The Dawn of Humanity

 

 Cave art depicting rhinoceros, Chauvet cave, France. 30,000-32,000 years ago.

Chris Night in his review of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything says the book is not about the ‘dawn’ of humanity but its ‘tea time’ around 30,000 years ago. It misses most of humanity’s first 200,000 years of hunting and gathering in Africa before the migration to Eurasia. Oh how boring. There is a reason for that. It erases the ‘first revolution’ won by mothers who used their sex strike to negotiate terms with men, socializing human reproduction to create egalitarian communes surviving many millennia. It projects private property and free market entrepreneurism back in history and cherry picks case studies to reinforce the bourgeois ideology that human nature is fixed for all time in the image of the possessive individual male.

Following Marx, Engels and Luxemburg, Marxists claim that women were the first revolutionaries who managed to create and defend the communal order on the basis of matrilineal kinship over many thousands of years. The overthrow of ‘mother right’ by the patriarchy established the first ‘class’ society.  As we fight to end all class society in a future communist society, women’s resistance to the rise of class society in defense of the commune for millennia, offers both inspiration and important lessons for our fight for socialism and the commune today.

Chris Knight comments on Rosa Luxemburg: 

“In her last book, Einfuhrung in die Nationalökonomie, she argued that “primitive communism, with its corresponding democracy and social equality [was] … the cradle of social development”. She went on to claim that “the whole of modern civilisation, with its private property, its class domination, its male domination, its compulsory state and compulsory marriage [is] merely a brief passing phase, which, because they first formed from the dissolution of primitive communist society, in future will become higher social forms … A communist and democratic society, even if in different and more primitive forms, embraced the whole long past of cultural history prior to present-day civilisation. In this way, the noble tradition of the ancient past, thus holds out a hand to the revolutionary aspirations of the future, the circle of knowledge closes harmoniously, and the present world of class domination and exploitation … becomes merely a minuscule transient stage in the great cultural advance of humanity.”

Chris Knight’s theory/program of ‘blood relations’ gives more substance to the contested social relations of Marx, Engels and Luxemburg’s concept of “primitive communism”. He argues that approximately 40,000 years ago women began a revolution in hunter-gatherer clans by organizing a sisterhood to protect their children from men. They synchronized their menstrual cycle with the full moon and went on a sex strike to compel their husbands to go hunting to provide for the children. This social relation allowed women to resist for many thousands of years the rise of the patriarchy. And it is that undying resistance that survives today in the emerging struggle against the Patriarchy especially in the form of trans-ideology which claims that men can become women.

This is an explanation for the recent emergence of trans-ideology today intensifying the backlash against second wave feminism just as capitalism slides into terminal crisis. The crisis this time is more extreme as Capital is destroying nature as the condition for its existence. Facing death Capital pulls out every trick in the book to divide and rule the proletariat. This must include the neutralization of women as part of nature’s fightback against capital over control of children. It is here that we can see the postmodern, idealist and voluntarist reprise of the overthrow of ancient ‘mother right’ behind the trans claims to be ‘menstruators’ and ‘uterus bearers’. Just as the original patriarchs sought to neutralize women’s power in reproducing blood relations by staging men’s menstrual rituals, trans-activists today claim that women do not have the exclusive right to motherhood. (Blood Relations p36-37)

Since transwomen claim to be ‘women’ they insist the term ‘uterus bearers’ must include men. So the trans-cult is not just woke, or the commodification of sex by a profit-driven new industry, it is the patriarchy attempting to erase the solidarity of the sisterhood grounded in sexual reproduction, and to separate ‘sisters’ from ‘brothers’, to divide the proletariat with charges of transphobia and fascism, taking us all down the road to extinction.

The original sisterhood solidarity worked for millennia, supported by mother’s brothers and the maternal clan. It was disrupted by men to form the original class society, the patriarchy, which survives today in the continued exploitation and oppression of women as unpaid or underpaid reproducers and producers. We need the return of sisterhood solidarity as an integral part of the working-class struggle for permanent revolution.

