Listen to my son, Simon, featured on the Silver Screen Sound Machine Podcast, talking about Northern Soul, and his role in Soulboy.
Sunday, 9 March 2025
Social-Imperialists Have Led Workers To Disaster - Part 6 of 6
History has repeated itself. The social-imperialists sold the workers into the bondage of US/NATO imperialism, as their only saviour against Russian imperialism, the underlying but unstated reality, of course, being that US imperialism would, at some point, demand its pound of flesh from Ukraine's workers themselves, as Trump is now setting out. Indeed, I pointed out, some time ago, that the, now, fundamentally misled and demoralised workers of Ukraine, will not just be easy pickings for western exploiters, but also, for Russian and Chinese exploiters. Trump's deal does not exclude the possibility that the Ukraine's mineral resources might actually be dug out of the ground by Russian or Chinese based companies, but that the US will still get 50% of the revenues from them having done so, as payment for all those weapons that the social-imperialists misled Ukraine into believing were being offered freely and generously by rapacious western imperialists! Had they not read how US imperialism acted in that respect, in relation to WWI and II?
Of course, the “anti-imperialists” have been no better. In the Middle-East, they have sought to align themselves not with the workers of the region, as the means to provide a solution, but have simply repeated the error of those that backed the Zionists. The only difference is that they seek to back a different bourgeois nationalist horse, i.e. a Palestinian rather than Zionist horse. And, having sought a bourgeois nationalist solution, they inevitably align themselves with all sorts of anti-working-class, reactionary nationalist movements, and states to that end. Their solution does not lead to a revolutionary, proletarian conclusion, via the process of permanent revolution, but, inevitably, limits itself to a simply bourgeois nationalist solution that pits Palestinian and other Arab workers against each other, rather than against the real enemy, the Arab and Jewish ruling classes, and the imperialist powers that stand behind them. It is the same approach as that used by the likes of Rosa Luxemburg and Josef Pilsudski, in relation to Polish independence, attacked by Lenin.
“See to what monstrous conclusions this monstrous logic leads, even from the viewpoint of the programme demand for Poland’s restoration. Because the restoration of Poland is one of the possible (but, whilst the bourgeoisie rules, by no means absolutely certain) consequences of democratic evolution, therefore the Polish proletariat must not fight together with the Russian proletariat to overthrow Tsarism, but “only” to weaken it by wresting Poland from it. Because Russian Tsarism is concluding a closer and closer alliance with the bourgeoisie and the governments of Germany, Austria, etc., therefore the Polish proletariat must weaken its alliance with the proletariat of Russia, Germany, etc., together with whom it is now fighting against one and the same yoke. This is nothing more than sacrificing the most vital interests of the proletariat to the bourgeois-democratic conception of national independence. The disintegration of Russia which the P.S.P. desires, as distinct from our aim of overthrowing Tsarism, is and will remain an empty phrase, as long as economic development continues to bring the different parts of a political whole more and more closely together, and as long as the bourgeoisie of all countries unite more and more closely against their common enemy, the proletariat, and in support of their common ally, the tsar.”
(The National Question In Our Programme)
When the Zionists in Israel, now, state openly to Palestinians, “who is going to save you, now”, they speak only a brutal and brutish truth of where the bourgeois nationalist solutions sought for the Palestinians, and advocated by social-imperialists and “anti-imperialists” alike, have led that benighted people. The response to the question of the Zionists should have been, "the revolutionary proletariat, including revolutionary Jewish workers will save us, and themselves", but the collapse of the global socialist movement into petty-bourgeois moralism and nationalism has made that impossible. Imperialism, and its poodle, the United Nations, was never going to save the Palestinians, and nor were the bourgeois Arab States for whom the Palestinians were also an encumbrance and inconvenience, as they sought to further their interests and alliances with imperialism, and so, necessarily with the Zionist state, as its proxy. The workers in Ukraine can expect no better outcome.
