Back issues

No 1505 27th January 2017

Anti-Trump demonstrations good but feminist, gay rights and other single-issue politics are a hopeless response to the deepening fascist tone of imperialist crisis. Mostly they are completely reactionary, deliberately used by the fake-“left” to suppress and head-off the revolutionary politics that must be built and which they fear despite their posturing pretences to be Marxists. It is not “misogyny” and women’s rights and abortion that are central but the chauvinism and hate campaigning to stampede the drive of the entire world capitalist system towards Third World War. Trumpism’s bullying tone is fascist but declaring this different to the blitzing, torture and war destruction of Obama-ism is to foster illusions in “democracy” versus Nazism. But all imperialism is on the fascist path driven by the greatest economic and political crisis Catastrophe in all history and stoppable only by revolution. Demonising Islamic “terrorism” as a new evil puts “lefts” alongside Trump and feeds the xenophobia preparing world for war. Leninism crucial

Rebellious street contempt and marches against the reactionary new Trump presidency are fine but severely let down by channelling into single-issue feminist, anti-racist and other “politically correct” forms.

Protest solely about “misogyny” or even “racism” is to miss the devastating and historic significance of the fight being pushed onto the working class by this bankrupt and Slump ridden ruling class, rapidly degenerating towards ever more open fascism.

Inasmuch as many have been newly stirred into political activity by the backwardness and reaction of the latest US regime the marches and demonstrations can be seen as positive, and that they happen at all, reflects the weakness and uncertain desperation of this latest turn to more openly fascist bullying by the degenerate ruling class.

It has not yet succeeded in a Hitlerite clampdown, though aiming for it with its whipped-up hate-filled chauvinism and vicious minorities scapegoating, bolstered by the demented and nonsensical “war on terror” (cravenly unopposed or supported by all the fake-“left”).

But nor will it be stopped by concentration on single issues, all reflecting the anti-communism and persisting illusions in “democracy” which are virtually universal in brainwashed Western society.

Such confusion falls vastly short of the need, facing everyone, for a gigantic epochal world transforming change.

Of course the crudity, chauvinism and sexual bullying privilege of the Trump bandwagon are beyond offensive, and the deliberate repealing of advances in abortion law, womens’ pay equality etc pander to the most hide-bound reaction and narrow mindedness, and capitalism’s deliberate use of every kind of divisiveness to keep its rule in place.

So too the environmental contempt and the racism.

Of course some of the immediate Trump measures are specific blows against women (though impacting on men too) adding to the double burden of oppression that afflicts particularly working class women within capitalist society.

But to extract these as the key issues for anger and resistance in the world is at best to hamper and limit the struggle unnecessarily, and at worst to block off the real understanding that is needed for the working class to deal with the onrush of the Great Catastrophe Slump (“austerity”) of the capitalist system’s economic breakdown and its accelerating slide towards international trade war and ultimately hot war conflict (already tearing the Middle East apart where it is devastating both women and men’s lives with savagery and horrors far beyond backward sexism, and being warmed up on a world scale – see China war quotes further on).

Much, much greater matters are at stake now than mere reversal of some social reforms which were only ever made in the first place to continue the burnt-out illusions of failed general reformism (ie Labourism etc – see “Single-issues” box next pages), convincing people that “changes can be made to make capitalism more pleasant”.

Like all reforms these concessions were always rescindable anyway (once the ruling class was hard-pressed) and even if not, were nothing but tinkering with a system that is about to impose the greatest disaster in history on the whole of mankind.

They really are just deck-chair re-arrangements on the Titanic.

Neither will this crisis be fended off by wearing pink knitted “pussy” hats, however well meaning and sincere the dismay and disgust of the many people who went to protest.

Nor does blaming “men” and “aggressive masculinity” provide answers.

Just the opposite, properly directed aggression and class-war determination mobilised against ruling class depravity, is exactly what is needed along with a revolutionary understanding and leadership which explains and analyses the seriousness and significance of the shattering breakdown now accelerating fast as the Great Catastrophe unfolds (slowed up – illusorily and temporarily – only by Quantitative Easing Mickey Mouse money printing and stagnation levels of “low interest rates” encouraging unsustainable debts, the whole world economy teetering on the edge of far worse disaster than 2008).

The revolutionary disintegration of all existing society, as analysed and understood by Karl Marx (Capital, Communist Manifesto) and Lenin (Collected Works), is underway as the entire world private profit economic and political exploitation system hits an historic brick wall of contradictions far beyond any previous collapse and failure.

There is no solution for any problems except the revolutionary overturn of this bankrupt system and its replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat seizing all privately owned production resources to build rational planned socialism.

The single-issue reformism of feminism, “gay rights”, anti-racism and environmentalism is not only inadequate to deal with the savagery now being unleashed, but is limiting or misleading vital revolutionary theory and grasp which is required for the struggle.

In its most extreme, these aggressively “militant” PC forms even become reactionary (again see box quotes p3).