The model of ‘mothers’ brothers’ role in the matrilineal clan relations (see Blood Relations p 26-29) can inspire the solidarity of men with women’s reproductive and productive rights. That means standing up for women as an historic sex class defending nature from capitalist destruction. It means uniting the working class to defend women’s spaces from men who want to invade them. We don’t dispute the right of trans people to identify as men or women. It is their insistence that gender identity replaces sex that attacks the legacy of the first social revolution today as part of the permanent revolution for the new commune.   

https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything/

https://libcom.org/history/did-communism-make-us-human-anthropology-david-graeber-chris-knight

How workers are used as fascist fodder to create a fascist state and smash the socialist revolution

 

"Freedom Campers" face police line outside NZ parliament. Once an ‘event’ such as the occupation of Parliament grounds by Convoy is understood in terms of the class struggle, the task of revolutionary socialists is clear – build a workers’ antifascist movement!

So far there are a range of opinions on The Daily Blog about the Convoy occupation of Parliament Grounds. Chris Trotter calls for the police to remove the protestors. John Minto sees this as a revolt of workers fed up with neoliberalism and the failure of their political leadership. Bomber is sort of neutral tolerating the ‘clowns’ and against using the cops to recruit more ‘clowns’. Somewhere in all this the distinction between the petty bourgeois leadership and the ugly mob is lost.

Let’s go further. This is an ugly mob that demands their individual rights without reference to the rights of others. But clearly the mob is one of mainly workers who are the victim of decades of antiworker attacks. But what Bomber sees as ‘clowns’ is a populist mob hyped up by fascist demagogues into a confused and distorted expression of the class struggle.

The struggle that is represented by the Convoy on the Parliamentary lawn is not about the use of violence, or whether most of the mob are workers. It is about how an international fascist movement is using declassed workers as fascist fodder to win state power to launch systematic fascist state violence against the working class.

Appearances are always deceiving. There is much more to the Convoy than a legitimate protest of angry workers. It is the creation of the international rightwing project of Bannon and Trump for a white supremacist fascist movement. The NZ Convoy is part of a global plan to save the white European world from the rising flood the poor black and brown masses.

So it is not a question of the mob vs the capitalist state. They are part of the same project which is how to monopolize state violence to smash the working class. Fascists are not against the capitalist state, they want to control it. They want to remove the ‘communist’ Jacinda just like the January 6th attempt by a populist mob to force the US Congress to give Trump the election victory over the ‘liberal’ Biden. Fascism is a long story.

Fascism is the last-ditch attempt by the capitalist class to hold onto power and hang onto its wealth in the face of rising mass resistance against its destruction of society. The effect of this destruction is the collapse of all the gains that workers have won over generations. Many millions of working people are thrown out of work into poverty. Having nothing to lose, their potential power to overthrow capitalism becomes a revolutionary threat. ‘Potential’ because that threat has first to be organised before it can be realised.

So, while globally workers can unite to overthrow capitalism with strikes and occupations halting the production process, workers remain divided as a class by income, nationality, religion, race and gender. Identity politics is one result which erases class identity, ‘declassing’ workers as bourgeois individuals in the dog-eat-dog market. Unless workers are united and mobilised against the ruling class and its state, the class enemy will make use of these divisions and recruit workers as fascist fodder to smash those workers who so retain their class solidarity and consciousness.

Since WW2 capitalism has undergone a long structural crisis of falling profits where the share of value produced going to workers has shrunk relative to the share of profits. Increasing labour productivity has casualised labour, weakened if not destroyed trades unions and thrown many workers into self-employment. This declassing of workers sees social democracy move right into the liberal centre, and those left behind become prey to populist demagogues who recruit them as fascist fodder against organised labour.

