Trumped, Stumped and Dumped

The fear and loathing of the triumph of Trump has called forth the usual load of garbage trying to fathom the causes and consequences. Was it endemic white racism? (Is there any other kind?) Was it the criminal Clintons? No, it’s not about race, or the Clintons, it’s 'about the economy stupid'. The low turnout, the refusal of progressive Bernieites to get in behind Clinton, the switch of the rustbelt deplorables from non-voting to Trump, created the perfect storm for the Stormtrooper.

But these 'facts' cannot be understood unless the deeper causes of the crisis of US capitalism are made clear. These explain why Trump is no more than an evil clown in the circus that is electoral politics, and that he cannot solve the problems of US capitalism dying on its feet. Trumped means Stumped. As Marx pointed out more than a century ago bourgeois elections every four years allow the subject citizens the right to vote for one or other faction of capitalist to rule over them until the next election. The very nature of the bourgeois state is that it is founded on a constitution that defends private property, the essence of capitalism. Because of its ownership of private property capitalists can force workers to work for them and create the surplus-value that becomes their profits. Enforcing that class exploitation is the state's mission.

Therefore, whoever is periodically elected to government rules in the spirit if not name of private property. This charade will repeat until the subject citizens form a class conscious majority and overthrow the capitalist state itself. And the essential aspect to that class consciousness is seeing right through the charade of bourgeois democracy to recognize the necessity to replace it with workers' democracy and a workers' state.

Make America Great Again

Trump won because the working class was divided and subordinated by the Democrats, the unions led by the labor bureaucrats and the fake left that always sucks up to the Democrats. Being locked into electoral politics prevents the working class from uniting around an independent class program to overthrow capitalism.

Yet since politics is no more than applied economics, we can see in Trumps triumph the beginnings of the break of workers from the Democrats. Some of those who backed Bernie did not vote for Clinton. They risked Trump because they hated Hillary’s role enforcing institutional racism and practicing imperial warmongering. But now that Bernie has 'united' with Trump, those who are already on the streets against Trump cannot look beyond this double betrayal to any revival of "progressive" Democrats. Michael Moore is pissing in the wind.

Other workers in the de-industrialised rust belts have not voted for the Clinton Democrats for 20 years. That is where the rhetoric of 'jail her' comes in. Many came out for Obama when US finance capital played the race card of cosmopolitan liberal democracy, before switching off again as Obama turned into another Clinton. So they went for Trump because he promised them a return to the time when America was great not just for the bosses but for the 'middle class'.

The slogan in their minds meant the return to the time when they had secure, well paid jobs in manufacturing and mining before 'globalization', and before 'neo-liberalism'. The so-called 'middle class' workers, is itself an oxymoron. In reality high paid workers in America in the post-war boom were not a 'middle class' but high paid workers who benefited from US imperialism in a period of capitalist expansion.

The 'middle class' in America is a state of mind not an economic category. Especially when the frontier bourgeois ideology of the 'free individual' is designed to write class out of history. Yet classes are constituents of capitalism. We have the self-employed, farmers, small business owners, etc., who are petty bourgeois in the classic sense of living off one’s own labor. Of course many are disguised wage workers or even slaves when exploited by big business as 'independent contractors'.

The 'middle class' workers in America are really labor aristocrats, well paid workers whose wages reflect in part the super profits that the US can extract from its exploitation of labor in developing, or emerging economies. Since labor aristocrats are paid at a rate beyond the cost of reproducing their skill they share in imperialist super profits. Their wages are subject to rises and falls depending on the economic cycle of boom-bust. Just as they benefited from the US empire in its prime during the post-war boom, so they are the victims of the decline of US imperialism since the 1980s.

The End of the Golden Age

As we will see, there can be no going back to the 'golden age' of post-war capitalism, not in the US or in any other country. The Rate Of Profit has fallen in the US since the 1980s apart from a rise in the 90s that never regained the post-war level. Since the 2008 recession, the US economy has stagnated, along with most of the rest of the world. Moreover, that Long Recession failed to restore the conditions of profitability so that the global economy faces a major depression to destroy labor costs and plant and machinery. While such a 'recovery' is possible, that of the labor aristocracy is not.

So can Trump deliver on his promises to Make America Great again? No he cannot. The reason is that the export of jobs from middle class America followed the export of capital away from falling profits to the developing countries to super-exploit cheap labor and raw materials. This is what neo-liberal globalization means; the export of capital from the imperialist countries to open up and economically dominate these oppressed economies in order to pump out super-profits to compensate for the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF) of US finance capital.

Without globalization, US capitalism was trapped by high wages at home and further pressure on the TRPF. That is why the New Democrats adopted neo-liberal globalization with gusto because their constituency is the new labor aristocracy, employed in the new tertiary knowledge, digital and media 'industries' driven by the logic of globalization to reap super-profits. That is why the Democrats have overseen the export of capital to China to take advantage of its rapid capitalist development since the 1990s.

Therefore Trump's whole retreat to isolationism as a solution to the destruction of manufacturing effects of globalization will cut off the sources of superprofits from offshore that US capitalism needs to survive. A trade war with China will end this flow of US super profits taking advantage of cheap labor and consumer goods. His is a deluded circus trick that will blow up in his face and in the face of those who voted for him. Trumped is Stumped by those who own and control the US state - finance capital-- and sooner or later he will be Dumped by the angry 'deplorables' unless he mobilizes them as fascist fodder to smash the rise of a militant labor movement.