Furthermore the anti-masculinity philosophy of this PC feminism simply creates division and conflict in the working class (between sexes) substituting partial, particular and often self-obsessed subjective and individualist demands, while deliberately and consciously blocking off and suppressing the Marxist-Leninist perspective that alone can lead the common struggle to stop the slide into oncoming mayhem and war.

It is the capitalist system, all of it, in its monstrous inequalities, divisiveness, unfairness and exploitation, ratcheting up conflict, antagonism and bitter recrimination and antagonism at all levels of society, from individuals, to communities, regions, countries and entire blocs of countries, which is the driving force towards world war and it is fundamental, producing the hate, racism, and other divisions.

Racism, sexist and other antagonisms emerge from capitalism, and can only be dealt with by the advance of society that will follow once capitalism is dealt with.

These single-issue politics are particularly pernicious when taken up by the multifaceted fake-“left”, from the “Labour movement” bureaucratic TUC and Labour Party reformists (including the “left” Corbynistas and assorted entryists) to the 57 varieties of pseudo-revolutionaries of the Trotskyists and Revisionists, all of a piece in their assorted variations on this (and constantly overlapping in their jostling for position and career paths).

They have all used these PCisms to avoid facing the revolutionary questions and to censor and suppress them, even at times with physical violence.

And any challengers to such notions, arguing for a much fuller understanding of questions such as homosexuality, will be shouted down or worse, censored and blocked off with “no platforming” and “safe spaces”.

That also plays into the hands of capitalist ideology and its growing censorship and repression under such “anti-extremism” pretences as the “Prevent” and other “monitoring” and brainwashing programmes for “British values” etc (ie bourgeois rule).

Single issue posturing and individualist self-righteousness diverts attention from broader issues of the world crisis, focused instead only on its own subjective issues, be it feminist demands to the “break the glass ceiling” in almost exclusively middle class career paths (and almost exclusively in the rich metropolitan countries) or be it the insistent demand that “gay marriage” and “gay adoption” be recognised as indicators that the obsessive demand for “gay is normal” has been imposed on society, whatever doubts and reservations there are among many people about such an insistence (doubts which have nothing to do with “homophobia” or returning society to primitive and backward persecution, bullying and criminalisation of homosexuality – again see box).

With such changes in place, after, say, voting for the warmonger Barack Obama, as the gay lobby did in 2012 to win its “marriage” recognition, the blitzing and drone-terrorising of the world can proceed apace as far as they are concerned.

But the crucial issue is the world crisis collapse which is driving this foul-smelling festering mess of ever-more obscene inequality, decline, incompetence and bankruptcy and the stinking barbarism of torture, war horrors and demented hatred being used to keep it in place.

Slump breakdown and international chauvinist hostility (as with Trump’s trade war moves) must inevitably culminate in world war unless capitalism is overturned.

The degenerate slide of the American ruling class into intensified fascist bellicosity to try and escape responsibility for the unstoppable Great Catastrophic crisis of the capitalist system is underlining ever more clearly the real nature of capitalist rule and its fraudulent “democracy”.

The crude and grotesque bullying and steamrolling of reaction, dismantling of environmental regulations, basic corporate controls, workers’ and other rights, is already delivering further major lessons to the whole world in the depravity and degenerate greed of this historically bankrupt exploitation system, further stirring the already huge international hatred for the Empire and its sidekicks (like the British ruling class).

It is also making clear that in the end profit-making will always prevail over every supposed “regulation” or “restraint” or containing of capital, all such limitations being torn up if needed when crisis accelerates.

For the minute the middle-class liberals and “left” are reeling in confusion and mockery at the “alternative facts” and the “post-truth” environment of the Trump order.

And reformism continues to pretend that there is some of way back to “nicer” post-war capitalism (allegedly “different” to “neoliberal” or “globalised” capitalism.

They need to wake up.

Mussolini was a “joke” too and while mockery is a useful weapon it will not suffice.

This time the vicious buffoonery of Mussolini is replaced with the preposterous egotism of Donald Trump borrowing and “improving” on the vile scapegoating developed most notably by the German Nazi regime in the 1930s, along with the international belligerence which was a hallmark of the Great Depression (blamed on the Germans but actually encouraged across the board by imperialism), blaming and “punishing” Mexicans, “Moooslims”, and 1200 million Chinese for the problems of capitalism’s own collapse and bankruptcy.

The bludgeoning insistence that “up is down”, and demented demands that black be recognised and described as white, are fascist methods, bringing propaganda lies to a new level of repression which not only uses the Big Lie techniques famously attributed to Goebbels (but long refined by post-war Western intelligence manipulation) but now defies “facts” and reality completely, intimidating and demanding that outright unreality be accepted as “the truth”.

