The Proletarian Situation As U.S. Imperialism Declines (Part 6)
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War and the Liberal Flimflam
Like their counterparts on the right, the idealists of the liberal/progressive ‘left’ harken back to an idealized fantasy of ‘normalcy’. A normalcy where the twin parties of capitalism, the Democrats and Republicans, tolerated each other in a mutual commitment to bourgeois political norms of debate, negotiations, and peaceful transitions. Of course this was the FDR era of rising U.S. imperialism, complete with the social unity of WW2.
The events of October have already proved this idealized era is long gone. Hamas has complicated life for the U.S. ruling class by the exceptional seizing of the battle initiative by a force of the oppressed. The zionist state was unprepared, and whether heads roll or not, the appreciation of the real situation in Washington as well as Jerusalem was faulty. This was unexpected and the aid bill, if it IS paid, will be steep. We say IF it is paid because funding for the U.S. wars in Ukraine and Palestine are unpopular with the Trumpster right who have a new Speaker of the House at last (after 3 weeks!) and will now show how they begrudge any of the $Billions in spending Biden wants. Wants apart from further fortifying the southern border, a shibboleth of the white power “representatives.”
Liberal idealists do not want to be reminded that their great/grandparents hurt from the Great Depression (1929-1940,) rode a wave of class struggle and initiated mass strikes and factory occupations. They founded the CIO in the wake of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters General Strike and the San Francisco General Strike in which the Longshoremen won the hiring hall and began desegregating the waterfront, fighting racism in the working class. The Toledo Auto Lite strike popularized industrial unionism in alliance with the unemployed leagues, which became the CIO’S Federal Locals. Where they don’t bury it, Democratic activists lie about and minimize the class struggle of that period. Lost are the lessons of a burgeoning political independence of the working class. Gone is any discussion of “The Labor Non-Partisan Leagues.” Mythologizing the past, complete with gift rights for workers from the ‘benevolent state,’ liberals now seek to manage the empire’s decline without acknowledging it is happening; at the same time they wish to be seen as tough talkers, as ready for war as any politicians of the past, and above all, frame all the subjects and do all the talking.
Social approval, such mass discourse as is encouraged, does acknowledge that the working class exists and that identity oppressions continue, but ruling class thought always decouples these facts from a materialist history with distractions and lying historical amnesia. Books are banned, textbooks and curricula are rewritten to deny the racist past and the imperialist present. States like Florida and Texas are virtually a different country when compared to New York, Illinois or California. The kept intellectual layers in academia and the workers movement have at the same time begun to put a useful form of post-modernism to work for Capitalism to thwart class-for-itself consciousness and fortify bourgeois individualism, even as the social wealth gap expands beyond even the Robber Baron days of the 1890s.
Fascist street fighters organize themselves as “Active Clubs” which sloganize that there is ‘no political solution,’ as they mobilize ‘defense guard’ for their co-thinking mayoral candidate in Franklin, Tennessee. Their politics is that of bullying, intimidation and violence. Those who afford them audience should take them at their word that, for them, there is “no political solution!”
Little wonder then that far right appetites for “accelerationism,” where fascists can touch off an explosion of social crises in a racist civil war have led to regular open parading by Hitlerites. To counter fascism, as our SWP forebears did in their better years (for instance 1939 Madison Square Garden), we have consistently called for Labor-Black-Brown Community Defense Guards and to demilitarize and replace the Police, who we say are NOT workers and do not belong in our labor federations!
Nazi demonstrations and terror-violence are now commonplace, and this has even been reported by the FBI Director to a Congress that does its best not to remember it. The majority in the lower house mutters against the “deep state” FBI and seeks Trump’s return, dreaming of the Hungarian state model. These demonstrations keep happening because the local political power in several states is held by pro-authoritarians whose idols rule in Hungary, Italy, and even Russia. We say SMASH FASCISM IN THE EGG!
War, Class Struggle and WW2
The class struggle threatened to turn political in the fight for a Labor Party, which was usurped by the Stalinist Popular Front which closed down the class struggle, with ‘no strike’ pledges supporting the inter-imperialist war abroad, the war which propelled the U.S. to the top of the world imperialist pecking order. Thinking they were pursuing the class struggle, workers sailed off to Europe, Asia and Africa for Uncle Sam, and the women and elders who filled factories, with workers and poor on rations, are still hailed as the ‘Greatest Generation’, the generation which ‘defeated facism’ (presumably for all time). For its part, the capitalist class under pressure of the largest labor organizing drive ever in the U.S.A. meted out unemployment insurance, social security, the minimum wage, the 8-hour day ultimately, putting limits on most industrial but not agricultural child labor, and the New Deal in exchange for class loyalty in the inter-imperialist war; class loyalty and class peace which could only be enforced with anti-labor laws including the Smith Act (1940), the Voorhis Act (1946 and the Taft-Hartley Act (1947).
