, and international rules based system, its necessary to ensure that what is being done is precisely that, and not to sow further illusions in it that if only a bigger popular movement is built, more public opinion mobilised, something fundamental will change.  It will not, unless capitalism itself is overthrown, and socialism put in its place.  So, things like this are useful, but limited.

Unless its pointed out that the ruling class will simply ignore such challenges if they seriously threaten its power, that they will subvert any such decisions, and ultimately, if their rule is seriously threatened, will just sweep bourgeois-democracy aside, as they did in Italy, Germany and Spain in the 1920's and 30's, and in Chile in 1973, the result is to simply sow further illusions in bourgeois-democracy, and so to lead workers into another such disaster, or at best into a demoralising dead-end.

Reactionary Nationalism Stalls Despite Lack of Principled Opposition

By-elections, last week, in England, and the Spanish General Election on Sunday, showed reactionary nationalism stalling, despite the lack of any credible, principled opposition being mounted against it. In England, the Liberals who, along with the Greens, SNP and Plaid Cymru are the only main parties opposing the reactionary, Brexitoryism of the Tories and Blue Labour, won a striking victory in Somerton and Frome. In Selby, the reactionary nationalists of Starmer's Blue Labour, scored a contrasting, but unconvincing win against their Tory twins, whilst failing to defeat them in Boris Johnson's former seat in Uxbridge. In Spain, a much predicted win for the right-wing nationalists of the Popular Party, and their ultra-right allies of Vox, failed to materialise, again despite no credible, principled opposition from either the PSOE, or its allies in the hodge-podge, rotten bloc, popular front of Sumar.

In the Somerton and Frome by-election, a Tory majority of 19,000, in 2019, was overturned by the Liberals, with a 29% swing, to give them an 11,000 majority. Blue Labour's vote share collapsed, falling 80% from 12.9% to just 2.6%. Nor can that be put down to simply tactical voting to ensure the defeat of the Tories. Blue Labour is far closer to the Tories than to the Liberals, whilst the Greens, are closer to the Liberals, and yet, seen, as more progressive. If it was simply tactical voting, then you would expect that the Green vote would have collapsed even more than that of Labour. The opposite happened. The Greens share of the vote rose by 100%, doubling from 5.1% in 2019, to 10.2%.

That represents a significant rejection of the reactionary, nationalist Brexitory policies of both the Tories, and Blue Labour, in favour of the pro-EU stance of the Liberals and Greens, despite the fact that the Liberals and Greens have, themselves, hardly been championing the cause of progressive internationalism, and a return to the EU. That is no doubt why the biggest winner in the by-election was “None of the Above”, as the turnout almost halved from 76% in 2019, to just 44%. Still, even if, in a General Election, the Tories picked up the majority of that missing 25,000 votes, they would still be struggling to overturn the Liberals current 11,000 majority.

That is not the case in Selby. The same drop in turnout was witnessed, falling from 72% to 44%. Although Labour saw its share of the vote rise from 24.6% to 46%, and the swing to it from the Tories being 24%, as against the 29% swing to the Liberals in Somerton, it was only enough to give Labour a majority of 4,000, which is more than likely to disappear come a General Election, as it would be expected the Tories would pick up the majority of the missing 20,000 votes. A further look at the two by-elections, shows the difference. Where Labour's vote share dropped by 80% in Somerton, the Liberal vote share in Selby fell by only 60%, and again, the Greens, seen as both more pro-EU, and more progressive (wrongly) saw their vote share rise by 60%.

The failure of Labour to secure any sizeable tactical voting from the Liberals or Greens, despite the fact that those parties had no chance of winning in Selby, is a result of the fact that their voters see Starmer's Blue Labour, rightly, as just an imitation of the reactionary nationalist, pro-Brexit policies of the Tories. Whilst Corbyn was also tainted with that same reactionary nationalism and Brexitism, at least, under his leadership, Labour was seen to have returned to its original social-democratic heritage, and, on Brexit, Corbyn was out of step with the vast majority of the party. But, under Starmer, not only is the reactionary nationalism and jingoism taken to the extreme, but his purges of the party offers no glimmer of hope that it might be reversed, any time soon, and that goes along with all of the rest of the petty-bourgeois, reactionary policies that Starmer is introducing that make Labour a party way to the Right of what it has ever been in the past. It is no longer even a social-democratic party geared to the interests of large-scale capital.

In Uxbridge, its weakness was even further exposed. There the fact that it is just a clone of Boris Johnson's Brexitory Party, gave no reason for anyone hostile to those reactionary nationalist politics to vote for it. Where, in Selby, a protest vote against a dysfunctional Tory Party was enough to have many Tory voters stay at home, in protest, enabling Labour to scrape in with a fragile majority, in Uxbridge, the petty-bourgeoisie found another reason to turn out to vote for the Tories rather than Labour – ULEZ. ULEZ is illustrative of the reasons for the failure of social-democracy, and rise of petty-bourgeois reaction, over the last 40 years.