Caught in a Contradiction

Trump cannot break with the 'establishment' any more than the Clinton new Democrats could. The reason is that the US state is not under the control of politicians, even those who do the rounds from Wall Street and the corporate headquarters to Washington, but by the ruling class of finance capital. That ruling class has already proven that it will not reinvest in US manufacturing unless it can cut wages to a China Wage or raise the rate of exploitation by employing robots. Neither can meet the needs of full employment at a living wage of the abandoned "middle class." Thus the ruling class committed to globalization to survive will force Trump to break the promises to his constituency. And this is where the racist, sexist rhetoric comes in.

When it becomes clear that Trump cannot return America to the golden age because his policies cannot restore jobs or profits, this will exacerbate the class struggle greatly. The radical left that is already mobilizing against Trump will be forced to mobilize also against the Democrats who back Trump. These young, multiracial students and workers have already started, and pose a challenge to the state at all levels, on the streets, campuses and in employment. To divert attention away from his economic failures Trump will use the racist, sexist, anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic rhetoric that he has employed in the election race to blame these activist minorities for all the economic ills of US imperialism.

Trump in the White House has a Republican Senate and House behind him. Even so he can act independently by invoking the "terror" state created by the Bushes and Clintons to declare a ruling class 'war on terror' at home 'over the head' of Congress. He can build his symbolic wall, boost the police and military, quarantine and deport Latinos and Muslims, ban protests and strikes, etc., and unleash his state forces as well as his paramilitary storm troopers against the attempts by "progressive" forces to defend the rights of minorities and labor.

Trump will be in the position to expand his executive power from that left him by Bush and Obama, and become a Louis Bonaparte standing above the classes to rescue the nation from "terror" at home and abroad. If that fails he is in the position to stage a fascist coup against the constitution drawing on the support of reactionary elements of the petty bourgeois and labor aristocracy against a militant mass labor movement. This means that already Trump poses the question of power rhetorically to a mass working class divided and subordinated to a treacherous labor bureaucracy aligned to the bourgeois Democratic Party.

To overcome these divisions it is necessary to urgently build a working class party that advances a revolutionary action program to lead every struggle against the power of capital concentrated in the Trump Presidency. That party will have to become the leadership in the unions, in all workplaces, in the schools, on the streets, linking all the many, various social movements into one massive united front, creating the organs of workers power, workers councils and workers militias, capable of defeating the state and paramilitary forces, smashing the bourgeois state and putting in place a workers state.

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Karl Marx: Revolutionary Scientist

Statues of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in Berlin

The disinterring of Marx today is now common, even if the body dug up is usually not that of Marx but imposters like Zizek who claim to be Marxists but are really academics who never organise the workers struggle. Marx had to suffer many attacks in his own lifetime and further indignities in death as Marxism was plagued by a constant stream of caricatures and misrepresentations, the most important being that Marxism was never a ‘science’ and has no relevance today.  Some even attack Marxism as a utopia that diverts us from making meaningful, incremental, progressive ‘change’.
Danylmc writing in the Dimpost blog decides after a quick skimming of Marxism that it never was scientific and moreover is counter-revolutionary because it calls for “smashing capitalism” rather than evolving through many iterations into a new, better society…or not.  For some reason Danylmc does not include the ‘labour theory of value’ (LTV) as one of Marx’s utopian ideas gone wrong. Maybe because Marx did not originate this theory as it was a fundamental plank of the political economy of his day.  Either Danylmc understands the LTV as Marx does, or not. Either way by accepting it he fails to see that it makes a mockery of his argument. [i]

So let’s see what Marx means by science. Was he copying 19^th century chemistry and reducing social revolution to a law like water turning into steam at the right heat as Danylmc claims?  No, social science has to account for the interaction of conscious subjects and their material environment.   For example, humans learn over millennia how to boil water more efficiently (that is conserving labour time) a reality that the young Marx observed when as a radical journalist he campaigned for the right of landless peasants to collect firewood in the Rhineland. This experience proved that social interaction is not the random behavior of individuals because humans’ actions are ultimately determined by their social relations. And it was capitalists that burnt coal to heat water to drive their industrial revolution so as to exploit human labour power more efficiently/profitably and even enable workers to buy firewood or coal as a commodity.

So let’s go back to the make-or-break LTV.  The LTV was a theory shared by bourgeois political economy which observed the flood of peasants off the land into the factories.  Marx also began with the presupposition that humans must reproduce themselves by means of their labour. Marx was trained in philosophy and law which meant he had to test the meaning of the words he used against the social reality. What turned Marx onto the scientific analysis of society was the failure of Hegelian philosophy to account for the actions of humans as part of God’s plan. Similarly he rejected the bourgeois political economy that turned social history into a march of human progress culminating in the rise to power of the bourgeoisie.