The parallels with anti-communist MI5 fink George Orwell’s 1984 “doublethink” are correct, (though his attribution of such methods to communism is in itself part of the Western lie mythology of anti-Sovietism, – the concrete reality he reflected in 1948 was that of the British capitalist establishment in London).

But this is no clever literary allusion: this new bullying aims quite deliberately to further cow and suppress all efforts to struggle for the truth even by the critical realism of the bourgeois liberal media, and especially to head off and prevent the great eruption of discussion and debate in the world working class which is beginning and which will inexorably be driven towards a grasp of anti-imperialism and eventually communist (Leninist) revolutionary theory.

The other side of this single-issue failure to grasp the depth of this reaction (born out of a mixture of petty bourgeois complacency and class-based reluctance to accept the revolutionary implications and its need for working class discipline) is a sudden near-hysteria at the “new fascism”.

But it needs to be understood that Trumpism is not essentially different and demarcated from what went before, but a continuation and deepening of the same capitalist crisis and its deliberate drive towards world war.

Trump is the latest lurch towards international trade war and belligerence, taking a different tack to previous ruling class strategy superficially, but on the same path.

For all the bluster and belligerence fired off in all directions against “unfair competition” and “stolen jobs”, and the enormous military and financial power threatened against the rest of the world, with capabilities far beyond any other country on earth, this “new broom” is still no more than an extension of the aggression and warmongering which has been imposed on the world for the last two decades, all of it essentially fascist, which is to say major power capitalism in crisis decline fostering belligerent warmongering as its “way out”.

Monstrous warmongering, terrorising and world blitzkrieging, has gone on non-stop since the destruction of the tiny Serbian revisionist nationalist remnants of the Yugoslav workers state in 1998, under Clinton (Bill), then extended onto country after country in the Middle East under George W Bush, Barack Obama and Clinton (Hillary), using the full panoply of drone “Hellfire” terrorising and summary (lawless) execution, death squads, nazi-NATO invasions, CIA skulduggery and whipped up “colour revolts”, manipulated local sectarian backwardness, vigilante “drug wars” (aimed at the working class), violent “demonstration” provocations to start civil war, sniper induced mayhem, violent coups (Honduras eg, Cairo 2013) and recruitment and encouragement of reactionary Nazism and its barbarities as in the Ukraine.

Philistine theories that Trump-ism is some kind of “fascism” different to this gruesome warmongering seen for the last thirty years, are part of a perspective still clinging to the idea that there is a future in “democratic” change, and that “fascism” is a special phenomenon to be “resisted”, if necessary even by voting for “less extreme” bourgeois parties.

It is a disastrous notion to fool the working class so – every part of capitalism is heading for devastation and every part of it is run by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, showing as much of its repressive reality as necessary.

It is the breakdown of its cleverest trick, the pretence of everyone “having a say” through voting, which makes necessary the cruder populism and bullying methods now on show - and Trumpism itself reflects the further collapse of illusions in the already threadbare “presidency” pretence (not least in the huge cynical disinterest, and abstentionism of the vote where over half the population did not participate - it is yet another lie that a great majority of the working class is behind this, as analysed in EPSR 1503) and again shown by his humiliating lack of support at the inauguration – the argument following being not a trivial spat as some pretend, but further indication of the collapse in bourgeois “democracy” (making revolutionary perspectives more urgent yet in the vacuum).

Such momentum as Trump has got will be lost as soon as the pretences of “delivering jobs” and restoring once prosperous conditions are seen through, which is the only possible future for this worldwide surplus capital clogged system, whatever transient and ever more inflationary credit-fuelled boost is given by building giant walls and pipelines.

Obama-ism itself was a desperate effort to stretch the “democracy” pretence, using all the tricks of single-issue politics, (black family in the White House, feminist icons Michelle and Hillary Clinton, gay marriage) and a presidency now also totally discredited by the reality of the last eight years, which has not delivered anything permanent at all for the working class (with all its economic “rescue” built on treacherous unsustainable paper money QE foundations) and which has continued all the barbarism of the Bush era in the Middle East, held back only by the war-weariness and defeats already inflicted.

Truth bending, provocations, lies, surveillance, censorship, torture and warmongering were all there too, the constant condition of monopoly capitalism and imperialist colonialism (read Ian Cobain’s detailed account in Cruel Britannia - a history of torture for example).

Far more is in the pipeline, all set going long before Trump, some of which the sporadically excellent “left” liberal bourgeois journalist John Pilger has once more brilliantly researched and described in his latest film The coming war on China, and articles around it, worth quoting at length:

the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China.

The great danger this beckons is not news, or it is news buried and distorted: a drumbeat of propaganda that echoes the psychopathic campaign embedded in public consciousness during much of the 20th century.

Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an ‘existential threat’ to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs.

To counter this, in 2011 President Obama announced a ‘pivot to Asia’, which meant that almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific by 2020.

Today, more than 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and, above all, nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, says one US strategist, ‘the perfect noose’.