The motivation for ULEZ, to reduce dangerous carbon emissions into the atmosphere, not only to deal with its effects on climate change, but, also, and more immediately, to deal with the dangers to the health of workers, breathing in a cocktail of noxious fumes, is entirely progressive and commendable. It ought to be one of those policies that social-democrats can champion, and win support for. Of course, amongst many workers, in London, that is, indeed, the case. As with Brexit, its not amongst progressive, working-class, Labour voters that there is opposition. The opposition comes from the petty-bourgeoisie, but that petty-bourgeoisie, not only also votes, but its sentiments are also echoed amongst sections of the working-class.

The petty-bourgeoisie opposes ULEZ, because they see in it, another layer of costs and bureaucracy to pay for that eats into its small profits. And, the same is true of those poorer, and less affluent workers, who are the ones that have the old inefficient cars that get hit by ULEZ and similar policies. The problem with social-democracy, particularly conservative social-democracy is that it is managerialist and bureaucratic, and thinks that, just because it sees the progressive nature of certain policies, everyone else will do so too, and, if not, well too bad, because it will push through the policy anyway, seeking acceptance of it later. That was the approach of social-democracy to the EU, for example.

The idea that the role of a political party is to be proponents of an ideology, to go out and actually win support for its ideas is alien to social-democracy, and has become even more so in recent decades, when the focus has been placed, more and more, simply on populism and tailism. Starmer's immediate scapegoating of Sadiq Khan, for Labour's failure in Uxbridge, and fact that he seems to be prepared to abandon the remnants of its environmental agenda for the sake of a few votes, is again illustrative of it. In the case of his attack on the soft-Right Khan, its another warning, as I predicted before Starmer's election, that he will have to move continuously to the Right, making not only the soft-Left in danger, but a whole swathe of even the centre and soft-Right of the PLP.

In the 1950's, and early 60's, a raft of progressive social-democratic measures were introduced, by both Tories and Labour. The perennial London “pea-soupers” were turned into a thing of the past, as air quality was improved with a shift from the burning of coal, and production of town gas from coal, by the introduction of much cleaner, and more efficient, natural gas from the North Sea, as well as a shift to electricity. The general development was codified in various pieces of Environmental Health legislation, such as The Clean Air Acts. The reason these acts could be, and were introduced was that new technologies produced more efficient means of producing and using energy. That reduced costs for industry, and raised its rate of profit, but also, with rising living standards, and a need to reduce time spent on domestic labour, the use of gas and electric heaters, as well as of central heating made phasing out inefficient coal fires, and coal burning inevitable.

At a time of falling costs for these new types of energy and heating, as well as rising living standards that enabled worker households to be able to pay out for these new forms of heating that went along with improving their lives with things like fridges, TV's, electric washing machines, vacuum cleaners and so on, social-democracy was pushing on an open door. Its not so easy when living standards have been under pressure from ten years of government imposed austerity, when the boycott of Russian oil and gas and so on, has pushed up energy prices, and so on. Its in those conditions that social-democracy needs to work harder to engage in a determined struggle to advance its ideas, but also to offer workers incentives to adopt them. That, however, sometimes involves social-democracy providing those incentives at the expense of capital, and that is what it is never prepared to do.

In Spain, the PSOE, like other social-democratic parties, has failed to advance the interests of Spanish workers. It has been a part of the general EU support for NATO's war against Russia in Ukraine, including the boycott of Russian oil and gas, and food exports that has pushed up global prices for those commodities, with a consequent effect on the living standards of Spanish workers. The Right have benefited from that failure of the PSOE, just as they have done elsewhere, over the last 20 years, pushing easy, but false and reactionary nationalist solutions. It fuelled the rise of the BNP and UKIP in Britain, the FN in France, and their equivalents across Europe, as well as Trump in the US.

Yet, the reality is that a progressive social-democracy, attending to the needs of real, large-scale, industrial capital, could, in the last 20 years, have also supported the needs and interests of workers. The expansion of the EU, and of global trade was a progressive development that reduced costs of production, and boosted the potential for capital accumulation, as well as of raising workers' living standards. But, instead of facilitating that accumulation of capital, and rise in living standards, social-democratic governments, and states, looking to the interests not of that real industrial capital, but of the owners of fictitious-capital (shareholders, bondholders etc.), i.e. the ruling class, were transfixed with the idea of continually inflating this fictitious wealth, of the need to produce each year, additional capital gains that could form the basis of further borrowing, as the means of funding additional consumption.

When that fool's paradise collapsed in 2008, they still sought to restore it, unable to change their mindset and conception of how the world functions. So, rather than seeing the solution in the need to actually create new value, and surplus value, via the accumulation of additional capital, they saw any such development, occurring naturally, despite their efforts to frustrate it via fiscal austerity and so on, as deeply troublesome, because that economic expansion, and capital accumulation, meant rising employment, and rising demand for capital causing interest rates to rise, the same rising interest rates that had caused asset prices to crash. All efforts were deliriously put into holding back the real economy, real capital, real value creation, in order to ensure the renewed inflation of purely illusory paper wealth, the rise in meaningless asset prices, as the form of wealth of the ruling class.

