Trump Craps On Zelensky

Yesterday, I noted that Starmer had disappeared up Trump's arse, accompanied by the entourage of UK media that tried to present the encounter as some kind of great triumph of British diplomacy, now freed by Brexit from the limitations of EU membership. Total nonsense, of course, as that media tried to justify the Brexit chaos that it, in great part, bears responsibility for, as it spent years fawning over the likes of Farage, to pander to the bigotry, and petty-bourgeois nationalism of its rapidly ageing readers and viewers. Of course, Starmer had not been alone in this disgusting spectacle of imitations of Uriah Heep. France's Man of Yesterday, the failed Macron, also engaged in such similar gut-wrenching hypocrisy and prostate massage, encouraged by the narrative that the moronic Trump is easily won over by endless and unbounded flattery and fawning.

Within an hour of my post being published, the truth, as set out within it, was being displayed for all to see across TV screens across the globe, as a hapless Zelensky was shat on from a great height by Trump, and his acolytes, before being sent packing. In the process, Trump, reciprocated, in different manner, to Starmer from the previous day. To paraphrase John Maclean from Die Hard, “He just got butt-fucked live on national TV.” And, that applied also to that media that had likewise eulogised over the triumph of Starmer and Macron in wooing Trump, with their charm offensive. All of that narrative now lay around their ankles in disarray.

Having watched the full proceedings play out, its fairly obvious that, in fact, Zelensky was set up, and that, as so often in the past, European and, particularly, UK leaders, fulfilled the role of useful idiots in the plan. Having allowed Starmer and Macron to abase themselves, and go away feeling they had sewn it all up in advance, the narrative was that Zelensky only had to go to the Whitehouse, sign the deal, do a few photos, and a press conference, in which he would openly sign over $500 billion to US imperialism to be paid for from its mineral deposits, and, in turn, Trump would promise to back-stop the military defence of Ukraine. As I wrote, yesterday, and previously, that was never going to happen. Nor did it.

Anyone who has seen the way the dynamics of a street fight are organised would have recognised the classic features. First, a more or less anonymous figure makes a provocative statement. In this case, it was asking Zelensky, “Do you not have a suit?”. Everyone knows, of course, that Zelensky has tried to use his costume of military fatigues as a trademark. The question, therefore, was designed to be antagonistic, and to imply that Zelensky was being disrespectful in not wearing a suit to meet the President. Zelensky fell for it, and got drawn in to a response, which, then escalated, and gave the main protagonists Trump and Vance ability to weigh in. You have to give it to Zelensky that, unlike the slimy, gelatinous behaviour of Starmer and Macron, he, at least, showed some backbone in confronting Trump and his gang, but, in doing so, he has signed the death warrant of his own regime, which was on its way out anyway, as I wrote at the start of the year.

The reality is that there is no denying the truth of what Trump said to him, which is that without the US support, and supply of arms over the last three years, Ukraine would not have been able to fight its war with Russia, and so its true that Zelensky has no cards to play, when it comes to having to choose between Russia or the US. It is simply a pawn on a chessboard. What is playing out in vivid colour is the reality of imperialism, and exposure of the delusion of nationalism, and the idea of national self-determination. The same reality applies to Britain and Brexit, and the attempts of Starmer and Blue Labour to pretend that they have the ability to navigate their own independent path, and can triangulate between the US and EU, are likewise doomed to imminent disaster. This weekend, as Zelensky, Starmer, Macron and other European leaders get together to lick their wounds and console each other, they face that reality.

Indeed, because the EU has, for decades, subordinated its own interests to those of US imperialism, even it, let alone the third rate power that is Britain, is in a poor position to now fill the gap left by the US. As I wrote recently, 62% of EU spending on military equipment goes to US arms producers, and those US companies have control over vital elements of the technology required for their operation. The role of US imperialism in insisting that Europe destroy its economy by boycotting Russian energy supplies, the blowing up of the Nordstream pipelines to ensure it did not go back on that, and so on, shows that the US has seen Britain and the EU as subordinates to be used and abused as it wished, and that was the case under Biden, and before him, Obama and others. All that Trump has done is to say the quiet bit out loud.