A study by the RAND Corporation – which, since Vietnam, has planned America’s wars – is entitled War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. Commissioned by the US Army, the authors evoke the Cold War when RAND made notorious the catch cry of its chief strategist, Herman Kahn – ‘thinking the unthinkable’. Kahn’s book, On Thermonuclear War, elaborated a plan for a ‘winnable’ nuclear war against the Soviet Union.

Today, his apocalyptic view is shared by those holding real power in the US: the Pentagon militarists and their neoconservative collaborators in the executive, intelligence agencies and Congress. The current Secretary of Defense, Ashley Carter, a verbose provocateur, says US policy is to confront those ‘who see America’s dominance and want to take that away from us’.

In Washington, I met Amitai Etzioni, distinguished professor of international affairs at George Washington University. The US, he writes, ‘is preparing for a war with China, a momentous decision that so far has failed to receive a thorough review from elected officials, namely the White House and Congress.’

This war would begin with a ‘blinding attack against Chinese anti-access facilities, including land and sea-based missile launchers… satellite and anti-satellite weapons’. The incalculable risk is that ‘deep inland strikes could be mistakenly perceived by the Chinese as pre-emptive attempts to take out its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into “a terrible use-it-or-lose-it dilemma” [that would] lead to nuclear war.’

In 2015, the Pentagon released its Law of War Manual. ‘The United States,’ it says, ‘has not accepted a treaty rule that prohibits the use of nuclear weapons per se, and thus nuclear weapons are lawful weapons for the United States.’

In China, a strategist told me, ‘We are not your enemy, but if you [in the West] decide we are, we must prepare without delay.’ China’s military and arsenal are small compared to America’s. However, ‘for the first time,’ wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists, ‘China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack… This would be a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy… Indeed, the nuclear weapon policies of the United States are the most prominent external factor influencing Chinese advocates for raising the alert level of China’s nuclear forces.’

Professor Ted Postol was scientific adviser to the head of US naval operations. An authority on nuclear weapons, he told me, ‘Everybody here wants to look like they’re tough. See, I got to be tough… I’m not afraid of doing anything military, I’m not afraid of threatening; I’m a hairy-chested gorilla. And we have gotten into a state, the United States has gotten into a situation where there’s a lot of sabre-rattling, and it’s really being orchestrated from the top.’

I said, ‘This seems incredibly dangerous.’

‘That’s an understatement.’

Andrew Krepinevich is a former Pentagon war planner and the influential author of war games against China. He wants to ‘punish’ China for extending its defences to the South China Sea. He advocates seeding the ocean with sea mines, sending in US special forces and enforcing a naval blockade. He told me, ‘Our first president, George Washington, said if you want peace, prepare for war.’

In 2015, in high secrecy, the US staged its biggest single military exercise since the Cold War. This was Talisman Sabre; an armada of ships and long-range bombers rehearsed an ‘Air-Sea Battle Concept for China’ – ASB – blocking sea lanes in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China’s access to oil, gas and other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

It is such a provocation, and the fear of a US Navy blockade, that has seen China feverishly building strategic airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Last July, the UN Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled against China’s claim of sovereignty over these islands. Although the action was brought by the Philippines, it was presented by leading American and British lawyers and can be traced to then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In 2010, Clinton flew to Manila. She demanded that America’s former colony reopen the US military bases closed down in the 1990s following a popular campaign against the violence they generated, especially against Filipino women. She declared China’s claim on the Spratly Islands – which lie more than 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometres) from the United States – a threat to US ‘national security’ and to ‘freedom of navigation’.

Handed millions of dollars in arms and military equipment, the then government of President Benigno Aquino broke off bilateral talks with China and signed a secretive Enhanced Defense Co-operation Agreement with the US. This established five rotating US bases and restored a hated colonial provision that American forces and contractors were immune from Philippine law.

Under the rubric of ‘information dominance’ – the jargon for media manipulation on which the Pentagon spends more than $4 billion – the Obama administration launched a propaganda campaign that cast China, the world’s greatest trading nation, as a threat to ‘freedom of navigation’.

CNN led the way, its ‘national security reporter’ reporting excitedly from on board a US Navy surveillance flight over the Spratlys. The BBC persuaded frightened Filipino pilots to fly a single-engine Cessna over the disputed islands ‘to see how the Chinese would react’. None of the news reports questioned why the Chinese were building airstrips off their own coastline, or why American military forces were massing on China’s doorstep.

The designated chief propagandist is Admiral Harry Harris, the US military commander in Asia and the Pacific. ‘My responsibilities,’ he told The New York Times, ‘cover Bollywood to Hollywood, from polar bears to penguins.’ Never was imperial domination described as pithily.

Harris is one of a brace of Pentagon admirals and generals briefing selected, malleable journalists and broadcasters, with the aim of justifying a threat as specious as that with which George W Bush and Tony Blair justified the destruction of Iraq.