The upshot is what we have today. Capitalism facing terminal crisis, layers of workers declassed and turned into fascist fodder, prey to petty bourgeois ‘leaders’ who blame the crisis on the working class and any govt, labelled ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ even ‘liberal’, destabilised by a populist mob to get fascist leaders into power.

Once an ‘event’ such as the occupation of Parliament grounds by Convoy is understood in terms of the class struggle, the task of revolutionary socialists is clear – build a workers’ antifascist movement!

Fight all attacks on workers on the streets, expose and discredit the bourgeois funders of fascism like Bannon and Trump, ridicule the puffed-up petty bourgeois leaders like Eftpostle and Demented who want to bring down the Labour Government.

Because the ruling class is preparing an international fascist movement to take state power, we have to defend bourgeois democracy. But only as a means to advancing the revolutionary struggle, not as a dead end. We never appeal to the bosses’ state to defend our rights.

We do it by class struggle methods. We show how parliamentary democracy is a sham. That the ‘human rights’ demands of the populists are a delusion. Only a workers’ state can deliver ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ from exploitation and oppression.

So once the socialist left has got its arse into gear, builds independent fighting anti-fascist militias to dispense with fascism, we will be prepared for the task of smashing the capitalist state and replacing it with a workers’ state.

First published on The Daily Blog 13 February 2022

 

Update

March 2. Police managed to break up the camp in a running battle with protestors. Revolutionaries do not call for the state policing of right-wing protests as it usually sides with their rotten politics against us. The suppression of fascist-led protests is the job of the workers anti-fascist movement!

 

 

ILTT Statement on the Inter-imperialist War in Ukraine

 

1.    Up until the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, NATO was organized as a counter-revolutionary bloc as part of the encirclement of the USSR and China with NATO, SEATO and CENTO. This bloc was to contain the degenerated workers’ states and maintain the authority of US imperialism in Europe been augmented by the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and the AUKUS tying Japan, Taiwan, Australia and the UK to the US encirclement project.

2.    After the restoration of capitalism in Russia, NATO moved eastward embracing the color revolutions as Russia wiggled out from under control of the western vulture capitalists to assert the rule of the oligarchs’ consolidation of economic and political power. Russia sought to consolidate its sphere of influence despite the loss of the Baltic states. Russia fought back against the color revolutions and western influence in the former Soviet States, eventually losing control of Ukraine in 2014.

3.    The trajectory of Russia’s emergence as an imperialist power became evident in 2008 based on the inability of the west to subordinate it as a semi-colony, its military strength and its ability to subordinate former Soviet states. The state control of former institutions of the Soviet state gave the new oligarchs the power to resist subordination to western imperialism and chart an independent course and act both financially and militarily as a counter-revolutionary force to put down the permanent revolution in Syria and most recently Kazakhstan.

4.    The German bourgeoisie had split allegiances, which were reflected both in the NATO 2030 Making A Strong Alliance Even Stronger and them Russian Strategic Goals 2021 documents as their dependence on Russian gas exports have played an important role in its stability. Some in Germany and the west hoped to break Russia from China to join NATO and push the western imperialist bloc eastward while the Russian’s looked at Germany as a vulnerable weak link in the western bloc which could be leveraged to split up NATO.

5.    Trump and the isolationists fed the Putin dream of breaking up the western bloc but the US ruling class put its foot down, displacing Trump with Biden and the hawkish Democrats committed to containing Russia and maintaining Germany in their sphere.

6.    The Putin/Xi meeting on February 4th consolidated the Russia/China imperialist bloc, something that has been obvious for a long time since BRICS, SCO and CSTO built the alliance of the two emergent imperialists power into a rising imperialist block facing off against the declining US/UK/EU imperialist bloc in the ‘Great Game’ for Eurasia. Now they are contending for Africa, Latin America and into Eastern Europe, first with the looking outward strategy and the Win-Win tactics of competitive loans and development projects which bring Chinese capital, corporations, managers and labor to the semi-colonies. More recently China and Russia are further integrating with the Belt and Road initiative.