The difference between natural and social science is that in the latter the scientist is a partisan or ‘interested’ observer. It was Marx’s taking the side of peasant wood collectors in the class struggle that converted him from a bourgeois intellectual into a proletarian intellectual.  He did this by critiquing political economy and developing the presupposition of the LTV into the Law of Value (LOV).[ii]  Political economy was empiricist and merely described value as the total labour embodied in commodities. Since this commodity production resulted from the contributions of workers, capitalists and landlords, each ‘class’ could claim a ‘fair share’ of the total labour/value as wages, profits and rents. It justified this expropriation of labour value as a reward to capital and land for the use of private property in the process of production. This empiricist rationale was elevated by Hegel into a divine mission. For Marx, it was one thing to defeat the bourgeois political and economic holy rollers in philosophical class struggle, but it would not stick unless the empiricist bourgeois political economy that justified the exploitation of labour in the process of production was blown apart by a scientific critique.

Marx’s Scientific Method

Marx’s method borrowed from Hegel in moving from concrete appearances to abstract essence and then back to the reconstituted concrete. Hegel observed the social classes, politics, state and law of German society of the early 19^th century as a contradictory unity of appearances accompanying the rise of capitalism. The appearances formed a real historical society (the market lives!) but the essence which explained them was the spirit of God.  The Political economy of Smith and Ricardo also took the appearance of developing capitalism but appealed to the idealism of material progress to resolve social contradictions into the universal freedoms of bourgeois society.

Marx put Hegel on his feet and argued that the essence was not ideal but material. God and material progress were just idealist slogans used by the bourgeoisie to claim it represented the interests of all classes and nations.  In the Critique of the German Ideology, Marx and Engels settled their accounts with the followers of Hegel.  History was one of social revolutions in which successive modes of production made up of social relations of production where the ruling class extracted the surplus product of the producing class and justified it by invoking Gods.  Each mode reached its limits when the ruling class oppression of the producing class produced a rising class consciousness leading to a social revolution.  Capitalism would follow course and give rise to its successor, communism.  For the young Marx this was still a philosophical critique. The real task of proving it scientifically began. Hegelian Marxists typically arrest at this point and explain history as a ‘lawful’ transition without any conscious subjective intervention unless it is the will to power of the heroic individual!

Here we have to begin with Capital Vol 1 and read it from start to finish. It is no good relying David Harvey as a guide because he recommends leaving the ‘difficult’ Part 1 for ‘later’.  Marx deliberately started Capital with the concept of the commodity because it was the “cell” of capitalism.  His method for arriving at the essence of value was to abstract from surface appearances of equal exchange down to the commodity ‘cell’ and then move back to the surface where the appearances are now understood as the result of “many determinations”.  The class struggles on the surface now reveal their deeper causes. The commodity had a dual character, a contradictory unity of use-value and exchange value. Labour power could be exchanged for its value and at the same time create surplus value as it was the only commodity to produce more value than its own value.

How did this come about?  The primitive accumulation of pre-capitalist material wealth in the colonial world gave capitalism its kick start in Europe.  But capitalism as a mode of production did not come into full existence until commodity production was generalised by commodifying labour power of wage labour as a result of creating a class of landless labourers.  The secret, hitherto denied by political economy, was that the use-value of labour power to the capitalist was defined as its capacity to create more value that its exchange value, i.e. the wage needed to reproduce it daily.
What is scientific about this discovery?  The dual nature of the commodity allowed Marx to resolve an anomaly in political economy where labour as the equivalent of value did not exchange at its value.  It if exchanged at its value capitalism would be all wages and no profits.  Therefore political economy had to fiddle with its LTV to account for this anomaly, adding qualifications to explain why some of labour’s value ended up as profits and rent. Marx resolved this so that the LOV explained the exploitation of labour-power and expropriation of surplus-value during the process of production.

Capitalism was not an equal opportunity society of the political economists assuming unequal exchange could be corrected. Capitalism was inherently unequal and would develop in a contradictory way until it could no longer reproduce itself giving rise to the conditions for socialism.
Marx learned from both Hegel as well as Smith and Ricardo, critiqued their errors, using a method of analysis that exposed their limitations and laid the foundations for his own science.  This was to be a scientific revolution greater than those of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin or Einstein.  From henceforth all social knowledge would have to be subjected to the rigorous methodology of the scientific method.   Social science not only incorporated natural science it had to explain the constant interaction between society and nature where social classes determine these relations within limits set by nature.

Marxism:  science or utopia in Russia?

Danylmc writes: “After the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks were very disappointed to learn that (a) history and (b) humans didn’t work like this at all. Firstly their revolution happened in an underdeveloped, mostly agrarian economy, not an advanced economy like Marx predicted. Second, the revolution failed to spread so they were stuck with ‘Communism in one country’. Thirdly, it turns out that if you have a capitalist economy – even a very basic one like Tsarist Russia – and you take away the market and put the workers in charge of the means of production (and execute anyone trading on the black market) then instead of transforming itself into a utopia because of the scientific laws of history and the malleability of human nature, the entire economy collapses, and people in cities end up eating their own children to stay alive, and everyone who can still walk rises up and joins the capitalist counter-revolutionaries trying to overthrow you.”

This is a complete travesty of what happened in Russia. First as we have seen assumptions (a) and (b) bear no relation to Marxism.  Marx did not hold to an idealist view of capitalism following inexorable laws would arrive at a communist utopia. Rather class conscious workers must overthrow it and seize power.  He excoriated the German Social Democrats in the 1870s for thinking that capitalism would evolve peacefully into socialism by means of objective laws of progress. We have seen that Marx’s scientific method makes class struggle the driver of capitalist development. It motivates the contradiction that causes periodic crises which we can see today are now terminal since the bourgeoisie can no longer overcome these crises without the destruction of humanity and nature. Either we the workers become the gravedigger of capitalism, or capitalism buries us all.