What is more, as I wrote at the start of the year, the interests of the EU are not to isolate itself from Russia, China and their periphery, but the opposite. These are two large politico-economic blocs that share common borders. The best means of security is to expand the trading arrangements between them, which, almost certainly would require a distancing from the US and North American politico-economic bloc. The recent visit of EU leaders to India, to forge a free trade deal between them, is indicative that this reality is, also, dawning on them.

Social-Imperialists Have Led Workers To Disaster - Part 2 of 6

As Owen Jones and others have extensively shown, western media, let alone the totalitarian, Zionist media inside Israel itself, has systematically covered up the atrocities committed by Zionist settlers, and by the IDF, day after day, both before and after October 7th, the most obvious atrocity that began the process being that of the violent creation of the Zionist state, itself, in 1948, which led to more than 700,000 Palestinians being forced from their land and homes, many of whom were driven to become refugees in Gaza, Lebanon and Jordan, and who are refused the right to return. As Marxists, we do not act as moralists seeking to right historical wrongs such as that, but seek to act in such a way as to best further the interests of the working-class in the conditions of today, and, invariably that means seeking to build the greatest possible unity of workers across national borders. Indeed, those national borders, in the age of imperialism, are an anachronism, a fetter on the rational development of capital itself, let alone the goal of creating international socialism.

As Lenin had put it,

“As the party of the proletariat, the Social-Democratic Party considers it to be its positive and principal task to further the self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality rather than that of peoples or nations. We must always and unreservedly work for the very closest unity of the proletariat of all nationalities, and it is only in isolated and exceptional cases that we can advance and actively support demands conducive to the establishment of a new class state or to the substitution of a looser federal unity, etc., for the complete political unity of a state.”

(The National Question In Our Programme)

Consequently, although Marxists could never have justified the creation of the Zionist state in 1948, we deal with the reality of its existence. To seek the destruction of that state by the same kinds of violence that saw its creation, would be as reactionary as that act of creation itself, simply winding the film of history in reverse. The question, for Marxists is always focused on the agent of change, and the only progressive agent of change is the working-class, a class which itself has no nationality, because it is a global class, fighting a global capitalist/imperialist ruling class. We seek the destruction of the Zionist state, only in the same way that we seek the destruction of all other capitalist/imperialist states, not at the hands of some other class state, or exploiting class, but at the hands of the revolutionary proletariat.

The project of Zionism, as a reactionary, racist and colonialist ideology could never be supported by Marxists, precisely because it places race and nationality above class, and focuses on the former rather than the latter as the basis upon which the fundamental divisions of society are based, and which must form the axis around which history is driven forward. So long as that is the case, then all such struggles will lead to class being subordinated to race and national identity, and consequently, the objective reality of the unity of the working-class as a global class, and of the actual fundamental antagonism – the contradiction between capital and labour – will become secondary. It means that the working-class will be repeatedly divided on the basis of race and national identity. The struggle for its own interests will repeatedly be postponed until some future date, after it has already weakened itself via a popular front with its real enemy, the bourgeois ruling-class.

As again, Lenin put it,

“That is why the proletariat confines itself, so to speak, to the negative demand for recognition of the right to self-determination, without giving guarantees to any nation, and without undertaking to give anything at the expense of another nation.”

(The Right of Nations to Self-Determination)

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Northern Soul Classics - Gonna Get Along Without You - The Vibrations

 

Friday Night Disco - Do It Yourself - Gloria Gaynor

 

Starmer Disappears Up Trump's Arse

No sooner had Keir Starmer arrived at the White House than he had disappeared up Trump's arse, the only sign of him left being a tiny hand, still protruding and waving a tiny, battered union flag. Nothing could more illustrate the nature of Brexit Britain's total impotence, irrelevance and subservience to the real holders of power than this exercise in prostration, or should it be prostate massage?

