Social-Imperialists Have Led Workers To Disaster - Part 4 of 6

When the working-class and its leadership fail to insist on their independence from the ruling-class, and cease fighting for its own interests, by subordinating itself to the interests of the ruling-class, based only on some moralistic conception of backing the lesser-evil, that is the inevitable result. It disqualifies itself from any say in the historical process, and as the workers in Ukraine will, now, find, as I predicted at the start of the conflict, will have fatally undermined themselves in the struggle that follows. What is more, as the world hurtles towards WWIII, and the extinction of humanity, the working-class, everywhere, has also been fundamentally undermined, by the moralising, and class-collaborationist policies of the social-imperialists, most disgracefully some of whom call themselves Trotskyists.

As Trotsky had noted in some of his last writings,

“... the facts of every passing day demonstrate to us that Zionism is incapable of resolving the Jewish question. The conflict between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine acquires a more and more tragic and more and more menacing character. I do not at all believe that the Jewish question can be resolved within the framework of rotting capitalism and under the control of British imperialism.”

And,

“The attempt to solve the Jewish question through the migration of Jews to Palestine can now be seen for what it is, a tragic mockery of the Jewish people. Interested in winning the sympathies of the Arabs who are more numerous than the Jews, the British government has sharply altered its policy toward the Jews, and has actually renounced its promise to help them found their “own home” in a foreign land. The future development of military events may well transform Palestine into a bloody trap for several hundred thousand Jews. Never was it so clear as it is today that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system.”

(On The Jewish Problem.)

In fact, Jews themselves arrived at the same conclusion. Despite all of the racist laws in Israel to give Jews ethno-religious privileges, only 40% of the world's Jews live in Israel, with as many living in the US. Increasingly, it is not Jews that provide the support for Zionism and its project in Israel, but Christian-Zionist zealots seeking The Second Coming, and Armageddon, and, in the US, they play a significant role within the Republican Party, along with other racists and white nationalists.

The social-imperialists abandoned class politics, and the primacy of proletarian struggle, in relation to the resolution of the problems of Jews, not only in favour of a reactionary, bourgeois nationalist solution – Zionism – which was no solution at all, and has, in reality fermented even greater anti-Semitism, the more so as the Zionists equated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, but have done so, in relation to the consequence of that non-solution – the denial of rights to Palestinians. Having established the new, bourgeois Zionist state at the expense of the Palestinians, the social-imperialists then have sought to inadequately compensate the Palestinians for that consequence, by offering them the prospect of a bourgeois state on just a part of Palestine, in other words, again a bourgeois nationalist solution. But, unlike the bourgeois nationalist solution offered by Zionism, the bourgeois nationalist solution offered to Palestinians has had no chance of being fulfilled. The Palestinians have not had the backing of powerful international forces, be it at one point the USSR, and later US imperialism, that the Zionists have enjoyed.

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Anti-Duhring, Part I Philosophy, X – Morals and Law. Equality - Part 18 of 24

In this can be seen just how far Marx was from the views of the moralists and the welfarists, who present the false idea that bourgeois society can provide such equal right.

“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

(ibid)

The moralists and welfarists say that, currently, not providing benefits for those with more than two children, for example, is to punish the children, but it is the parents that have those children without the means to provide for them that are actually the ones inflicting that punishment. There is a difference between equality of being, which forms the basis of bourgeois ideology of free and equal individuals meeting in the market on equal terms, and which, as Marx sets out above, continues even into the first stages of Socialism, as against the concept of equality of rights. The former is a lie, but the latter, the idea that we are all equally human, and so have equal human rights is one that has played a significant role in revolutionary struggles throughout history. As set out above, for the bourgeoisie, the idea of such equal human rights, in terms of political and legal rights, was central to its revolutionary struggle against the feudal aristocracy, “and which to this day still plays an important agitational role in the socialist movement of almost every country. The establishment of its scientific content will also determine its value for proletarian agitation.” (p 129)

Thousands of years elapsed before the idea that individuals, in society, should have equal political and legal rights.