Saturday, 8 March 2025
Anti-Duhring, Part I Philosophy, X – Morals and Law. Equality - Part 20 of 24
This is, again, magnified in the accelerated nature of the process seen in Russia, as detailed by Lenin. The growth of the bourgeoisie also sees the spread of bourgeois ideas. A look at England shows, for example, the way that the bourgeoisie begins to send its children to university. Those children, having done so, go on to take up positions in the state, as well as in the schools and universities themselves, so that they infuse those institutions with their own ideology. This goes on all the while that the political regime, itself, remains dominated by the landed aristocracy.
Even by the time of the 1832 Reform Act, only 2% of the population, in Britain, had the right to vote, which excluded, also, most of the bourgeoisie, more or less all of the petty-bourgeoisie, and of course, the whole of the emerging working-class. Even where the bourgeoisie did have votes, they were concentrated in the large towns and cities, which did not constitute parliamentary constituencies, as against the rotten boroughs, and concentration of seats in rural areas, dominated by the landed aristocracy. Even by the end of that century, parliament continued to be dominated by them, until such time that workers got the vote, and were pulled in, largely, behind the Liberal Party, as the representative of the newly developed, social-democratic alliance of large-scale industrial capital, and the industrial proletariat.
As Lenin described, in Russia, by the 1890's, its state was also dominated by the representatives of the bourgeoisie, and it was the interests of capital that dictated the actions of the state. Yet, it was still the old feudal-Asiatic class that dominated the Tsarist political regime.
“Trade on a large scale, that is to say, particularly international and, even more so, world trade, requires free owners of commodities who are unrestricted in their movements and as such enjoy equal rights; who may exchange their commodities on the basis of laws that are equal for them all, at least in each particular place. The transition from handicraft to manufacture presupposes the existence of a number of free workers — free on the one hand from the fetters of the guild and on the other from the means whereby they could themselves utilise their labour-power — workers who can contract with the manufacturer for the hire of their labour-power, and who hence, as parties to the contract, have rights equal to his.” (p 132)
And, so these requirements of capital and bourgeois society invariably come to dominate the actions of the state, i.e. of its permanent bureaucracy. Incidentally, talk of “the deep state” is just petty-bourgeois, conspiracist nonsense. What they really mean is just “the capitalist state”, i.e. the state of the bourgeois ruling-class, which, as a class state acts on behalf of that class, which is now a global ruling class, whichever party wins elections. It is the reality that Trump and Truss discovered, as they tried to pursue the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie to turn back the clock to the days prior to the dominance of imperialist capital, and the social-democratic state, and that Trump and Blue Labour are finding once more, as the global ruling class, again, uses its power via the global financial markets, to send interest rates higher, and their currencies lower, in response to their reactionary nationalist, petty-bourgeois agendas.
That is necessarily so, not just because the real human beings that make up that state bureaucracy are themselves bourgeois, but because the state must ensure its own survival, taken in its wider context. As Marx and Engels pointed out to Zasulich and Danielson, after Russia's defeat in the Crimean War, it recognised that it had to modernise, in order to compete with other capitalist states. It had to abandon its existing feudal-Asiatic production, and develop capitalist production.
“And finally the equality and equal status of all human labour, because and in so far as it is human labour, found its unconscious but clearest expression in the law of value of modern bourgeois political economy, according to which the value of a commodity is measured by the socially necessary labour embodied in it.” (p 132-3)
Friday, 7 March 2025
Social-Imperialists Have Led Workers To Disaster - Part 5 of 6
Inevitably, as Marx and Engels wrote, in relation to the European “non-historic peoples” in the 19th century, and as Lenin and Trotsky wrote about such small nations in the 20th, the Palestinians turned to other more powerful states, creating yet again divisions within the global working-class along national lines, and causing them to fall in behind the ruling classes of those states, lines and divisions themselves determined by imperialism. The reality of the supposed Two Bourgeois States solution was always that it could only be brought about, not only over the heads of the workers in the Middle-East, but also over the heads of the ruling classes of Israel and Palestine, and the surrounding states. It would require US imperialism, probably in conjunction with EU imperialism to impose such a solution on those ruling classes, and they had no reason to do that, rather than continuing to support the Zionist state as their proxy, and have it implement their agenda in the region.
The same is true in relation to the imperialist solution imposed from above on Ukraine. In the 1930's, Trotsky noted.