At first, it is only the lower ranks of the working-class that most notably suffer from that. Its they that do not own a home, whose paper price inflates hugely each year, who probably do not have a company, let alone private pension, or savings tucked away into mutual funds, whose paper valuation again inflates each year with other asset prices. Even some of the petty-bourgeoisie, can often turn its attention to this development, and expand its activities into becoming buy to let landlords, increasingly interested, not in the rents, but in the same annual inflation of property prices, and consequent capital gains. Its those elements excluded from that fantasy of rising asset prices that first become alienated, and, as always, provide a pool in which the reactionaries can fish. But, as asset prices continue to rise, so this pool of people grows larger, because an increasing number of people cannot afford to buy a home, or to move up to a better home, like every Ponzi Scheme, if you were not in near the beginning, it costs you more to buy in at the later higher prices, whether it is a house, a pension, or the purchase of shares, meaning that the returns, from doing so, are increasingly diminished, and your risk of making a capital loss rises significantly.

The conservative social-democrats, in trying to live in that world of fantasy that existed from the late 1980's until 2008, of ever rising asset prices, are offering workers something they cannot deliver, and, in the meantime, in order to try to engineer a return of that fantasy, and even just to avoid the reality represented by the 2008 crash, they have to attack workers real, immediate interests, as with Larry Summers calls for millions of US workers to be sacked so that the inflation that central banks have created can be reduced, or the calls of British Labour politicians, and their EU counterparts for workers not to seek to avoid their living standards being cut, by demanding above inflation pay rises.

In Britain, the US and across the EU, despite this abysmal performance by social-democrats, the reactionary nationalist Right are failing to make further headway, from that they have made in the last 20 years, and that is a sign of the underlying objective changes in material conditions, and its reflection in ideas. A decade ago, it was manifest, confusedly in the rise of Sanders, Corbyn, Syriza, Podemos, the Left Bloc and so on.

The confused, inadequate nature of those initial responses, themselves still stuck in the realms of social-democracy, saw them collapse when tested, but the course of history has simply, as it always does, flowed into other channels. It is flowing into the channels of industrial action, as workers feel a new found strength and confidence, as economic expansion has continued despite the best efforts of conservatives, and labour shortages have forced employers to compete for labour, via higher wages.

That kind of industrial, sectional economic struggle can never be sufficient, as Marx described in Value, Price and Profit, and as Lenin described, because what workers need to move forward is a political struggle, a class struggle. But, the two are not divorced. As Marx put it, workers cannot wage a class struggle unless they can first, at least, wage a struggle to defend their standard of living, and as Lenin put it, whilst strikes are not instances of class struggle, they are schools for class struggle. And, there is also a connection between economic strikes and political strikes. Those of us who lived through the similar period of the 1950's, and 60's are aware of that, as the state sought to constrain the wildcat strikes of an emboldened working-class, with laws, which, in response, led to workers engaging in political strikes, such as that for the release of the Pentonville Five.

The task of Marxists analysing these developments, and their precedents, is to insist on revolutionary optimism. The reactionary nationalists have hit a high water mark, and despite the miserable performance of social-democracy, the conditions are moving against them, and also against conservative social-democracy itself. But, we also need to learn the lessons of the 1960's, and 70's too, when revolutionaries, were caught up in that rising tide of economism, and growth in the size and influence of progressive social-democracy. We are not social-democrats, even progressive or Left Social Democrats.

We are Marxists, revolutionary, international socialists. Social-democracy, even left social-democracy, is the ideology of the bourgeoisie, ultimately representing its objective interests. We march with it for part of the way, in so far as it strengthens the position of the working-class to fight, as Marx describes in Wage-Labour and Capital, because the working-class is strongest when real capital itself expands more rapidly, and facilitates that opening up of ideas, discussed by Lenin above, of the need for workers control of production, and so on. However, our goal is not simply this improvement of conditions within capitalism, including workers' control of production and so on, which the ruling class would, in any case, never concede, unless forced to do so by an armed working-class. Our goal is the overthrow of the existing wages system itself, and its replacement by international socialism.

Biden Turns To More Dictators To Save His Skin

In the 1930's, when social-patriots argued that socialists should form a Popular Front with "democratic imperialism" to fight the greater evil of fascism, Trotsky pointed out that, for imperialism, democracy and fascism are simply two different masks that it adopts or discards according to whichever best met its needs at the time.  Imperialism/capitalism is not committed to democracy, and the wars it fights are never to replace fascism with democracy, which simply gives it a pretext.  Democratic capitalist regimes adopt Bonapartist and dictatorial measures, in the course of wars, and can go from democracy to fascism themselves during the course of wars, and of course, "democratic imperialism" allies with dictatorships and fascism itself to fight others.