In Los Angeles in September, Harris declared he was ‘ready to confront a revanchist Russia and an assertive China… If we have to fight tonight, I don’t want it to be a fair fight. If it’s a knife fight, I want to bring a gun. If it’s a gun fight, I want to bring in the artillery… and all our partners with their artillery.’

These ‘partners’ include South Korea, an American colony in all but name and the launch pad for the Pentagon’s Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system, known as THAAD, ostensibly aimed at North Korea. As Professor Postol points out, it targets China.

In Sydney, Australia, Harris called on China to ‘tear down its Great Wall in the South China Sea’. The imagery was front-page news. Australia is America’s most obsequious ‘partner’; its political elite, military, intelligence agencies and the dominant Murdoch media are fully integrated into what is known as the ‘alliance’. Closing the Sydney Harbour Bridge for the motorcade of a visiting American government ‘dignitary’ is not uncommon. The war criminal Dick Cheney was afforded this honour.

Although China is Australia’s biggest trader, on which much of the national economy relies, ‘confronting China’ is the diktat from Washington. The few political dissenters in Canberra risk McCarthyite smears in the Murdoch press. ‘You in Australia are with us come what may,’ said one of the architects of the Vietnam War, McGeorge Bundy. One of the most important US bases is Pine Gap near Alice Springs. Founded by the CIA, it spies on China and all of Asia, and is a vital contributor to Washington’s murderous war by drone in the Middle East.

In October, Richard Marles, the defence spokesperson of the main Australian opposition party, the Labor Party, demanded that ‘operational decisions’ in provocative acts against China be left to military commanders in the South China Sea. In other words, a decision that could mean war with a nuclear power should not be taken by an elected leader or a parliament but by an admiral or a general.

This is the Pentagon line, a historic departure for any state calling itself a democracy. The ascendancy of the Pentagon in Washington – which Daniel Ellsberg has called a silent coup – is reflected in the record $5 trillion the United States has spent on aggressive wars since 9/11, according to a study by Brown University. The million dead in Iraq and the flight of 12 million refugees from at least four countries are the consequence.

‘I state clearly and with conviction,’ said Obama in 2009, ‘America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.’ Under Obama, nuclear warhead spending has risen higher than under any president since the end of the Cold War. A mini nuclear weapon is planned. Known as the B61 Model 12, it will mean, says General James Cartwright, former vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that ‘going smaller [makes its use] more thinkable’.

The Japanese island of Okinawa has 32 military installations, from which Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq have been attacked by the United States. Today, the principal target is China, with whom Okinawans have close cultural and trade ties.

In 1959 a US fighter plane crashed into Miyamori School, Okinawa, killing a number of children.

There are military aircraft constantly in the sky over Okinawa; they sometimes crash into homes and schools. People cannot sleep, teachers cannot teach. Wherever they go in their own country, they are fenced in and told to keep out.

A hugely popular Okinawan movement has been growing since a 12-year-old girl was gang-raped by US troops in 1995. It was one of hundreds of such crimes, many of them never prosecuted. Barely acknowledged in the wider world, the resistance in Okinawa is a vivid expression of how ordinary people can peacefully take on a military giant, and threaten to win.

Their campaign has elected Japan’s first anti-base governor, Takeshi Onaga, and presented an unfamiliar hurdle to the Tokyo government and the ultra-nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s plans to repeal Japan’s ‘peace constitution’.

The resistance leaders include Fumiko Shimabukuro, aged 87, a survivor of the Second World War, when a quarter of Okinawans died in the American invasion. Fumiko and hundreds of others took refuge in beautiful Henoko Bay, which she is now fighting to save. The US wants to destroy the bay in order to extend runways for its bombers. As we gathered peacefully outside the US base, Camp Schwab, giant Sea Stallion helicopters hovered over us for no reason other than to intimidate.

Across the East China Sea lies the Korean island of Jeju, a semi-tropical sanctuary and World Heritage Site declared ‘an island of world peace’. On this island of world peace has been built one of the most provocative military bases in the world, less than 400 miles (650 kilometres) from Shanghai. The fishing village of Gangjeong is dominated by a South Korean naval base purpose-built for US aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and destroyers equipped with the Aegis missile system, aimed at China.

A people’s resistance to these war preparations has become a presence on Jeju for almost a decade. Every day, often twice a day, villagers, Catholic priests and supporters from all over the world stage a religious mass that blocks the gates of the base. In a country where political demonstrations are often banned, unlike powerful religions, the tactic has produced an inspiring spectacle.

The world is shifting east, but the astonishing vision of Eurasia from China is barely understood in the West

One of the leaders, Father Mun Jeong-hyeon, told me, ‘I sing four songs every day at the base, regardless of the weather. I sing in typhoons – no exception. To build this base, they destroyed the environment, and the life of the villagers, and we should be a witness to that. They want to rule the Pacific. They want to make China isolated in the world. They want to be emperor of the world.’