“Only hopeless pacifist blockheads are capable of thinking that the emancipation and unification of the Ukraine can be achieved by peaceful diplomatic means, by referendums, by decisions of the League of Nations, etc. In no way superior to them of course are those “nationalists” who propose to solve the Ukrainian question by entering the service of one imperialism against another. Hitler gave an invaluable lesson to those adventurers by tossing (for how long?) Carpatho-Ukraine to the Hungarians who immediately slaughtered not a few trusting Ukrainians. Insofar as the issue depends upon the military strength of the imperialist states, the victory of one grouping or another can signify only a new dismemberment and a still more brutal subjugation of the Ukrainian people, The program of independence for the Ukraine in the epoch of imperialism is directly and indissolubly bound up with the program of the proletarian revolution. It would be criminal to entertain any illusions on this score...
The worker and peasant masses in the Western Ukraine, in Bukovina, in the Carpatho-Ukraine are in a state of confusion: Where to turn? What to demand? This situation naturally shifts the leadership to the most reactionary Ukrainian cliques who express their “nationalism” by seeking to sell the Ukrainian people to one imperialism or another in return for a promise of fictitious independence.”
Thursday, 6 March 2025
Anti-Duhring, Part I Philosophy, X – Morals and Law. Equality - Part 19 of 24
With the fall of the Roman Empire, at the hands of the Goths and Vandals, even the limited egalitarianism it posited for freemen was swept away. In its place came a hierarchical social structure, which forms the basis of feudalism. It brought, “Western and Central Europe into the course of historical development, created a compact cultural area for the first time, and within this area also for the first time a system of predominantly national states influencing each other and mutually holding each other in check. It thus prepared the ground on which alone the question of the equal status of men, of the rights of man, could be raised at a later period.” (p 131)
As Marx noted in The Poverty of Philosophy, feudalism does not metamorphose into capitalism, nor do the serfs, as serfs, metamorphose into bourgeois and proletarians. A serf, as with a slave, can simply be reproduced for ever and a day, their surplus labour appropriated by the slave owner or feudal lord. It is not this relation that provides the dynamic of social development. Rather, it is the rupture of this relation. Once the serfs are freed, and the feudal retainers are disbanded, they are also separated from the means of production and consumption. In order to survive, they must find themselves some other source of income. They move to towns and cities in the Middle Ages, and use whatever skills they have developed from cottage industry to become independent commodity producers. As such, they come into competition with the existing feudal guild production, based on protectionism and guild monopolies. It is this activity of the former serfs, as, now, small scale commodity producers that leads to their development into a new bourgeois class.
“Originally itself a feudal estate, the bourgeoisie had developed the predominantly handicraft industry and the exchange of products within feudal society to a relatively high level, when at the end of the fifteenth century the great maritime discoveries opened up to it a new career of wider scope. Trade beyond the confines of Europe, which had previously been carried on only between Italy and the Levant, was now extended to America and India, and soon surpassed in importance both the mutual exchange between the various European countries and the internal trade within each individual country. American gold and silver flooded Europe and forced its way like a disintegrating element into every gap, fissure, and pore of feudal society. Handicraft industry could no longer satisfy the rising demand, in the leading industries of the most advanced countries it was replaced by manufacture.” (p 131-2)
By manufacture, here, is meant handicraft production, but, now, undertaken by several producers under one roof, as described by Marx in Capital, and by Lenin in The Development of Capitalism in Russia. These manufactories, set up, often, by merchant capitalists, or the larger handicraft producers themselves, already facilitate economies of scale. The size of building required does not increase proportionate to the volume of production, buying materials in larger quantities enables lower prices to be negotiated, savings on marketing are achieved, time required to get materials etc. from a stock room is reduced, but, also, it already enables a level of technical division of labour, and attendant increase in productivity.
That enabled this bourgeois production to undercut the old, feudal, guild production so that it continued to expand, despite the restrictions placed upon it. It does not arise as a metamorphosis of feudal production, but as, from the start, a separate species in competition with it.
“But this mighty revolution in the economic conditions of society was not followed by any immediate corresponding change in its political structure. The state order remained feudal, while society became more and more bourgeois.” (p 132)
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