We only know this because Marxism as a revolutionary science proves that the dual nature of the commodity contains the fundamental contradiction between use-value (nature) and exchange value (capital) that is the basis for determining what happens at the surface of capitalist society.  Class struggle over the rate of exploitation at the point of production explains class struggle at the level of the market, nation state and international relations. [iii] In Capital Vol 3 Marx shows how the LOV is the basis of other ‘laws of motion’ accounting for development of capitalist production, crises of falling profits, and the drive to expand capitalist production on a world scale. Here he sets out his theory of crisis whereby the periods of boom and bust, the concentration and centralisation of capital, and the widening income gap between capital and labour are explained. While both he and Engels anticipated many of the developments of capitalism in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, we have to look to the work of succeeding Marxists to see how they used his finished and unfinished work as the basis for the testing and validating of his scientific theory.

Lenin finished off Marx’s unfinished volumes in one small pamphlet entitled “Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism”. To do this he had to go back to Vol 3 and show how the state, world market and international relations were explained by the laws of motion underlying crisis and counter-crisis tendencies motivated by class struggle.  This enabled him to break with the mechanical evolutionary Marxism of the 2^nd International in Europe and the Mensheviks in Russia.  The result was Bolshevism, the concrete application of Marxist revolution that made the revolution in Russia, the “weakest link in imperialism”, and which led the 3^rd Communist International.

The most important breakthrough of Lenin was to recognise the need to form a proletarian party as the mechanism of uniting theory and practice to test the scientific method of Marx.  Without Marxism that penetrated the veils of capitalist exploitation revealing the essence of the fundamental contradiction contained in the commodity, then workers would lack the “consciousness” necessary to fight to overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism. While Marx had stood as the scientific ‘authority’ against the lapses into bourgeois idealism within the ranks of the workers movements, it remained trapped in by bourgeois ideology and constantly lapsed back into class struggle over the distribution of ‘fair shares’ that did not require the overthrow of capitalism.

The result was the Bolshevik party that was as response to the extreme contradiction between European imperialism and the old Tsarist feudal regime. The party became the Marxist scientist that tested theory in practice in the “weakest link” of imperialism in Russia. The old evolutionary Marxist utopia was destroyed in theory and practice. The February Revolution that began as the strike of women textile workers threw up a bourgeois Provisional Government which was incapable of breaking from British and French imperialism. It proved this by collaborating with the Tsarist General Kornilov in a Tsarist Coup. The Bolsheviks quickly drew the conclusion that the workers must take the road to socialist revolution in the almost bloodless October insurrection.

Far from ‘disappointment ‘resulting from the Revolution it inspired world wide support from workers who rose to defend it when it was invaded and isolated by the invasion of the imperialist nations. The Bolsheviks already knew that socialism could not be built in one country, let alone a backward isolated country. The survival of the Russian revolution depended on the spread of revolution and they knew in advance what was necessary to make this happen.  They formed the Communist International to organise Bolshevik type parties, the worker scientists, in every country. Only the failure of workers to break from their ties to the bourgeoisie and its ideology of market equality to form such parties capable of leading revolutions, allowed the imperialist ruling classes to hang onto their decrepit capitalist system and condemning the revolution to degenerate into a Stalinist caricature of “communism”.

The Bolshevik Revolution still stands as the most advanced struggle of the international proletariat against the reactionary utopia of rotting, dying capitalist society.  If we look around the world today we can see the bourgeoisie “eating their own children by the million” as they fight to our death to hold onto the stolen wealth of generations of workers.  Our hope must be in the revolutionary science of Marxism, embodied in the international revolution party, capable of putting into practice the scientific program that can guide our struggle to take power and replace capitalism with socialism.

NOTES
[i] The Labour Theory of Value was the issue in Marx’s “The Modern theory of Colonisation” Chapter 25 in Capital Vol 1. Mr Peel emigrated to the Swan River (Perth, Australia today) with capital, machines and men. The men shoot through to the bush to become independent producers, so Mr Peel’s machines rust and his land lies unproductive. Never mind, Mr Peel does what any good capitalist does when he cannot profit from the exploitation of labour-power, he becomes a land agent and speculates in founder’s rent.
[ii] The LOV means that value equals the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. Socially necessary labour time equals the average time of work enabling wages to buy the average commodity basket to allow the working family to live at the average standard of living.
[iii] Vol 2 examines the circuit of capital including the transformation of value into prices in the market while holding competition constant.  Vol 3 moves to the more concrete level of competition among capitalists in the market. He had planned 3 other volumes on the State, World Trade and International Relations to return to the most complex concrete level of reality which he never completed drafting.

Syria Fact Sheet: Victory to the Revolution!