7.    Ukraine won its formal independence from Russia in 1994, but the true independence has never existed and can only be won under the slogan and implementation of an Independent Soviet Ukraine which recognises the national rights of Donbass and Crimea. Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in Europe, but it has an untapped wealth of fertile soils ripe for the picking by the imperialist power that succeeds in drawing it into its sphere of influence. This civil war in the East, which is in reality a proxy war between Russia and the US to claim control of this prize, reflects the intensity of the struggle. See “Chartbook #81 Permanent crisis or Black Earth agro-giant? Alternative futures for Ukraine (Adam Tooze)”

8.    Both the Kiev and the Moscow governments have made use of fascist reaction. Today the fascists are a minority in Ukraine and the break-away People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk which raised a socialist program in their struggle have bowed to Russian power at their back. Russia in turn employs Russian fascists in a paramilitary role.

9.    The Ukraine government, caught between the two imperialist blocs, nevertheless is economically and militarily subordinated to the western bloc and NATO. Russia correctly identifies the western bloc and NATO as an economic and strategic threat. Thus, as a pawn in the great game the workers and peasants of Ukraine have no way out from under the thumb of imperialism but the path of permanent revolution.

10. This means that the call ‘neither Washington nor Moscow’ of the Third Camp socialist tendencies is in fact a social patriotic slogan in favor of US imperialism since there can be no Ukrainian independence as a vassal of Western or Eastern capital.

11. To secure Ukrainian independence socialist revolution is required. And this requires open hostility. Class against class, with fraternization and mutinies and a proletarian military policy turning the war drive of the imperialist powers into class war. The ILTT takes the side of neither imperialist bloc and rejects the theories of sub-imperialism of the opportunists who seek to support Putin and Xi against the socialist revolution.

12. The Stalinist parties take an unapologetic pro-Moscow ‘peace’ position reflective of their origins of the Moscow parties in the USSR days and without reference to which class holds power in Moscow today. According to the Stalinists, capitalist Russia is a leading force in the anti-imperialist bloc of nations. In reality, Russia as an imperialist power, like the United States and the EU, is a leading counter revolutionary force against proletarian permanent revolution internationally.

13. We call on workers in the US and Russia and all nations to turn inter-imperialist war into a civil war at home to bring down the capitalist class, bring the workers to power in Workers States, to expropriate the capitalists, bring the troops home and build national and international centrally-planned economies, world peace and rational socialist economic development.

14. As the martyred German socialist Karl Liebknecht said: “The main enemy of the German people is in Germany: German imperialism, the German war party, German secret diplomacy. This enemy at home must be fought by the German people in a political struggle, cooperating with the proletariat of other countries whose struggle is against their own imperialists.”

February 14, 2022

For an International United Front against Inter-imperialist War!

 

The terminal crisis of capitalism drives the various imperialist nations into conflict with each other for control of foreign markets and resources. It was only a matter of time before the war of words, the trade and currency wars turned into a hot war such as unfolding in Ukraine today.

To prevent the mushrooming of this war we need a united front that promotes rank-and-file rebellion against the imperial adventurism of inflammatory deployments. Likewise, we need to promote labour political strikes and mass actions on each continent to shut the war drive down!

The international workers movement struggles to end the wars of capitalist and imperialist rivalry which drags our class, our youth and our communities into the death spiral of hot wars for geo-strategic advantage and profit. A hot war can quickly escalate into a nuclear face-off that could easily destroy life on the planet for thousands of centuries.

It is imperative that the international working class mobilize its forces to stop the imperialists’ war unfolding between the NATO/US/EU imperialism on the one side and Russian imperialism, its allies and proxies on the other.

At this moment at the end of February, the position of the PRC is anomalous. We call on the workers and enlisted ranks of the PLA to refuse support to Russia’s empire project and to block the Beijing leadership from carrying out its own expressed expansionist gains.