NATO has the dictatorship of Erdogan, in Turkey as a permanent member; its members states have close relations with the brutal regime of Duterte in Indonesia, whose goods routinely murder political opponents; they have close economies relations, and military alliances with the feudal Gulf monarchies that stone women for adultery, behead opponents, as well as kidnapping journalists before dismembering them while they are still alive!  In the 1930's, as Trotsky pointed out, the same "democratic imperialism", they claimed it was fighting for freedom and democracy against Hitler and Mussolini, was at the same time, holding millions of colonial slaves captive, deprived of basic human rights.  In more recent times, this hypocrisy was summed up in the mantra used by imperialism, to justify its alliances with all sorts of unsavoury rulers, as "he may be a bastard, but he's our bastard."  Nothing has changed, when it comes to imperialism, and its wars, whether shooting wars or economic wars, as their starter for 10.

The economic war that the US has been waging against Russia and China, and at a lower level against the EU, which is its main competitor and real target, has blowback.  It increases costs, and in an inflationary environment, in which the vast oceans of liquidity - much of it in Dollars as global reserve currency - can simply be sucked into circulation, enabling those higher costs to be translated into higher prices, which then become second round higher costs, wages and so on, which then creates further rounds of inflation, that poses problems for central banks, as well as for states who see their own expenditures rise, meaning their borrowing rises, which puts upward pressure on interest rates, which then causes asset prices to crash.  Given that the global ruling class owns all its wealth in the form of these paper assets, much of it relating to US based paper assets, that is a significant problem.

The immediate problem facing Biden, however, is that his economic war against Russia has pushed up oil and gas prices phenomenally.  Back in 2014, describing the way, the normal process of the long wave was unfolding, as high primary product prices had driven a new round of exploration and development, I said that oil prices would never again go over $100 in 2014 prices.  In the last few days, they have hit $140 and could hit $200 by the end of the month.  But, that is entirely due to Biden's economic war against Russia, which has constricted the supply of oil on to global markets, artificially.  Given the increased capacity for oil production from new technologies, from fracking and so on, together with the more efficient use of oil, due to new technologies, and given that oil is being replaced as a source of energy production in power stations, and in vehicles, the argument that oil should not go above $100 remains valid.  Its current price is entirely down to Biden's economic war.

In the US, petrol prices have hit their highest level ever.  That is bad news in a country where people's views on "freedom", are inextricably linked to their ability to get into their gas guzzling cars, and drive anywhere they choose in the country, whenever they choose.  It is a problem in a country that depends upon goods being transported long distances by truck, and everyone can see, in an election year, that the problem is entirely one created by Biden and his economic war.  He's tried in typical bureaucratic manner to deal with it, in the past, by releasing oil from the US Strategic Reserve, but that barely touched the surface, and simply means storing up the problem for the future.

Now, Biden is responding by pleading with the dictators in Venezuela and Iran to come to the aid of the US economy, by pumping more oil and supplying it, to make up for the oil that the US is trying to stop flowing from Russia!  In other words, in order to implement an economic war (against Russia) whose pretext is the dictatorial nature of the regime and its invasion of Ukraine, Biden is turning to other dictators whose regimes the US has already imposed sanctions, with the promise that if they help him, those sanctions might be lessened.  If ever their was an example of the lunacy of the policy of "lesser-evilism" that might be it, though closely matched by the former US policy of dealing in secret with Iran, in order to raise funds to supply arms to the Contras in Nicragua. 

In terms of dealing with Iran, it is particularly hypocritical, given that one reason the US imposed sanctions on Iran was its role in military interventions in Syria, and other parts of the Middle-East.  So, it deals with Iran, promising to lessen its sanctions in part introduced because of its expansionism, in order to get lower oil prices for the US, that have been caused by Biden's economic war against Russia, taking part on the pretext of Russia's invasion of Ukraine!  But, more than that, however, you describe the kleptocratic regime of Putin, in Russia, it is one based upon capitalist production, and the rule of the bourgeoisie.  It is modernist in outlook.  But, the same cannot be said about the regime in Iran.  It is not modernist in outlook, but decidedly mediaevalist, based upon the clergy and landlords.  Yes, it has large-scale capitalist production, as its forced to do, in a world where such production dominates, but that simply illustrates the contradiction residing at the heart of the regime.  In terms of a class analysis of the state, Iran would have to be described as reactionary as against Russia, or any other bourgeois state.

Yet, Biden is prepared to deal with that reactionary state, and, thereby, to facilitate its survival, simply in order to obtain some very short term benefit, in reducing petrol prices in the US, whose current levels are likely to cause Democrat candidates to get slammed in this year's elections, opening the door once again to the Trump Party.  This is the deplorable state that social-democracy has sunk into, and unfortunately, significant sections of the Left have sunk along with it. 

Social-Patriots v International Socialism

The war between Ukraine and Russia has again brought out the division that erupted prior to WWI, between social-patriots, and international socialists, the latter gathering in conferences at Zimmerwald in Switzerland, and who adopted as their slogan, “The Main Enemy Is At Home”, as first put forward by KarlLiebknecht. The basic, and, for a socialist, undeniable foundation of this slogan, is that the workers of each country have more in common with the workers of other countries, including countries they are at war with, than they do with their own ruling class. The inevitable conclusion of that fact, for a socialist, is that the workers of each country should refuse to line up in support of their own ruling class, in any war, and direct their appeals, on that basis to the workers of other countries to do the same, and to join with them in turning their guns on the real enemy, the ruling capitalist class.