Two inveterate liars met, both of whom lied even more, as they tried to square the circles of their recent contradictory statements in relation to the Ukraine-Russia war. Trump indicating a more rapid onset of his cognitive impairment, said he could not even remember calling Zelensky a dictator only a couple of days earlier. Of course, for all intents and purposes, based on the US's previous definition of a dictator, Zelensky would qualify. He has cancelled the elections, meaning he has no democratic mandate to continue in office, and yet is doing so; he has closed down opposition parties; he has placed restrictions on workers' organisations; he has closed down Ukrainian TV, Radio and media companies that were critical of his regime; Ukraine continually appears in various western league tables of corruption, openness etc., as no better than Russia.

Trump's memory lapse was a means of him placating Starmer (or more correctly the press pack following him around) without the need to square the circle of his current lies about providing some vague “backstop”, which he has merged into his demand that the US be given its pound of Ukrainian flesh, from the minerals deal. Starmer and the petty-bourgeois media pack, of course, did not press that issue as they fall over themselves to believe that Trump is somehow going to go to war with Putin, or at least, continue to provide the weapons and funding that allow brave Ukrainian workers to continue to sacrifice themselves in the interests of western imperialism, and Zelensky's corrupt, oligarchical regime. But, tomorrow, or the day after, Trump will simply lie some more, and all of the hot air of Thursday will be forgotten.

The imagery was gut-wrenching. The US bourgeois revolutionaries, overthrew their King, George III, and established their Republic. Asked whether they had a Monarchy or a Republic, following the Revolution, Benjamin Franklin replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Of course, in Presidential systems, as against parliamentary systems, a Republic simply means that you have an elected Monarch, rather than an hereditary Monarch, as the President alone claims a popular mandate – even though in the US, not even the latter is true as a result of the Electoral College – and the Constitution vests monarchical, prerogative power in the hands of the President, which is why such Presidential systems are always more amenable to Bonapartism. Trump clearly sees himself, not only as a Bonaparte, but, like Bonaparte himself, as a future Monarch or Emperor.

In the age of the Internet, e-mail, and of global electronic telecommunications, it was rather fitting therefore, that a British Prime Minister was reduced to the role of postman, to have flown 3,000 miles to deliver, by hand, a hand-written letter from his liege Lord, King Charles III, the incumbent of an institution that should have been abolished more than two centuries ago, at the time of the bourgeois revolution, and who is the descendant of that same George III that the American Revolution did rid themselves of! No wonder that the, now for all to see, totally ignorant, Elon Musk, has no idea about how the UK political system works, leading him to call on the said King Charles to remove the elected government, no doubt, in his fantasy, to, then, see his chosen candidate, Tommy Robinson, appointed, possibly to be supported by Trump's other buddies, the Tate Brothers, recently also relocated to the US.

Prior to Brexit, I noted that the vision of the petty-bourgeois nationalists was to turn Britain into the equivalent of Batista's Cuba of the 1950's, but I did not expect that it would be a Labour government that would be the vehicle of such a transformation. That seems to be the intention of Blue Labour, whose Brexit agenda requires Britain to be separated from the EU definitively, by tying it in to the US, if not as its 51st state, then as dominated by it, and its rules, standards and laws, much as, Trump now advocates for Canada and Greenland. If Starmer agrees to a trade deal with the US, it would remove any possibility of a closer relation with the EU, because it would involve the UK accepting all of those US food and other standards, in relation to chlorinated chicken, and so on. Its no wonder that a British media, which fell over itself to back Brexit, in order, mostly, to appeal to the sentiments of its largely aged, petty-bourgeois, nationalist readers and viewers, and, now, seeing the disaster that has resulted from it, try to double down on their previous lies about the benefits of Brexit, by hugely inflating the chances of, and benefits of a trade deal with the US, whilst, at the same time, attempting to claim that Starmer has been able to adopt this stance on the world stage, only because of being freed from the constraints of the EU.