The American Communist Party of the 1930’s weathered the shocks of the Moscow show trials and the Hitler-Stalin pact. Under Stalin’s guidance it zig-zagged its way out from under its ultra-left third period militancy, leveraging its inch deep but miles wide penetration into the working class, to promote their alliance with so-called ‘progressive imperialism.’ Abandoning the class struggle for class peace they told the workers that socialist revolution was not the only solution to the fascist threat, rather the job in the imperialist center was to support the Stalinist Theory of Socialism in One Country and eschew the Bolshevik Leninists who sought to turn the second inter-imperialist war into socialist revolution. Even today the legacy Fosterite Party of Communists (USA) march in May Day rallies with both the Hammer and Sickle flag and the flag of U.S. imperialism. How did they get away with this?
The Browder-led CP in the lead up to WW2 were hand in hand with Stalin and FDR against Hitler and only after Sept. 1, 1939 with Stalin’s deal with the NAZI’s. Then after June 22, 1941 they reverted to the “anti-fascist peoples’ front” status quo ante. The postwar ‘correction’ represented by the Foster leadership years only overlaid the “peaceful coexistence” line on top of the peoples’ front of 1934 and the Hitler era.
Today the Stalinst CP has degenerated so far from Marxism that they want a normalcy where NATO is respected on both sides of the aisle. They have to recognize their authoritarian past but want to keep up the facade of champions of social justice without equal and 100% Americanism. This despite the uninterrupted trajectory from the Americanism of the Palmer Raids, the Tulsa massacre in 1921 of Black Wall Street, of Jim Crow segregation, the Cold War witch hunts of the McCarthy era, COINTELPRO, the bombing of the MOVE house by a Philadelphia Democratic Mayor and continuing to the persecution of Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Reality Winner. In the labor movement the CP supports Democrats who make occasional common cause with small “D” democratic protest culture, the better to canalize and dam it up. They do nothing visible or palpable to thwart U.S. imperialism’s drive to WW3.
Trotsky saw WW2 coming long before it was on the minds of the Socialist Workers Party leadership, whom he criticized for apolitical union organizing and insufficient opposition to Roosevelt. Even before drafting the Transitional Program he was fighting for a correct understanding of what the USSR was and how Political Revolution was the only sure method of defense of the revolution against the imperialist powers and capitalist restorationists among the Stalinists. War was certain, as some imperialist forces did want a ‘collective security’ agreement with Stalin, while still others hoped for one with Hitler against the USSR. Both of these alignments ultimately materialized and it was clear the workers of the world stood to be the losers, the variable capital, just as in WW1. Trotsky called for a Proletarian Military Policy. This policy sought to make revolutionary gains by the workers the object of the by then (summer, 1940) unavoidable conflict. But hardly had Trotsky been assassinated when the SWP shut down the International Center!
“Despite the objective situation weighing heavily on the new International, following the example of the Bolsheviks in war and revolution, Leninist-Trotskyists had the duty to raise the banner of the Fourth [International] in the war and fight for socialist revolution to defeat imperialism and to make the political revolution against Stalinism. Pierre Broue in “How Trotsky and the Trotskyists confronted the Second World War” concludes:
“But we may suppose, on the contrary [against being victims of the objective situation] that the Trotskyist organisations, their members and their leaders, were involved, and that they have at least some responsibility for their own setbacks. In that case, we may think, that if we start from the premises of Trotsky’s analysis of 1940, that the Second World War did see that development of a mass movement based upon a national and social resistance, which the Stalinists did their utmost to divert, and which in the case of Greece, they led to its destruction – a resistance which the Trotskyists could neither support nor utilise, because they did not know how to locate themselves in it, and even, perhaps, because they could not understand the concrete character of the moment in history in which they were living. We believe this question deserves to be asked.”