The social-patriots, to the extent that they are ever socialists, rather than being liberals/social-democrats, give lip service to this idea, but as soon as they are put to the test with an actual war, they abandon it, like rats abandoning a ship. That is what they did in WWI and WWII, and the same is being seen today in relation to Ukraine's war with Russia. The social-patriots try to cover this class treason by sophistry, arguing that the war between Ukraine and Russia is not of the same type as that of WWI. They always have to argue that the specific instance of their class treason is different, to justify themselves.

In respect of the war between Russia and Ukraine, their argument is that its all Russia's fault, because its Russia that attacked Ukraine. But, in every war, each side claims that its all the fault of the other side, that it was the other side that first started shooting, and so on. Socialists have always rejected such playground arguments, and said, we do not care who started it, who may or may not be at fault, because the result is the same that, the war sets worker against worker, and lines the workers of each country up with their own bourgeoisie, a consequence that we have no interest in supporting.

The extension of this argument is that Russia is trying to annex Ukraine, and so this is more like the position of socialists supporting a national liberation movement against a colonial power. Firstly, there is no evidence that Russia is trying to annex Ukraine, as against annexing the Russian majority areas of the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics, just as it previously annexed Crimea. Indeed, one reason that financial markets have not sold off big-time, is that speculators realise that Putin's ambitions are limited to those goals, and that he is likely to achieve them in fairly short order. Its only when NATO, and western media has tried to claim that Russia is trying to annexe the whole of Ukraine, and that Russian troops might get bogged down, that markets sold off more, but that narrative is almost certainly wrong.

The same was said about Russia annexing Georgia, in 2008, when it sent in troops to protect South Ossetia against the war crimes being committed by Georgia, against the Russian majority population in those areas. It didn't try to annex Georgia. Russia's attacks on Ukraine have concentrated on consolidating the breakaway republics, and driving out the Ukrainian Army, and the Nazi paramilitaries that have been incessantly shelling the breakaway republics for the last 8 years, causing 14,000 deaths of people living in those areas. It has followed the NATO playbook used when it tore Kosovo out of Serbia, of, then, using mostly air strikes, and missile strikes against Ukrainian military and command and control installations inside Ukraine. Russia has only a fraction of the troops mobilised that it would require if it had ever intended annexing Ukraine, which shows it never had any such intention. Nor is their any reason it would want to do so, Ukraine, even by the standards of Russia, is a vast geographical area, with 40 million inhabitants. Trying to annex it, and hold it, would be hugely expensive financially and militarily, and for what - as a country it is bankrupt.

The Nazis Of The Ukrainin
Azov Battalion have
 conducted a scorched
 earth retreat from Donetsk
 and Lugansk Republics

The argument that Russia is trying to annex the whole, or large part, of Ukraine, and has got bogged down, due to the valiant efforts of the Ukrainian army is a fiction, and simply a feeble attempt at propaganda by NATO, and western liberals and their media. Russia has largely achieved its military objectives in a matter of around 4 days; Ukraine has come to the negotiating table; Ukrainian security forces have even cooperated with Russian troops to secure the Chernobyl nuclear site; the Ukrainian military has largely melted away when it was confronted with Russian troops, whilst the Azov Battalion has engaged in a scorched earth policy of increasing its shelling and destruction of civilian areas, as it has withdrawn; and the Ukrainian government has been led, in panic, to hand out tens of thousands of weapons willy-nilly to untrained citizens, and to call on western mercenaries to come to its aid. That, even as NATO has been providing it with tons of the latest military hardware, for months, and that it has the advantage of the defending army, which normally requires the attacker to have a 4:1 numerical advantage, whereas the Ukraine forces outnumber the Russians.

But, let's assume that the claim that Russia seeks to annex Ukraine is correct. Does this change the position of socialists in relation to such a war? No. As socialists, we are, of course, opposed to annexations, and socialists oppose Russia's attack on Ukraine, just as we oppose Ukraine's military attacks on the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics, over the last 8 years, that have killed at least 14,000 of the inhabitants of those regions. But, the fact that we oppose such attacks, does not mean that we, then, give our support to Ukraine – which actually means, and can only mean support for the Ukrainian ruling class and its state. My enemy's enemy is not my friend. Just because the ruling class of Russia and Ukraine fall out, like bandits squabbling in the thieves kitchen, does not mean that we have to pick one set of bandits to support against the other!

What about the clearest example of a situation in which a country is oppressed by another, that of a colony seeking to win independence from a colonial master? But, again, socialists do not choose to support one ruling class – that of the colony – as against the ruling class of the coloniser. Nor do we stand shoulder to shoulder with the ruling class of the colony, in a war against the colonial power, which would be necessarily a war aimed at the workers of the colonial power. In such conditions, we argue for the workers and peasants in the colony to organise independently of their ruling class to fight for their freedom from the colonial power, and that, in doing so, they appeal to the workers of the colonial power for support, for them to engage in industrial action to block war supplies and so on. The reason we do that, is that, even in this most stark of examples, our enemy is not the workers of the colonial power, but the ruling class within the colony itself. If, and as soon as, the workers and peasants achieve freedom from colonial slavery, our strategy, based upon permanent revolution, is for them to turn their guns on their own bourgeoisie, if they have not had to do that already, as in such conditions, seeing the potential of the workers and peasants coming to power, that bourgeoisie invariably abandons the anti-colonial struggle, and itself sides with the colonial power, to save its own skin and property.