We – or many of us – remain in thrall to the US, which has intervened violently in the affairs of a third of the members of the United Nations, destroying governments, subverting elections, imposing blockades. In the past five years, the US has shipped deadly weapons to 96 countries, most of them poor. Dividing societies in order to control them is US policy, as the tragedies in Iraq and Syria demonstrate.

‘I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,’ said Barack Obama, evoking the national fetishism of the 1930s. This modern cult of superiority is Americanism, the world’s dominant predator. Accompanied by a brainwashing that presents it as enlightenment on the march, the conceit insinuates our lives.

In September, the Atlantic Council, a US geopolitical thinktank, published a report that predicted a Hobbesian world ‘marked by the breakdown of order, violent extremism [and] an era of perpetual war’. The new enemies were a ‘resurgent’ Russia and an ‘increasingly aggressive’ China. Only heroic America can save us.

There is a demented quality about this war-mongering. It is as if the ‘American Century’ – proclaimed in 1941 by the American imperialist Henry Luce, owner of Time magazine – has ended without notice and no-one has had the courage to tell the emperor to take his guns and go home.

(Return to story reference above.)

Pilger captures well the aggressive barbarism and deadly bellicosity of all American (and sidekick) imperialism in this piece, not just the berserk reactionariness of Trump; it is the entire system which is heading for war and has been doing so for at least two decades.

But he suffers from his own shortsightedness and “democracy” illusions too, despite explaining the cynicism and sinister plotting and skulduggery of the ruling class.

It credits the ruling class with much greater foresight and control than is actually the case.

The anti-communist, pro-”democracy” liberal Pilger misses out the key perspective in all this, which has to be the capitalist crisis itself, and the collapse of the profit system into “overproduction”, with the world clogged solid by “too much” capital unable to be invested anywhere because it can no longer make a profit (see EPSR joining box).

It is the core understanding to which Karl Marx devoted much of his adult life, not because he was “interested in economics” but because it is the key to not simply the nature of inequality and exploitation but the inevitable collapse of this class-ridden system and the need for it to be overturned and replaced with planned commonly owned production - socialism in other words.

The inexorable unfolding of this gigantic contradiction in the heart of production for private profit is behind the great warmongering drive of capitalism.

Without focusing on this as the starting point, the increasingly confused picture of the China buildup, manoeuvring around Putin’s Moscow, the collapse of the “left” progress in Latin America, and the Middle East turmoil cannot begin to be tackled or any sense at all be made of things.

Crisis is the driving force underneath all the increasingly bitter chauvinist hatreds between the ruling classes of its great national and multi-national blocs (German dominated Europe, the Japanese Far East etc) facing the most ruthless to-the-death battle for the what remaining opportunities there are as markets collapse, and pushing for war to both wipe out rivals and to destroy capital “surplus”, leaving room once more for investment and expansion like that which came after WW2, as capital from primarily the US victor was able to fill the vacuum in totally pulverised and devastated lands.

It was that regeneration which fed the reformist delusions of steady “welfare state gains”, as the newly revived capital had enough scope temporarily to fend off the revolutionary mood sweeping across Europe especially - (created by the horrors of Slump and world war and the triumph of the Soviet Red Army, and boosted by the great anti-colonial movements which were triggered worldwide, weakening the ruling class too) - buying off the working class (in the rich countries only), aided and abetted by class collaboration of Labourism and “official trade unionism”.

But ultimately the same overproduction contradictions prevail again, this time on a wider, world scale, penetrating every corner of the globe.

All the working class reformist gains have to go as every ruling class is forced to step up its exploitation in order to make any profit at all; and as they desperately prepare for cutthroat international conflict.

As the EPSR explained even at the time of the Iraq war, it is dominant but bankrupt America which has taken on directly the Nazi-aggression role this time (formerly assigned to “aggressive Germany and Italy” in the 1930s, the then rising powers in Europe), intent on cowing and intimidating the entire world with its “shock and awe” to face down all potential rivals and to suppress the ever rising discontent and rebelliousness of the masses, most particularly in the Third World.

Sidekick Britain follows behind, whipping up the same chauvinist hate atmosphere and scapegoating poison as the US, with its frenzied xenophobia and foreigner blaming for economic collapse and failure.

But it has been a disaster, failing to re-impose imperialist authority and power in the Middle East (and upon the whole world).

For all its detail, what Pilger’s piece does not convey is the desperate failure and uncertainty of the ruling class in all this.

Far from a confident calculation about surrounding the rising China and eventually “taking it out” - thereby supposedly “solving its problems” the American ruling class is in an increasingly confused, and uncertain state, at odds with itself (as the astonishing CIA efforts to topple or at least undermine Trump indicate).

Wiping out Chinese production eg does not suit large swathes of the major corporations at all; only with this “cheap labour” have the huge Apples and multiple other companies been able to produce at cost levels allowing them to make their enormous profits or even any profit at all.