Rebel fighters hold their weapons as they take their positions near the town of Kafr Nabuda in Hama province, Syria, Oct. 11, 2015. The Syrian army, backed by allied militias, has made advances in western Syria after heavy Russian airstrikes. (photo by REUTERS/Ammar Abdullah)

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/11/syria-opposition-advance-hama-countryside.html#ixzz4MjO8HyuT

 

Syrian Fact Sheet

1)       U.S. sheds crocodile tears over Aleppo while their own coalition is waging attacks on people across the region; the tears are for the deal they had with Russia. The U.S. never had a problem with Assad while they were employing his torture chambers against captured Afghanis and Iraqis during the Iraq war or while he kept Palestine in check.   Indeed the U.S. refusal to arm the opposition with heavy artillery, anti-tank, anti-aircraft MANPADS and SAMS has long indicated the two-faced non-commitment to any revolutionary upsurge of the masses for democracy.  The U.S. has always been hedging its bets in search of the new pawn or in deference to Assad. The Obama “red line” declaration after Assad’s Sarin gas attack on Ghouta proved this. That pro-Assad figures in the west have had so much fun disputing the truth of the attack is due to the Obama administration’s refusal to energize their press control, exactly for doublethink reasons when they found no support in Congress for enforcing any red line.

2)       The Arab national revolution emerged again in 2011 with the democratic and economic demands of the masses across the Middle East and North Africa.  The people's demands could not be met under regimes that sustained imperialist control and perpetual semi-colonial subjugation.  Thus the masses came in collision with imperialism.  Both the dominant western imperialism and the emergent Russia/China bloc contesting for geopolitical advantage and control of semi-colonial resources and markets.

3)       The counterrevolution emerged from multiple quarters against the masses in the region from Egypt to Libya to Syria. The majority of local counterrevolutionary forces are proxies for imperialists, East or West. Thus we see Hezbollah backing Assad, while additional counterrevolutionaries are the proxies for regional players and are external expressions of intra-royalty factions in Saudi-Arabia and/or counters to Iranian intervention, and a virtual invasion by Iran with Russian technical and logistical support. To survive the masses have had to find arms where they can. This disturbs sectarians who equate the stencils on the arms crates with imperialist control over the end users. Some of these sectarians say there is no Syrian working class.

4)       The bourgeois army officers and Syrian capitalist renegades around the FSA/SNC who abandoned Assad and ran off to Geneva to make alliance with imperialism claim leadership of the opposition and make alliance with western imperialism in the hope of gaining control in a post Assad regime subordinate to the U.S./EU and free from the Russian bloc. They do not speak for the revolution, nor for the Local Coordinating Committees (LCC).

5)       Russia is not anti-imperialist; Russia is looking at Syria as a fertile territory for investment of its surplus capital.

6)       The bombing of civilian populations by Assad and Russia with no real opposition from the west is aimed not at ISIS or Al Qaeda but at the civilians who are organizing their own self-defense, including their own self administration.

7)       The Local Coordinating Committees (LCC) established across Syria are the form that self-organization takes, they are the natural organs of self-defense and survival created by a civilian population under siege.  Inside the LCC’s both the democratic aspirations of the masses and the need for civil administration and defense from the neo-liberal barrel bombs of Assad unite a civilian opposition against all anti-democratic forces. Thus they are an embryo of workers councils for self-administration of the society by the working population and the lower middle class and dispossessed farmers driven to the cities by climate change.

8)       U.S., Russia and China suffer overproduction of Capital and are desperate to find places to put it to use where they can assume profit in actual investment and not speculation. Syria has the misfortune of geographic location to be right where profitable pipelines can be built.  For Russia, Syria is a host that offers naval and airbases on the Mediterranean, a geopolitical objective of the first order as a counter to the U.S. bases that ring this body from Morocco to Turkey. This is also a proxy war over the allegiance of important business partners for both imperialist blocs, namely the business of Turkey and Iran.  For Turkish and Iranian business, the Russian bloc, just like the U.S. bloc would sacrifice the national liberation of the Kurdish people just as readily as sending their bombers or facilitating invasions of Syria.

9)       But make no mistake, none of these profit-making objectives can be achieved by either bloc so long as the revolution is contesting political power with the regime; both Russia and the U.S. endeavor to crush the Revolution; Russia seeks to obliterate it and fortify the personal regime of Bashar Assad; the U.S. seeks to combine elimination of the revolutionaries with co-optation of forces it can make amenable to the survival of an Assad regime minus Assad.

10)    The revolution increasingly comes to understand that national liberation from the combination of the Assad dictatorship and the invaders allied to Assad requires breaking with imperialism completely. This places socialism on the order of the day as the only way out and that the national democratic revolution has no hope of realization in a bourgeois parliament but must be carried through to victory by the armed masses and their own workers-democratic organizations. Stalinophiles count as nothing the proliferation of hundreds of Local Coordinating Committees or their five years of experience administering and exercising growing powers in areas liberated from Assad.  