“In conformity with its fundamental task of combating bourgeois democracy and exposing its falseness and hypocrisy, the Communist Party, as the avowed champion of the proletarian struggle to overthrow the bourgeois yoke, must base its policy, in the national question too, not on abstract and formal principles but, first, on a precise appraisal of the specific historical situation and, primarily, of economic conditions; second, on a clear distinction between the interests of the oppressed classes, of working and exploited people, and the general concept of national interests as a whole, which implies the interests of the ruling class...

From these fundamental premises it follows that the Communist International’s entire policy on the national and the colonial questions should rest primarily on a closer union of the proletarians and the working masses of all nations and countries for a joint revolutionary struggle to overthrow the landowners and the bourgeoisie. This union alone will guarantee victory over capitalism, without which the abolition of national oppression and inequality is impossible...

Recognition of internationalism in word, and its replacement in deed by petty-bourgeois nationalism and pacifism, in all propaganda, agitation and practical work, is very common, not only among the parties of the Second International, but also among those which have withdrawn from it, and often even among parties which now call themselves communist...

Petty-bourgeois nationalism proclaims as internationalism the mere recognition of the equality of nations, and nothing more. Quite apart from the fact that this recognition is purely verbal, petty-bourgeois nationalism preserves national self-interest intact, whereas proletarian internationalism demands, first, that the interests of the proletarian struggle in any one country should be subordinated to the interests of that struggle on a world-wide scale...

the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form..

(Lenin – Draft Theses On The National and Colonial Struggle)

So, even in the starkest example, of a colony, the international socialist position is that we identify the interests of the workers and peasants as separate from those of the ruling class of that country. Compare that with the position of the liberals/social-democrats, and the reformist social-patriots, including those that call themselves Marxists, who talk only about the abstract concept “Ukraine”, or the “nation”, or “the people”, and who, in doing so, sweep over the fact of classes and class oppression within the country.

One of the reasons that so many have fallen into a social-patriotic position on Ukraine is that, for decades, petty-bourgeois moral socialists failed to adopt this position in relation to national liberation or “anti-imperialist” struggles. The Stalinists, who had adopted the Popular Front in the 1920's, and again in the 1930's, after the interlude of the Third Period, of course adopted a position of supporting third world bourgeois nationalists. But, those in the various Left groups in competition with the Stalinists adopted a similar position. In one case after another, they became cheerleaders of various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist movements, giving them more or less uncritical support, on the basis of their “anti-imperialism”, thereby ignoring the fact that these forces, and governments were themselves, often vile, anti-working-class regimes, and most clearly represented the “Main Enemy” of the workers that oppressed them at home. The idea of building separate, independent working-class organisations in opposition to those forces, disappeared entirely from the program of this petty-bourgeois, moralising left.

Support for “national self-determination” became an easy area of work for tiny sects that had gone nowhere in building large working-class socialist parties, especially after the downturn in industrial struggle from the mid 1980's, but they had always been able to count on a new annual intake of students, who could replenish their numbers to replace those they had burned out and disillusioned, and those students were always more attracted to the single issue campaigns to support this year's chosen cause, rather than the hard slog of work inside the labour movement itself. Attaching yourself to this year's cause of national liberation, be it Ireland, or Nicaragua, Tibet or Kosovo, always played well in the student recruitment stakes.

In referring to defence of Ukraine, what they actually mean is defence of the Ukrainian ruling class and its property. Marxists are, of course, opposed to any attack on Ukraine, but that does not at all require us to become supporters of the Ukrainian ruling class, its state and its army, any more than opposition to attacks on Gaza requires us to be supporters of Hamas! We are in favour of the Ukrainian workers, as described in the above Theses, forming their own militia to fight for their own liberation, not just against any invading army, but also against their own immediate oppressors, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie and its state. It is on that basis that they are best placed to appeal to the Russian workers to follow their example, and turn their guns on Putin and the Russian ruling class. It is a certain fact that, so long as the Ukrainian workers identify themselves with the Ukrainian ruling class, its state, and the NATO imperialism that stands behind it, Putin will be able to use that fact to mobilise the Russian workers behind him, and to isolate any Russian workers opposing him.

What then of Lenin's position on self-determination for all of those nations trapped within the Tsarist Empire for which the Bolsheviks set out support for their right to free secession. Its true, Lenin and the Bolsheviks did argue that the Russian Marxists should emphasise their support for the right of free secession for those nations. Why, and what did that mean? Lenin and the Bolsheviks adopted that position as a tactic. Those nations had been trapped and oppressed in the Tsarist Empire for centuries. The peoples within them naturally looked upon all Russians, including the Bolsheviks with suspicion, if not worse. Lenin wanted to overcome that, and win their support, combining their struggle against Tsarist national oppression, with the struggle against Tsarist and bourgeois class oppression.