“In the oldest, primitive communities, equality of rights could apply at most to members of the community; women, slaves and strangers were excluded from this equality as a matter of course. Among the Greeks and Romans the inequalities of men were of much greater importance than any equality. It would necessarily have seemed crazy to the ancients that Greeks and barbarians, freemen and slaves, citizens and denizens, Roman citizens and Roman subjects (to use a comprehensive term) should have a claim to equal political status.” (p 130)

Many of those distinctions disappeared, other than that between freemen and slave, which was fundamental to its mode of production. The equality of freemen, as property owners, became the basis of Roman Law, “the fullest elaboration we know of law based on private property. But so long as the antithesis between freemen and slaves existed, there could be no talk of drawing legal conclusions from a general human equality; we saw this again recently, in the slave states of the North American Union.” (p 130)

Indeed, as I have noted, elsewhere, as the US sociologist, Oliver Cromwell Cox, set out, it is the fact that the bourgeoisie espouses this concept of human equality, as the basis of its ideology and bourgeois society that means, in order to rationalise the enslavement of millions in the various colonial empires, established in the 17th century and after, by mercantilism, it must develop the ideology of racism, of the idea that those subjugated are less than human.

“Christianity knew only one equality on the part of all men, that of an equal possession of original sin, which corresponded perfectly to its character as the religion of the slaves and the oppressed. Apart from this it recognised, at most, the equality of the elect, which however was only stressed at the very beginning.” (p 131)

Indeed, in The New Testament, we find the story of how Jesus saw no reason to bestow his miracles on gentiles, when it came to healing a sick child. And, the Old Testament is replete with examples of the acceptance of inequality between men and women, who, like servants and slaves, were treated as chattels.

“The traces of common ownership which are also found in the early stages of the new religion can be ascribed to solidarity among the proscribed rather than to genuine equalitarian ideas. Within a very short time the establishment of the distinction between priests and laymen put an end to even this incipient Christian equality.” (p 131)

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Social-Imperialists Have Led Workers To Disaster - Part 3 of 6

It was impossible to establish the Zionist state in 1948, in Palestine, without it being “at the expense of another nation.” And, the attempt to create such a state by those violent means, could have no other result than to divide Palestinian and Jewish workers, and create the conditions for such division and violence to persist, including the extension of that division in the working-class to the working-class in the surrounding Arab states. Who benefited from that? Not only the Zionist ruling caste, resting upon the Israeli ruling-class, but, also the Arab ruling classes in those surrounding states, who could use Zionism as a convenient bogey, so as to distract from the real enemy of the workers in their own country.

“Social-Democrats must moreover bear in mind that the landowners, the clergy and the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations often cover up with nationalist slogans their efforts to divide the workers and dupe them by doing deals behind their backs with the landowners and bourgeoisie of the ruling nation to the detriment of the masses of the working people of all nations.”

(Lenin - (Resolutions of the Summer, 1913, Joint Conference of the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. and Party Officials)

And, of course, the other beneficiary was US imperialism, which not only kept the working-class divided (not only in the Middle-East, but also in the imperialist heartlands where Zionism had considerable influence within labour movements), but, also, obtained its own heavily armed encampment through which to channel its activities. As the then Senator Joe Bidden put it, “If Israel did not exist, the US would have had to create it”! Indeed, Israel largely is the creation of US imperialism, for all intents and purposes a vassal state dependent upon it, for its existence. As I noted several years ago, Ukraine's dependence on US imperialism would have the same consequence, as NATO used Ukrainian workers blood and bones as grist in the mill of its global imperialist conflict with Russian~Chinese imperialism. As with much else, Trump has simply said it out loud as he now demands his own pound of Ukrainian flesh in the form of control over vast quantities of Ukrainian minerals, and revenues.