11)    Defense of Rojava against ISIS was at first heroic and led by the Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) with armed women’s detachments taking the fight against brutal counterrevolutionary theocracy. But as has happened numerous times in the post-WWII era, Kurdish national liberation has collapsed into an unholy alliance with U.S. imperialism. That this time, the betrayal was managed by the Maoist PKK (Kurdish Workers Party), the same group that lately abandoned the armed struggle within Turkey, shows how the stagist theory of Stalinism, in practice, abandons the masses when a revolutionary victory is within their reach. The U.S. forced the YPG to abandon the fight against Assad, just as it co-opted FSA forces on the southern front

12)    Co-opted forces allied to one or the other bloc can only deliver a carved up Syria corresponding to contemporary spheres of economic interests. Assad howls that this is what Washington wants, but has nothing to say about the forced redistribution of populations-- actual ethnic cleansing -- that is the object of the Russian air campaign against Aleppo and the invasion by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

13)    Since the end of WWII the semi-colonial states have been driven by the need of their peoples to liberate their economies from the parasitism of imperialism.  The Russia/China bloc is not leading an anti-imperialist bloc that can win national independence for semi colonies from imperialism.    Russia and China are not leading an anti-imperialist united front a la the World Social Forum’s dream of a “21st century Socialism,” rather they are trying to wrest countries from U.S./EU imperialist control across the global south and claim the semi-colonial prizes for their own profit.  Did their BRICS bank bail out their preferred popular front in Brazil and head off the U.S.-inspired impeachment? No!

14)    Today internationalist workers must defend the Syrian Revolution as it is the front line in the struggle of the international proletariat and oppressed masses against the designs of imperialism, the system that each of the two blocs employs in a quest for control of all the world’s trade and labor. This is what is at stake in besieged Aleppo. Take the side of the masses against every one of their would-be masters! Victory to the Syrian Revolution!

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The World is Upside Down, Capitalism is Not Working!

The common phrase “The World is Upside Down” reflects the widespread concern that things are not right in the world. I will argue that it is not the world that is upside down but capitalism, and that this has always been so. The catchphrase “Capitalism is not working” is closer to the truth, but likewise when has that not been true? What we face today is the decline and fall of an upside down society making way for a new society which is right way up.

Neocon market rules

Neocons (my term for all neoliberals, neocons and neo-classicals) assume that capitalism is the best society yet and anything wrong with it results from interference by monopoly interests taking control of the state. Capitalist society is seen as made up of individual citizens buying and selling commodities. The role of the state is to defend the private interests of such individuals from those who would used the state to disposses them. Spending on the police and military are a justified ‘overhead cost’ of running capitalism. This ideology of a class neutral state was always an attempt to hide the real role of the capitalist state in making capitalism work.

In fact since NZ was colonised by white settlers, the state always played the leading role in creating the market and then regulating it to manage the economic use of land, labour and capital. NZ history abounds with examples of the use of the state power to dispossess Maori, subsidize farmers, regulate unions and monopolise producer boards and so on…

This history disproves the ideology that the market rules without state intervention. There would be no market without the state. The neocons suffer from hubris and bad faith and when it become obvious that they use the state to advance their private interests. They bait and switch like crazy to deflect attention away from the key role of the state back to the dogma of market rules. For them the World is only Upside Down when the state does not work to make capitalism profitable by filling their pockets.

Liberals and Labourites

Liberals have always been in love with the big state because they think that the market can only work if regulated by the state. The left in government can use the power of the legislature and bureaucracy to work in the interests of social harmony, equality and welfare. Witness the First Labour Government. However, this is a faustian pact because in the process workers are turned into slaves of the state which regulates them as drones to supply the profits of the bosses e.g. the labour unions.

When they realise their dreams of social equality have fallen into the great abyss between the rich and poor, their refrain is; oh dear, The World is Upside Down, Capitalism is Not Working. For liberals to put the world right side up and make capitalism work they have to try harder. This means turning into neo-liberals and using monopoly state power to deregulate society. Workers become more productive (that is exploited) making more profits – witness the Fourth Labour Government. Scratch a liberal and you find a neocon.

In fact as the global capitalist crisis worsens and threatens to bring with it climate collapse, liberals are in a state of panic clutching as all sorts of panaceas to make capitalism work and stand the world rightside up. The problem is that it is they, the liberals, who are Upside Down. Liberals try to make society free of conflict. They get upset when they realise they can’t make capitalism work without collaborating with neocons. Labour’s great search for the middle class is running away from its working class base and the reality of class society. But the futile search for a classless state to manage a kinder, gentler society cannot overcome their cognitive dissonance.

Radicals aroused

Radicals reject both the neocon market rule mantra and the liberal delusion that social harmony and equality can by created by state reforms. The more market dementia of neocons and the cognitive dissonance of liberals cannot be solved unless the deeper cause is challenged – class struggle. Once the power of the classes are equalised then wealth can be equalised and capitalism is turned right side up and begins to work.

But what sort of classes? For radicals the problem is the unequal distribution of wealth made possible by capitalist control of the state. The bosses screw the workers by cutting their wages to increase profits. To correct this the bosses’ control of the state has to be overthrown so that workers can organise society by regulating equal exchange. For some (socialists) this means workers must take power to control the state, for others (anarchists) once state power is destroyed, there is no need for a state.

However, anti-capitalism in all of its forms fails to get to the root of capitalist exploitation and oppression. Classes formed by unqual exchange cannot be eliminated by workers replacing capitalists with workers running the state or substituting workers control over exchange. This is because capitalist exploitation does not result from unequal exchange (except as a bonus) but by the expropriation of value at the point of production. Without the expropriation of the means of production owned by the capitalist class, no amount of workers power in the state can overturn the exploitative social relations of capitalism.