We call on all workers organizations which oppose both NATO militarism and Russian advances into Ukraine to form an International Workers United Front against Imperialist Wars that initiate direct actions by workers organizations and opponents of wars for profit and national chauvinist aims.

We call for a conference of organizations to set a time and place for joint United Front actions internationally, that ensure each organization’s representatives have the right of democratic participation with the right of full freedom to express their programs and criticisms. The international conference will discuss the demands of the movement and the methods of opposing and ending inter-imperialist war.

International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT) Integrating the RWG (Zim), RWG (BR), CWG (A/NZ), CWG (USA)

 

No to Capitalist War! Fight the Class War!

 

                                                            Russia invades Ukraine

Terminal crisis is more than late capitalism, it’s too late capitalism. It’s the dying society making way for the birth of the new society. But it won’t go quietly. The ruling classes fall back on their atavistic origins and fight wars to scavenge what is left of nature. But war today intensifies the attack on nature and sacrifices the working people as cannon fodder. Only an international socialist revolution can save humanity from destruction.

In the Ukraine the Western aligned elite relives the past glories of the white supremacist European fascism. In Russia the Bonapartist regime of Putin relives the blood and soil triumphs of the Tsarist empire. Both are symptoms of terminal crisis   

In this issue, read our Statement on Ukraine and our call for an International United Front Against Inter-Imperialist War. Two imperialist powers – the US, and the other NATO powers, are fighting Russia over the prize of semi-colonial Ukraine. Political and economic warfare has escalated to military warfare. In that situation we are for the defeat of all opposing imperialist powers. This is called dual defeatism. But who and what will defeat them? Only class war can defeat imperialist war and open the road to socialist revolution!

By class war we mean, first, the Ukraine workers and small farmers whose class interest is to be free from the oppression of imperialism, by forming self-defence militias and appealing to the ranks of the Russian army and of the Ukraine army, which is a proxy for NATO, to fight for an ‘Independent Soviet Ukraine’. Second, workers and poor farmers in Russia and the NATO powers must appeal to the ranks of their military to refuse orders, unite to launch strikes and mutinies to cripple the military machines, and fight for Workers and Farmers Governments in a world federation of Socialist Republics.

Aotearoa/NZ is embedded in the US imperialist bloc as a weak semi-colony. Its national bourgeoisie prides itself on its ‘independent’ foreign policy and taking acting on UN collective security resolutions. But when imperialist wars break out, Labour and National governments both fall into line with the US bloc.

Workers in Aotearoa/NZ must reject acting as cannon fodder for the US/NATO bloc that wants to colonise Ukraine! We must fight imperialist war by joining the international class war! For an independent Socialist Ukraine! For workers and poor farmers militias to defend Ukraine! International support for workers militias fighting for independence from both US/EU and Russian imperialism!

The articles in this issue about the recent uprising in Kazakhstan and the teachers’ strike in Zimbabwe also show how imperialism is the main enemy in the global class war. In the formers, only the independent organisation of the workers and poor farmers can end the client regime that rules the state on behalf of Russia. In Zimbabwe, only workers coming to power can overthrow the military regime that came to power with the support of China.  

The Aotearoa/NZ version of the anti-vax Convoy Camp occupied the Parliamentary grounds for more than 3 weeks before being evicted by the police. It shows how the global extreme right is taking advantage of capitalism’s terminal crisis to recruit declassed petty bourgeois and workers as fascist fodder, and why we urgently need a mass anti-fascist movement to smash capitalism in its embryo!

Finally, we argue that the first revolution by women 40,000 years ago to create ‘primitive communism’ until it was overthrown by the Patriarchy 10,000 years ago, has an echo today in the attack on women by trans ideology to neutralise their revolutionary power.    

 

Class Struggle #140 Autumn March-May 2022

Class Struggle 140 Autumn 2022 by dbedggood