Complete delusion, of the type that, also, lay behind the jingoism of the hype for Brexit in the first place. In fact, the delusion goes back way before that, into the hugely inflated role of Britain during World War II, a fantasy tale, largely constructed, as he claimed in advance, by Churchill, and readily snapped up by those that sought to cling to the idea of Rule Britannia, and rolled out repeatedly, as now, to draw parallels with standing up to dictators and aggressors. The reality was that, in the 1930's, the British ruling class and its media welcomed first Mussolini and then Hitler's rise to power, as they saw it smashing down uppity workers, and acting as a counter to the epitome of that in the USSR. They saw no reason to stand up to those dictators when they were attacking workers, or, as in Germany and elsewhere, when they were conducting pogroms against Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and so on.

Recently, I heard the otherwise, usually good, James O'Brien, making this same comparison, and fallacy, in relation to Ukraine. His conclusion that appeasement had been wrong in the 1930's, when Hitler went on to invade Poland, and so it would be wrong to appease Putin, by not acting to return Eastern Ukraine, did not follow. For one thing, he failed to ask the question of why it was that the Sudeten Germans saw becoming part of a fascist Germany as preferable to remaining inside a supposedly “democratic” Czechoslovakia. Secondly, he assumes that Germany's invasion of Poland, then left no other option than for other imperialist states to engage in a new slaughter of millions of mainly workers, in a war that was actually fought for the interests of their own respective exploiters and oppressors. The alternative, of course, was to have supported the workers in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany to have organised to fight fascism from within, to exploit its inherently contradictory and antagonistic nature, resulting from the heterogeneous nature of the petty-bourgeois masses that it rests upon, not to mention its function when in power of acting in the interests not of that petty-bourgeoisie, but in the interests of large-scale industrial capital.

But, the narrative presented is that the world could only be saved by being destroyed by World War, with the world's workers playing the role only of cannon fodder, and their own interests having to be denied until some future date. And, even there, the history is denied, and a fantasy constructed in its place. By 1940, Nazi Germany had rolled over western and central Europe. Just to put that in modern context, Putin's Russia is stretched just to take Eastern Ukraine, let alone be able to roll over the far more developed, and better armed, states of western Europe. Britain had been defeated catastrophically at Dunkirk, and, in every other confrontation, exposing the lie of the supposed superiority of the British military, it suffered similar losses, both in North Africa, and in Asia, where, for example, it suffered its worst ever defeat, even in Churchill's words, to the Japanese, in Singapore.

In 1940, Britain was already defeated, slowly starving were it not for the shipments sent from the US and Canada, at the great expense of the lives of thousands of brave merchant seamen. It was the USSR that defeated Germany, not Britain, nor even the US, though the US, after it, again, belatedly entered the war in 1941, did provide large amounts of equipment and material, to enable the USSR to take the war to Germany, and it was, again, the US that tipped the scales in North Africa, It is the fantasy of Britain's imperial past, and not the reality of even then, let alone the reality of Britain today, as a second, or even third rate world power that the Brexiters presented, and that they continue, now, in the form of Starmer, to cling to.

Britain, in 1982, barely was able to defeat Argentina in the Falklands War, and, today, would not be able to do so. But, nor is that a reason to try to go back to the fantasy of that previous military capability, by the increase in military spending proposed by Starmer, itself, as with the cuts in Foreign Aid, designed only to appeal to the sentiments of the bigots, and jingoists. An increase in military spending will act to further undermine the British economy.

It can only be financed by diverting a portion of surplus value away from productive investment/capital accumulation into destructive investment. If the state, appropriates a portion of surplus value/profits to finance investment in roads and infrastructure, or in schools, hospitals and so on, then the use-values created by that investment go back into the economy. Roads get used to transport goods to market, schools and teachers produce educated future workers, required to produce further goods and services, and, also, to produce new value and surplus value. But, that is not true with military spending, the bombs, bullets, tanks simply sit, if you are lucky, slowly rusting away, providing no useful benefit to society, a destruction of the value used up in the labour and materials for their construction. But, if you are not lucky, and they are used, the result is even worse, because, instead of increasing the wealth of society, instead of acting as means of production or consumption to assist further production, they act to destroy what already exists in the most violent manner.  Such spending at the least reduces capital accumulation and growth, and at worst, results in expanded negative reproduction.