By saying to the workers and peasants in these oppressed nations, “we are not like our rulers, we do not seek to oppress you, and to prove it, we will allow you to freely secede, if that is what you want”, Lenin hoped they could win them over to a joint struggle. It was never Lenin's intention to argue for any such secession, or national self-determination of these oppressed nations. On the contrary, his and the Bolshevik position was that they sought not national self-determination, but the self determination of the working-class, and that they sought the removal of existing national borders and nation states, and the joining together of workers across all of them. Emphasising the right to secede was simply a way of trying to persuade the peoples of these oppressed nations not to do do so, that they did not need to do so, because the real solution to their problems resided not in nationalism, not in national self-determination – which would simply replicate their existing problems of being exploited by the bourgeoisie – but was Socialism, and for which, the combination of workers across a significant number of countries is required.

When Germany attacked Russia in 1914, the the Russian liberals and social-patriots argued that it was necessary to rally around the flag and to engage in a war against Germany, just as, today, the social patriots, and social-imperialists argue that its necessary to defend Ukraine – i.e. defend the Ukrainian ruling class and its state – against Russia. The two situations are entirely comparable. Russia, in 1914, was still an economy that was barely industrialised, and overwhelmingly agricultural.  As an indication of that, it was unable even to manufacture enough rifles and bullets to conduct the war, leading to its soldiers being sent into battle with pitchforks and other implements. Germany, by contrast, was the leading industrial power, having at least caught up with, and probably surpassed Britain.

Germany quickly overran parts of Western Russia. Russia had already lost territory, in the East, in 1905, to Japan. The Bolsheviks, having seen what had happened to China, as it was carved up by the various imperialist powers, saw the likely future of Russia following a similar course. Yet, the Bolsheviks, did not argue that it was necessary to line up with the Tsar and the Russian ruling class to defend Russia. Indeed, at this point, nor did the Mensheviks, which shows that they held to a more principled position than the social-patriots and social-imperialists of today. The Russian socialists, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, in the main adhered to the international socialist position of Zimmerwald that “The Main Enemy Is At Home”.

The Liberals, social-patriots, and social-imperialists argue that its necessary to support Ukraine against Russia, on the basis that Ukraine itself could be destroyed, or annexed. A picture from the recent liberal rallies in support of the Ukrainian ruling class, is shown by some of the social-patriots to this effect. It says, “If Russia stops fighting there will be no more war. If Ukraine stops fighting there will be no more Ukraine”.

But, of course, this is false on a number of levels. Firstly, it assumes that Russia intends to annex Ukraine, which is unlikely. Secondly, it assumes that Ukraine is lines on a map, and its current state, whereas, Ukraine is actually, all of its people, and those people are divided into antagonistic classes. If Ukraine were again entirely annexed by Russia, it would not cease to exist, as its people continue to exist, just as Alsace-Lorraine passed back and forth from Germany and France. Thirdly, socialists are in favour of doing away with all states. We want to abolish all nation states, and to unite the workers of the world in one political entity, and to have it administered by those workers collectively, doing away with the state itself. So, the loss of one of those states is not a fundamentally determining issue for us, particularly if trying to protect its existence leads to the deaths of millions of workers, or to the end of humanity in nuclear war.

But, the argument is false for other reasons. It fails to mention that Ukraine has been at war for the last 8 years with the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. If Russia stopped fighting it would not at all mean that that war stopped. On the contrary, it would be more likely to intensify further, and it would also further embolden NATO, and its own expansionist strategy. Moreover, no one is saying that the Ukrainian workers should stop fighting. The slogan of “The Main Enemy Is At Home” does not say that the only enemy is at home. What it says is that the workers should organise themselves and fight for their own interests, not the interests of their ruling class, and rather that they should turn their guns on that ruling class. In 1914, when, following defeats, and as a result of the agitation conducted within their ranks by the international socialists, the Russian troops adopted that policy en masse, and stopped fighting at the front, returning home to turn their guns on the Tsar, it did not at all mean that there was “No More Russia”. On the contrary, it meant that it was the start of the Russian Revolution that removed the Tsar and his despotic regime, and then went on to remove the Russian bourgeoisie and landlords, establishing the world's first workers state.