And as many bourgeois analysts point out, multiple threads of interconnected world production are used by the big monopolies sourcing raw materials and subcontracting manufacture back and forth across the world to sometimes dozens of international locations and suppliers.

China alone is not the target: the entire world is paranoically (and in some senses justifiably) perceived as the “enemy” to blame for the undermining of “American Greatness”.

The European Union is relentlessly targeted for huge economic sanctions and fines against its major companies (including British ones) and a large part of the Quantitative Easing hyper-support for the dollar since 2008 has been used to compete with and undermine both European and Japanese rivalries - the constant sneering at Europe as a “failure” reflects this deliberate financial warmongering as the US uses its international world reserve currency dominance to push its crisis outwards onto the rest of the world.

The EU responds with its own giant fines, tax demands and “anti-monopoly” penalties, none of which are due to some principled concerns for “fair competition” and a “level playing field” but reflect the bitter economic warfare which is coming ever closer to the boiling point.

“Brexit” reflects exactly this conflict as an equally confused and divided British ruling class tears itself apart over whether it is better to stay with the European bloc facing the American aggression increasingly targeting the EU competition (already described by the Germans as “warfare”) or to line up with the US (as the grovelling of the hopeless (and unelected) Theresa May before Trump is currently desperately and humiliatingly trying to do).

This gigantic turmoil and fearfulness is further confused by the Trump aggression, lashing out almost wildly and reflecting the huge lack of confidence of the US ruling class as to which of its rivals and enemies it has to take on immediately.

The carefully laid plotting described by Pilger against Putin’s restorationist oligarch-capitalist Russia has fallen apart for example, almost certainly because the Trump wing of the ruling class needs to lash out at more obvious blame-targets such as the Mexicans - scapegoated targets to try and confuse and head off the massive rising discontent in the American working class itself.

Contradictorily this apparently backward movement is a reflection of a major potential threat to the US ruling class, its seething discontent currently headed into chauvinism and xenophobia to some extent, but mostly just hostile to the banks, corporations and “establishment”. In that it is similar to the British Brexit vote, expressing huge discontent.

The deadly danger for the working class is that it continues to be headed down these chauvinist channels – and the more so because the ostensible “left” does nothing to fill the vacuum with the only possible leadership that can direct this ferment where it needs to go - into revolutionary struggle against the ruling class of their “own” country.

Just the opposite, they help feed the backwardness either by going along with the “national interest” and protectionism, and demonisation of “migrants” or by offering up middle-class moralising nonsense about the “right to free movement” and “welcome all immigrants” - or sometimes both at once.

This “left” Brexit-ism leaves these various “lefts” lined up with capitalism and its most backward elements and no amount of protest that they are “against xenophobia” can make any difference; the overwhelming impact of calling for “British jobs” is to feed the hatred and hostility of blaming others, be it whole countries (against Chinese “dumping”) or migrants.

The same with declaring that the EU represents the “interests of imperialism” as the ever more convoluted explanations of the Brarite Proletarian (CPGB-ML) do, “theorising” therefore that leaving the EU is a “blow against monopoly capitalism” (and, strangely, against British imperialism) as if the great corporations and finance interests outside Europe are somehow less of a part of monopoly capitalism.

But the world markets and their monopolies, to which Britain is now exposed even more directly, are at least as rapacious, if not more so, than those organised around Brussels (meaning primarily German imperialism), and are just as much beset by the Great Catastrophe.

A whole page of moralising niceties and finger-wagging about the “dangers of xenophobia” in dragging the working class behind unjust wars of aggression (all true enough) makes no difference at all once this “left Brexit” nonsense has been promoted.

Such page-long articles are the most dishonest excuse-making sophistry, desperately trying to cover up for the obvious chauvinist poison which has been unleashed by the entire Brexit argument.

And even if there were something in the idea that “breaking up Europe” would weaken this imperialist bloc, which it might (or rather, which it reflects), that is of no use to the working class without grasping that therefore it strengthens the opposing imperialist elements firstly, and without putting a perspective of revolutionary class war to bring down the British ruling class as part of the argument.

The “anti-chauvinism” arguments calling for “free movement” of labour as a “right” advanced in Proletarian and by much of the rest of the left are equally hopeless and dishonest.

As the EPSR has carefully unpicked in past argument and polemic (see last issue and Nos 1133, 1134,1135) telling the working class that migrant labour is not a problem is nonsensical – capitalism has always used it precisely as a means of undercutting wages in the destination and of heading off discontent in the countries of origin.

As in (EPSR 1085 17-04-01):

There are arguments to believe that such politically-correct-tinged striving might be counter-productive, even. If it is only the National Front that is ever prepared to argue out loud that waves of economic-opportunist migrants coming into the country and taking up scarce welfare resources, housing, good jobs and good education opportunities, etc, is not necessarily to the immediate practical advantage of already-resident proletarians struggling to get the same scarce things for themselves, and that the unfair ‘foreign monopolist’ system was to blame for all this enforced (and condoned) migratory nonsense, – then would not such ludicrous diversions be as likely to attract proletarian support as the PC anti-racist ‘left reformists’ with their “end all immigration controls” and “welcome to all asylum-seekers, the more the better” slogans, which take politically-correct subjective-idealist philosophy to new heights of absurdity???