Starmer was already proposing to cut state spending, at a time when decades of spending cuts has led to the fabric of society, in terms of its infrastructure, being in a state of advanced decay. The idea that it can continue in that way, and even intensify it, by cutting spending further, whilst throwing money and resources into the production of arms, is simply untenable. As I wrote recently, it could borrow the money to pay for that military spending, but that will simply defer the problem of paying for it, and meanwhile will cause interest rates to rise further. It may seem hard to grasp at the moment, as right-wing populists, petty-bourgeois nationalists have been on the rise across the globe, whether in the form of Trump, or Blue Labour, or Le Pen and so on, but they have almost certainly reached a peak, and the contradictions inherent within them are set to explode. Its up to workers to seize the day.

Anti-Duhring, Part I Philosophy, X – Morals and Law. Equality - Part 16 of 24

In developed economies, themselves, we see how far we still are, necessarily, from that idea of “from each according to their ability” (often misrepresented by reformists and welfarists as “ability to pay”, i.e. higher taxes) in the fact that bourgeois, trades union consciousness still seeks to base collective bargaining (i.e. haggling over the price of labour-power, or how much workers are to be exploited) on the protection of differentials. The irony of that, of course, is that one consequence of the maintenance of such differentials between skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers is differences, then, in workers' household incomes, which, then, are intended to be ameliorated by the capitalist state, which sets up a whole bureaucratic apparatus of welfarism, draining resources for no other purpose than to administer this welfare, as alms, which, also, provides it with a mechanism of social control, which provides benefits to the poorer households, which would not have been required had their real wages been higher to begin with, and covers the cost of these benefits by raising taxes on better paid workers, which itself sets up a division and antagonism within the working-class itself, utilised, also, as a means of social control.

In other words, the trades unions insist on the pay differentials of their skilled workers being maintained, but, also, collectively demand that the capitalist state protect the living standards of their unskilled members via the welfare system, which it funds by taxes on the incomes of those better paid, skilled workers who, thereby, lose a considerable portion of the benefit of that pay differential, and all of which involves the unnecessary employment of large numbers of state bureaucrats to collect those taxes, keep records, and pay benefits, who could, otherwise, have been employed productively! The social democrats and reformist socialists justify this welfarism on the basis of the idea that it is redistributing income from “the rich”, but, as Marx and Engels showed, that is not possible. The relation between the revenues received by the owners of capital (real industrial capital, or fictitious capital) and workers is, ultimately, objectively determined, whether the revenues of workers take the form of actual money wages, or the social wage. In summary, it is determined by the value of labour-power, which is why capital always seeks to raise productivity so as to reduce that value of labour-power, i.e. to reduce the proportion of the working-day required as necessary labour to reproduce the worker. If due to market conditions, in the short run, workers' revenues (wages/social wage, i.e. relative wages) rise, and consequently, relative profits fall, this leads inexorably to a crisis of overproduction of capital, causing capital to first throw labour on to the streets, and secondly to engage in a technological revolution, which replaces labour with machines, which then results in relative wages falling.

The extension of this absurd concept of welfarism is the concept of so called specific types of poverty, such as fuel poverty, food poverty, housing poverty, child poverty, and so on, all of which, of course, provides the basis for a gaggle of middle-class people to be employed in campaigns, and quangos resting upon the need to deal with each, rather than a recognition that they are all simply a manifestation, not of some specific poverty, but of poverty itself, or more correctly, a lack of income! If we take someone with an income of £500 a week who spends £300 a week eating well, £150 on the cost of shelter and £40 on other things, leaving them with £10 to cover energy, whilst their fuel bill is £20, they would be in “fuel poverty”. However, they could have spent less on food, and so paid their fuel bill.

Likewise, they may have six kids so that the £300 food bill is a minimum required, whilst they must, also, now, spend the £40 they spent on themselves on their kids, leaving them, in “fuel poverty”, and probably “child poverty” too. Yet, in both cases, the “poverty” was a consequence of particular choices of how to spend their income – food in the first case, six kids in the second. However, if the household income is only £300 a week, they may spend, say, only the minimum amount of £100 on food, have no kids, spend the minimum £150 on shelter, and a minimum £40 on other necessities, still leaving them in “fuel poverty”, or they could pay the fuel bill, and spend less on food, then being in “food poverty”.