It is also no coincidence that the favoured “solution” to the question of Palestine is the mythical “Two-State Solution”, which could only have come into existence itself if the Palestinians agreed to similarly play the role of vassals to US imperialism, though, even with Fatah, in the West Bank, largely prostrating themselves in that manner, and acting as the contracted police force of the Zionist state, it has taken them no further forward, as the process of annexation of Palestinian land and property, and extermination of Palestinians as a people has continued. For social-imperialism, the two-state solution, the creation of two new bourgeois states – Israel and Palestine – is the logical manifestation of its subordination of workers' interests to those of the bourgeoisie, with the workers being removed from any role other than as cheerleaders or cannon fodder for the solutions formulated by the world's ruling classes, which in reality means the solutions to be provided by imperialism.

And, that is most clearly being seen, now, not only with Trump's proposals for Gaza, but, also, in his proposals for Ukraine. The moralistic whining and whimpering of social-democrats and liberals that there can be no peace negotiations without the EU and Ukraine at the table is simply an exposition of their bankruptcy. Trump and Putin have carved up Ukraine between them, just as Trotsky described, in the 1930's, happened to Ukraine, and as happened in many more places, such as the carving up of China. When the wolves gather to rend the flesh of the lambs, they do not engage in discussion of it first with the lambs! Defeated Germany was excluded from the negotiations between the other imperialist powers, at Versailles, who, having carved up the world between them, simply told Germany that the war would resume unless it agreed to their terms. The same happened when, after WWII, the US, USSR, and Britain carved up the world between them, in their talks at Potsdam and Yalta, satirised in "Animal Farm", by Orwell as the pigs and humans, at the end of the book, sitting around the table together.

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Anti-Duhring, Part I Philosophy, X – Morals and Law. Equality - Part 17 of 24

In the first examples, the specific “fuel poverty” was a consequence of consumption decisions – food or kids – whereas, in these latter examples, its a consequence of inadequate income, to cover the cost of the reproduction of labour-power. In Capital, Marx sets out the objective basis of the value of labour-power. But, as with any such commodity value, it is based on what is socially necessary labour. A yarn spinner might, as Marx describes, use gold spindles rather than steel, but cannot, thereby, recover their value in the yarn they produce. Labour-power is no different. Given the standards of the time, workers need a certain quantity and quality of food, clothing, shelter, education and so on to reproduce their labour-power. If some choose to eat more, they can do so, but it does not change the value of that labour-power, reflected in their wages. It simply means they must consume less, or cheaper types of other wage goods.

Similarly, to reproduce labour-power, parents need to produce two children. If they choose to have three, four, six or twelve children, is also up to them, but does not increase the value of their labour-power, or entitle them to have it compensated in benefits paid for out of the taxes levied on other workers' wages, who make different consumption choices. The moralists protest that that means the right to have more than two children is, then, restricted to the rich/affluent. Well, yes,just as the right to live in a mansion, to own a yacht, jet or new Ferrari is restricted to those that can afford these consumption choices! That is the way capitalism works, and as Marx set out in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, it is also the way Socialism would, initially, have to work, as it emerges from bourgeois society.

“Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour cost. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labour, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form.”

(Marx – Critique of The Gotha Programme)

But, Marx notes the points set out above. Besides the fact that one worker is stronger, fitter etc., and so doing 8 hours of labour is easier for them than for another worker who is not so strong, or fit (i.e. whose ability to labour is less) one worker may have two children that need feeding clothing and so on, whilst the other does not. Yet, both workers would receive back from society the same equivalent of 8 hours labour, meaning that one worker has contributed less, in terms of their ability to labour, whilst the other also, receives less, relative to their needs, because they need to also provide for two children. This is only something that can be addressed, as a socialist society so raises social productivity so that an increasing proportion of the social product can be distributed on the basis of need.

Until that time,

“... it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”

(ibid)

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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