Marx to the rescue

Marx’s critique of capitalism proves that neocon, liberal and radical ideas are all expressions of the ideas of the ruling class, that is bourgeois ideology. The neocons celebrate this, the liberals are ambivalent and impotent, the radicals are fooled by capitalism’s classes appearing as based on market relations. The key to understanding this is that bourgeois ideology is not invented by intellectuals but produced along with commodities as the fetishism of commodities.

Capitalism appears right side up because the unequal social relations where labour power is exploited are inverted to appear as equal exchange relations. Marx explains this inversion of reality as ‘commodity fetishism’. Instead of workers’ labour power being seen as the producer of value, value appears to be inherent in the product – commodities. Hence the struggle over the distribution of value becomes represented as one over the exchange of value in the market between workers, capitalists and landlords.

It follows that capitalism cannot be made to work by eliminating state interference in the market (neocons) reforming it (liberal) or taking it over (radicals). Capitalism as a society is created upside down to allow one class to profit from the exploitation of nature. It only works because it is upside down. So when capitalism works for neo-cons, liberals and radicals, it is still upside down. It can only be made right side up by a critique which goes to the roots of capitalist society and which drives a revolutionary transformation of capitalism into socialism.

How Marx arrived at his critique of capitalism, penetrating the fetishism of commodities and understanding of the contradiction between capitalist society and nature, stems from his critique of the German philospher Hegel, who, while standing on his head was stood right side up by the young Marx. I will deal with this in another post.

Reblogged from:

http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/10/10/guest-blog-dave-brownz-the-world-is-upside-down-capitalism-is-not-working/

Kashmir: As Tension Mounts on Indo-Pak Border, Entire Opposition, Including the Stalinist-left, Throws its Weight Behind the War-Hysteria, Fascism and the Saffron Government

Sonia Gandhi, President of the Congress Party, in bed with the Saffron regime and Stalinists

On Wednesday, September 28, Indian armed forces allegedly carried out military expedition, termed as ‘surgical strikes’ 3 kms inside the Pak administered region of Kashmir, claiming 38 dead. The operation is claimed to have been conducted at seven different points between the two military sectors Poonch and Koopwara, in retaliation to the attack by Pakistan sponsored terrorists upon the Uri Military base of Indian forces, earlier this month. Later in the day,fearing retaliation from Pak army, territories over 10 kms strech on Indian side of the line of control passing through Kashmir and Punjab, have been ordered to be evacuated.

Pakistan however has denied any such surgical operation by Indian forces, claiming it to be ‘false boasting’ for oblique purposes, but admitting to casualties, two dead and nine injured, in heavy cross-border artillery shelling and firing. The feeble and half-hearted denial however does not inspire much confidence. Nawaz Sharif, Prime Minister of Pakistan had called an emergency meeting of his cabinet after denouncing the ‘unprovoked and naked aggression’ by India.

Post strikes, the Indian Interior Minister Rajnath Singh, also called the all party meeting, at his North Block office on September 29, purportedly ‘to discuss the ensuing situation’. The explicit purpose of the meet was however to rope in all opposition parties, from Congress to Stalinists, in celebration of the aggression and to endorse and approve the policy of the saffron government aimed at escalation of war.

All leaders of the opposition parties, including Sitaram Yechury, leader of the Stalinist Left-front, supported the alleged military strike by the government, in one voice.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj drove across to 10, Janpath, at around 4 pm to brief and convince Congress president Sonia Gandhi.

After dubiously criticising the soft paddling by the Modi government in response to the Uri attack earlier this month, the Congress-led Opposition finally joined hands with it to back the Army’s “surgical strikes” on terrorist launchpads across the line of control, openly.

The leaders, present in the meeting, including Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad, CPM’s Sitaram Yechury, NCP’s Sharad Pawar, JD(U)’s Sharad Yadav, BSP’s S C Mishra and RJD’s Prem Chand Gupta, were informed about few details of the military operation, that took place allegedly at few points across Kupwara and Poonch.

The meeting was attended by top brass of the ruling party and the government, including the Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Defence Minister Manohar Parikkar, Information and Broadcasting Minister Venkaiah Naidu, and Minister for Food and Public Distribution Ram Vilas Paswan.

Over the last ten days after Uri attack, the Congress and the opposition led by it, had been urging the government to respond strongly to Pakistan. On Thursday, it backed the government fully after the alleged retaliatory military strikes by it.

Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi tweeted:
“All of us stand firmly united against terrorism and those who support and sponsor it. The Congress Party and I salute the Indian Army and our jawans for acting valiantly to defend our country and our people. Jai Hind.”

Sonia Gandhi, President of Congress party, said in a statement that the party “stands with the government in its actions today to protect our country’s security and deal with the menace of terrorism from across the border”. She said that the strike was a “strong message that conveys our country’s resolve to prevent further infiltration and attacks on our security forces and our people”. Congratulating the Army, she hoped that “Pakistan will recognise that it bears a great responsibility in the continuing cross-border terrorist attacks against India” and said that she expected Islamabad to take “effective action to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism that it has supported…”

Former defence minister and senior Congress leader A K Antony said that the strike was “inevitable” since infiltration by terrorists trained by the Pakistan Army is continuing unabated. “Given the situation, it was an inevitable action. I congratulate the Army and the government. Pakistan should now stop sending terrorists into India. There is a limit to India’s patience.”