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Social-Imperialists Have Led Workers To Disaster - Part 1 of 6

Social imperialists have, again, led the working-class into disaster. At a time of an evident and growing drive to global imperialist war, which, this time, would inevitably, and quickly, become a thermonuclear war, destroying humanity, the social imperialists have disarmed the working-class both physically and politically, by subordinating them to their own respective ruling classes, and making them simply foot soldiers in the interests of those ruling classes, rather than an independent third camp of the proletariat, fighting for its own class interests, against those ruling classes. The most obvious example of that, now, is in Ukraine, but the same can be seen in Palestine.

That, short of a direct military confrontation between US imperialism/NATO and Russian~Chinese imperialism, i.e. World War III, Ukraine could never defeat Russia, no matter how much weaponry NATO provided, should have been obvious to any intelligent person, let alone Marxist. As I have set out before, part of the reason for them believing it could, or was even about to do so, was not just that the social imperialists, and other apologists for NATO, swallowed their own propaganda, as part of a moralistic act of wishful thinking, but that, from the start, they committed to the false narrative that Russia wanted to annex the whole of Ukraine, and had launched a full scale invasion to that effect. The reality always was that Russia knew it could never conquer the whole of Ukraine, didn't need to, to achieve its aims, and so never did launch such a full-scale invasion.

US imperialism/NATO did not need to occupy the whole of Serbia to achieve its aims. It only needed to occupy Kosovo, and split it away from Serbia. It didn't mean that, in the process, it didn't also bomb Serbia itself, and so on. In the same way, Russia did not need to occupy the whole of Georgia in 2007, and, despite claims of NATO, and its apologists, that it would, it didn't do so, even though it clearly could have done so, easily, having driven its tanks right up to Tbilisi. It only needed to occupy the ethnic Russian areas of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and did so using the same justification that US imperialism/NATO had done on many occasions, including in Kosovo, of preventing genocide/ethnic cleansing etc. Its amazing how many times imperialist powers have used this pretext as the basis for their own military adventures, and yet the social-imperialists continue to ask workers to swallow it.

Trotsky, writing as a war correspondent, during the Balkan Wars, not only noted, and searingly exposed, the lies and hypocrisy of the European imperialists and their media, which recounted, in gory detail, the atrocities of the Turks, whilst not only failing to report the equally grisly atrocities of those fighting against them, but, also, deliberately censoring any such reports made by journalists and socialists such as Trotsky. Trotsky wrote to Miliukov, who had been a prominent, liberal, Russian advocate for “national liberation” of the Balkan Slavic peoples, and advocate of liberal interventionism to achieve it,

“Recently, during the period of the armistice, you made a political journey to the Balkans; you visited several centres and, what is of particular importance, you went to the regions recently conquered by the allies.

Did you not hear during your travels – it must be supposed that this would be of interest to you – about the monstrous acts of brutality that were committed by the triumphant soldiery of the allies all along their line of march, not only on unarmed Turkish soldiers, wounded or taken prisoner, but also on the peaceful Muslim inhabitants, on old men and women, on defenceless children?”

(The Balkan Wars p 285-6)

The same has been seen in every such military conflict, with domestic populations being led into support for the actions of their own ruling class, by lurid claims of the bestiality of those they are fighting, whilst scrupulously avoiding any suggestion of their own atrocities. The justification of the genocide in Gaza on the basis, not of the already abominable nature of Hamas' attack on October 7th, but of a systematic and torrential series of lies, about babies being beheaded, women raped and so on, during those attacks, is a recent example. Trotsky, continued,

“Would you not agree that a conspiracy of silence by all of our 'leading' papers.... that this mutual agreement to keep quiet makes all of you fellow travellers and moral participants in bestialities that will lie as a stain of dishonour on our whole epoch?

Are not, in these circumstances, your protests against Turkish atrocities – which I am not at all going to deny – like the disgusting conduct of Pharisees: resulting, it must be supposed, not from the general principles of culture and humanity but from naked calculations of imperialist greed?”

(ibid)

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