Hammer people too ridiculously and too relentlessly for being ‘politically incorrect’ and it is as likely to create a nationalist backlash as anything else.

Of course blaming the migrants themselves is not the answer either; the point is that without tackling the whole of imperialism, which means a revolutionary class war struggle, there is no solution.

But beyond this, the entire “left” even more seriously plays into the hands of the chauvinist hate-mongering with its non-stop denunciations of Islamic “terrorism” and either direct or tacit support for the Western gibberish of a “war on terror”.

Since the 9/11 attacks at least and even before, the entire spectrum of the “left” has shamed and humiliated itself with endless “condemnations”, either declaring Islamist revolt to be a source of reaction in itself - variously described as Islamofascism, or reactionary Islam, or “headbanging jihadism”, a completely new class in the world which has nothing to do with Marxist understanding – or promulgating a thousand shades of conspiracy theory that the “jihadists” are all “mercenaries” or controlled agents of the CIA or other agencies such as the Zionist Mossad etc.

And while there has, here and there, been some clear manipulation of some elements by imperialism, notably in Afghanistan in the 1980s to entrap the Soviet forces aiding the Kabul pro-socialist government of the time, and more recently in enflaming sectarian division and tensions in Iraq, Libya and particularly setting alight the civil war in Syria, the overall significance of the great wave of “Islamic fundamentalism" and its terrorism is of the giant rebellion throughout the Third World against imperialism.

Islamic State is just one part of the response to giant world turmoil and struggle unleashed by imperialism itself and its “shock and awe” blitzkrieging to keep the world under the thumb of Washington diktat, initially blasting apart Iraq as a lesson and example to all the discontent in the world which might be either contemplating uprising against the “Empire” or in the case of major monopoly capitalist rivals, (like the EU) contemplating a challenge to its top-dog status as no longer capable of controlling and keeping a grip on world rebellion.

There are plenty of conspiracies by imperialism – the billions poured into the CIA and a dozen other agencies fund almost nothing else but coups, “freedom” demonstrations, massacres, assassinations, colour “revolutions”, electoral manipulation and physical and economic sabotage against either workers states or intransigent regimes which are insufficiently compliant with imperialist needs and demands – but it is a total sophistry and opportunist evasion to describe the boiling ferment of suicide struggle which has raged several decades as primarily “created “ by imperialism.

And even where imperialism has attempted to play its dirty games, it has frequently “blown back” as the Islamic State most noticeably demonstrates, spawned by Washington stirring of sectarianism in Syria, to topple Assad, but rapidly transforming into its opposite, continuing the Iraqi Sunni triangle anti-occupation, anti-American liberation struggle.

All this is the early ferment of anti-Westernism (now that the first round of world revolution has largely liquidated itself through Stalinist retreat from revolutionary perspectives) and mostly with an obvious anti-imperialist agenda from al-Shabaab in Somalia (just overrunning a military base set up by the imperialist stooge Kenyan regime inside Somalia with US training) to the dogged and determined Palestinian struggle’s current militancy led mainly by Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

As previously mentioned the “conspiracy” theorists find themselves in huge tangles about trying to explain all this as “really all run by the West” and not least in trying to explain the enormous and bloody massacre now being imposed on Mosul in Iraq where the ISIS revolt is being wiped out by a gigantic and barbaric onslaught of thousands of Western troops (US, UK, French) and the military forces of the stooge Baghdad regime, chosen installed, protected and trained by Washington.

It is still a long way from the conscious revolutionary struggle to end capitalism and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat but condemning and denouncing this world upheaval is to be on the wrong side completely.

The fake-“left” (and tragically thoughtful journalists like Pilger) now find themselves lined up with Trump’s promise to “bomb the shit out of ISIS”, one of the central tenets of his presidency.

Why? Because it sustains and feeds precisely the “xenophobia” and the war fever that the fake-“lefts” so moralisingly preach against.

It is a crucial element in the propaganda demonising the Third World (and all non-Americans) feeding the backward hatreds and scapegoating which imperialism has turned to as its major distraction and excuse for the degenerate collapse and Slump disaster it has brought to the whole world (and which the ruling class knows full well is due any moment to implode once more into the financial mayhem and world trading collapse which was just hours away in August 2008 - as soon as the fantasy pretence of trillions of valueless QE dollars works its way through the hugely complex world economic system, unleashing mass inflation or bank failures or more).

The complexities of the unfolding struggle are mind bending but impossible to grasp at all without revolutionary theory and the fight to build a party of conscious cadres deliberately struggling to develop it.

Build Leninism

Brendan Jameston

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