Venkaiya Naidu said after the all-party briefing, that “details were given by the DGMO about five-six places across the LoC along Kupwara to Poonch”. “All political parties complimented the Indian Army enormously. They assured that they were totally with the government to face any situation. They were all very happy,” said Venkaiyah Naidu. “The feedback we are receiving is that the entire country is very happy about the swift action taken by the Indian Army,” he said.

JD(U)’s Sharad Yadav said that “all parties spoke in one voice”. RJD’s Gupta said the leaders backed the government for “all actions being taken in the interest of the nation”.

Former Minister of State for Defence and Congress leader M M Pallam Raju, speaking to reporters in Hyderabad, supported the military action, cautioning the government that Pakistan was expected to retaliate.“I think this is a good retribution. But at the same time, we have to be prepared. We should also be prepared for retaliation from their end,” said Raju.

General Secretary of CPI (M) and leader of the Stalinist left-front, Sitaram Yechury assured the government of the support of the left on the issue and asked the government to “ensure the safety and security of the country from cross-border terrorism”.
 

Resorting to demagogy, Yechury expressed hope that now there would be no “further escalation in hostilities”. “We hope that now incidents like those at Pathankot and at Uri will not recur,” he said, implying that Pakistan must learn a lesson. Fully conscious of the fascist, warmonger character of the saffron government, Yechury continued to advise it to engage in ‘diplomatic and political moves to defuse tensions’.

Opposition parties, Stalinists included, have carefully prepared the ground for this support to fascist government. After the attack on Indian Army base in Uri, they dubiously criticized the Government, for its inaction and soft stance on the issue. Through such criticism, they in fact consciously facilitated the government to carry out the cross-border military expedition.

Bourgeois parties aside, the Stalinists were in the frontline in performing this dubious duty towards the government. Paying only lip service to the cause of peace and harmony, the Stalinists did never oppose the war efforts of the government and the conscious built-up of nationalist hysteria around it.

Stalinists are crisis managers of capitalist regimes. On all vital issues and important turns they have stood support to them and have rendered critical assistance to the regimes enabling them to overcome the crisis, again and again.

Hailing the military strike, Arvind Kejriwal, leader of AAP claimed, “the entire country stands behind the armed forces”. AAP Minister Kapil Mishra demanded the withdrawal of the status of ‘most favoured nation’ from Pakistan.

United resolve of all opposition parties on the issue of war and their tacit support to the war policy of the government underscores the class character of the war in the offing, in the interests of the class of the rich and the elites.

The strikes of September 28, are another step ahead that draws South Asia even more closer to first ever open armed conflict between the two nuclear armed states of India and Pakistan. Since 1965, both states of India and Pakistan have been in almost permanent war mode against each other, now covert, then overt.

Mounting tensions between India and Pakistan are offshoots of the military drive directed by the US led NATO military alliance, all over the globe. The deep geo-communal divide, the legacy of the reactionary partition of 1947, between implicit hindu India and an explicit muslim Pakistan, supplies necessary fuel to these rivalries. Indian sub-continent is fast turning into a battlefield between the rival imperialist powers and national states backed by them.

Recent backout of India and Afghanistan followed by Bangladesh and Bhutan from SAARC meeting at Lahore, is the clear sign of escalation of these tensions in the region and polarization of the national states into rival camps.

Both India and Pakistan are tilting to hostile big power alliances led by US and China, respectively. Both are armed with deadly nuclear weapons. Any conflict between them may develop into a nuclear conflagration and may turn entire South-Asia into a huge graveyard of human corpses. The damage is incalculable.

It is clear that the military strikes of 28 September, had followed the green signal from the US, as US officials have refused to condemn the strikes. For long, US is pampering and encouraging aggressive designs of India to balance the Chinese influence in Asiatic region and with express motive of roping in India into an anti-China alliance.

After coming into power in 2014, the saffron government under Modi has stepped up the offensive against Pakistan in covert war. Restraining itself from raking up a direct conflict against China, Modi government eyes the softer target Pakistan for a convenient ride. Last month, it had openly threatened to dismember Balochistan from Pakistan. In the process, Pakistan is driven closer to China, perfecting the military polarization in South Asia.

Massive military built-up in South Asia makes it spectacular that war is on the horizon and anytime the volcano may erupt, engulfing entire region to its flames.

As pseudo-left takes to sharp right turn to national chauvinism and war, the task before the working class is to oppose the war from an internationalist perspective and use the anti-war platform as ready bastion for socialist revolution.

Without necessary assistance of the lefts, to bind the youth and workers behind the war designs of their bourgeois regimes, it would not be easy for the regimes, if not at all impossible, to make through to the war. It is thus imperative for the working class, in the struggle against war, to expose the pseudo-left, primarily Stalinists, as stooges of their national bourgeoisie and nationalism. The fight against war is above all the fight against the false left, inside the camp of the working class, to foil their designs to befool the working class and youth and tie it down to the war agenda of bourgeois regime.
 

 Youth and workers must oppose the war and jingoism and must muster their weight around the program of Workers’ Socialist Party that proposes to reverse the reactionary partition of 1947 through a revolution from below, reunify the Indian sub-continent and on that basis unify the South Asian Countries into a Union of Socialist Republics under a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government.

-Rajesh Tyagi/30.9.2016

http://workersocialist.blogspot.co.nz/2016/09/as-tension-mounts-on-indo-pak-border.html