If we want another example of the utilisation of this policy, then, again, the First World War provides a useful lesson. Germany, as the dominant industrial power in 1914, was slowly winning the war. Trotsky, examining these prospects considered what would happen if the Kaiser succeeded in defeating France, Belgium, Italy and so on, and, thereby annexed them, forming a huge European state. That was the goal both of Germany and France, as both were faced with the reality that they needed such a large European state to compete with the existing industrial power of Britain, and more specifically, the emerging power of the huge US state. As Trotsky put it,

“Capitalism has transferred into the field of international relations the same methods applied by it in “regulating” the internal economic life of the nations. The path of competition is the path of systematically annihilating the small and medium-sized enterprises and of achieving the supremacy of big capital. World competition of the capitalist forces means the systematic subjection of the small, medium-sized and backward nations by the great and greatest capitalist powers. The more developed the technique of capitalism, the greater the role played by finance capital, and the higher the demands of militarism, all the more grows the dependency of the small states on the great powers. This process, forming as it does an integral element of imperialist mechanics, flourishes undisturbed also in times of peace by means of state loans, railway and other concessions, military-diplomatic agreements, etc. The war uncovered and accelerated this process by introducing the factor of open violence. The war destroys the last shreds of the “independence” of small states, quite apart from the military outcome of the conflict between the two basic enemy camps.”

(The Program For Peace)

In other words, just as competition leads to monopoly and ever larger production, so too it requires ever larger single markets, economies and states. For Marxists, this is historically progressive, and something we welcome as it also creates the conditions for Socialism. Its interesting that in this article, Trotsky does not at all give any succour to the petty-bourgeois, liberal idealists' concepts and slogans in relation to “national self-determination”, instead pointing out, in harsh terms, that, whatever principles of such like are advanced, the actual borders will be determined by the objective material reality of military might! And,

“If this “right” must be – through revolutionary force – counterposed to the imperialist methods of centralization which enslave weak and backward peoples and crush the hearths of national culture, then on the other hand the proletariat cannot allow the “national principle” to get in the way of the irresistible and deeply progressive tendency of modern economic life towards a planned organization throughout our continent, and further, all over the globe. Imperialism is the capitalist-thievish expression of this tendency of modern economy to tear itself completely away from the idiocy of national narrowness, as it did previously with regard to local and provincial confinement. While fighting against the imperialist form of economic centralization, socialism does not at all take a stand against the particular tendency as such but, on the contrary, makes the tendency its own guiding principle.”

(ibid)

So, Trotsky, asks what the international socialist response would then be to Europe being conquered by the Kaiser's Germany, and the consequent annexation of the defeated states. Would we demand, as with the implication of the liberal placard at the Ukraine demonstration, that all the old states be reborn, that whole new borders be established once more. Certainly, of course, that is the logic of the position of the sovereigntists and nationalists, such as those that argued for Brexit, and who would like to break up the rest of the EU along with it. And, it is ironic that all of those petty-bourgeois moral socialists and liberals, who have been effervescent in opposition to those sovereigntists and nationalists, now find themselves adopting exactly the same position as “idiot anti-imperialists”, now opposing Russian imperialism, and uncritically supporting the Ukrainian ruling class and its state, and the Nazi paramilitaries of the Azov Battalion allied with it! Its perhaps, similarly fitting that many of them were also prominent supporters of Starmer, who has also now become the most hard line, sovereigntist, and reactionary nationalist Leader the Labour Party has ever had!!!

But, it most certainly is not the position of international socialism, as Trotsky explains.

“Let us for a moment grant that German militarism succeeds in actually carrying out the compulsory half-union of Europe, just as Prussian militarism once achieved the half-union of Germany, what would then be the central slogan of the European proletariat? Would it be the dissolution of the forced European coalition and the return of all peoples under the roof of isolated national states? Or the restoration of “autonomous” tariffs, “national” currencies, “national” social legislation, and so forth? Certainly not. The program of the European revolutionary movement would then be: The destruction of the compulsory antidemocratic form of the coalition, with the preservation and furtherance of its foundations, in the form of complete annihilation of tariff barriers, the unification of legislation, above all of labour laws, etc. In other words, the slogan of the United States of Europe – without monarchies and standing armies – would under the indicated circumstances become the unifying and guiding slogan of the European revolution.”

This puts the concept of national self-determination in its context as far as international socialism is concerned, as against the primacy that is given to it by the petty-bourgeois moralists, who have lapsed into petty-bourgeois nationalism and sovereigntism, which inevitably has turned them into bourgeois defencists, defenders of the existing ruling class in each nation, and consequently advocates of workers of each nation lining up behind their respective ruling class, just as the social-patriots did in World War I. Trotsky answers them.

“Social-patriotism which is in principle, if not always in fact, the execution of social-reformism to the utmost extent and its adaptation to the imperialist epoch, proposes to us in the present world catastrophe to direct the policy of the proletariat along the lines of the “lesser evil” by joining one of the warring groups. We reject this method. We say that the European war, prepared by the entire preceding course of development, has placed point-blank the fundamental problems of modern capitalist development as a whole; furthermore, that the line of direction to be followed by the international proletariat and its national detachments must not be determined by secondary political and national features nor by problematical advantages of military preponderance of either side (whereby these problematical advantages must be paid for in advance with absolute renunciation of the independent policy of the proletariat), but by the fundamental antagonism existing between the international proletariat and the capitalist regime as a whole.

This is the only principled formulation of the question and, by its very essence, it is socialist-revolutionary in character. It alone provides a theoretical and historical justification for the tactic of revolutionary internationalism.”

No To War – Disband NATO – The Main Enemy Is At Home – Workers of The World Unite