Yet Trotsky had already asked and answered this question, so who do we hold responsible? Trotsky spelled out the concrete tactics of defeatism in his Proletarian Military Policy (PMP). He warned constantly right up to his death of the danger of lapsing into social patriotism, notably in ‘A Step Towards Patriotism’. “Should revolutionary defeatism be renounced in relation to non-fascist countries? Herein lies the crux of the question: upon this issue, revolutionary internationalism stands or falls.” The Communist Tendency in the SWP (US) wrote a 1972-73 critique of the degeneration of the FI after the death of Trotsky. It argued that the FI succumbed to national chauvinism during the war and failed to correct that deviation from revolutionary Marxism after the war. It blamed the increasingly petty bourgeois leadership and not the hostile conditions of the time, and called for the founding of a new International based on the Program of the FI of 1938.” (ILTT Draft Program)
War & Empire: Split in U.S. capitalist class? Business ‘realists’ vs. Neo-Cons
The history of perpetual wars of domination by U.S. imperialism in particular and all imperialist states generally demonstrates the capitalist ruling class’ needs war to control access to markets and labor in dependent states; it demonstrates their inability to achieve any peace but that of the graveyard. The real world economy produces value for 7+ billion people and the biggest companies in the world all want a piece of that. Every mob boss knows war is no good for business. And the world of big finance capital understands the same. Yet, inevitably trade wars and currency wars turn into hot wars.
The neocons are still playing their grand checkerboard, attempting to drive a wedge between China and Russia, as does Trump (for his white power alliance), and Balkanizing the former USSR into semi-colonial statelets. There are anarcho-Democrats carrying water for this drive too.
Jamie Dimon, Elon Musk, and many European capitalists see the futility and the economic disruption of the neocons’ obsession. This was already apparent in the NATO summit 2030 document as the dream of fissures in the Russia China bloc were just that-–dreams. The fissures are in the EU and NATO. The foreign policy neocons are now aligned with Biden as the most stalwart advocates for projecting American militarized imperialism. Others are not as concerned with projecting military power as much as living large on ‘the art of the deal.’ Morgan Stanley took China’s invitation to open branches. You can be sure war drum music is not to their taste. A finger in the pie is better than no finger at all is how pragmatic businessmen play ‘as the world burns.’
Neo-Ricardian professor Richard Wolff reminds us that the Russian economy’s GDP is only $1.2 trillion, while the U.S. economy is $14 trillion, but the big boy on the block now is China with a GDP over $17 trillion. For Wolff, despite their size, massive militaries and nuclear capabilities the only imperialist in the game is the U.S. and its NATO allies who are all clearly in trouble economically and wanting a China bailout redux. Kissenger, Yellen, Gates, Musk, and Raimondo took expeditions to kiss the ring of the rising master of world finance. But three weeks later there is no sign from the Chinese side that this sweetness is working. They have sent their warships to guard their access to Iranian oil in the Straits of Hormuz.
Wolff makes some of the above stated observations here and here. What he does not say is that a new ‘Anti-imperialist United Front,’ actually a popular front, is being forged by leftist academics and commentators (Escobar and Wolff), fake socialists (Code Pink, Peoples Forum, Tri-Continental, Brian Becker’s PSL, Irvin Jim’s NUMSA/SRWP), bourgeois pragmatists like Jeffery Sachs and the wheelers and dealers like Musk, Gates, and Jamie Dimon who see the writing on the wall. They cannot avoid the reach of the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) and want in.
This new world order is not a socialist project, it is, for neo-Kautsyians, the alternative. Some fool themselves into believing the Communist Party of China (CPC) hype that their system is some kind of modern New Economic Policy (NEP) using capitalist tools to advance the forces of production to levels at which socialism will be viable. For dependent semi-colonies, joining the China-led projects allows for the completion of the national democratic revolution, they tell us, and serves as an anti-imperialist road out of dependency: where the reigning imperialist does not have to be overthrown by socialist revolution, where the dependent nations can simply navigate away from the U.S.-led IMF/World Bank to the China-led BRICS/Shanghai Cooperation Organization/New Development Bank and the Belt & Road Initiative.
Other 21st century mensheviks ally themselves with these neo-Keynesian projects, just daubing themselves with red paint. To keep peace with their Stalinist fellows they describe Russia and China as “sub-imperialists.” Along for the ride and to prevent any genuinely revolutionary consciousness and organization in the workers movement we see the “BRICS From Below Coalition” alongside champions of “MMT,” i.e., Modern Monetary Theory, a variety of Underconsumptionism.
But protecting shipping and trade routes and repatriating profits has always been about military power. There is no Kautskian “out” from the consequences for empires when they are displaced by emergent great powers. It took two world wars to finally sink the UK as the reigning hegemon. While it may be truthful to say China wants the unstoppable transition to be peaceful, the facts on the ground confirm empires do not go down without a fight. And although there is a pragmatic wing of big U.S. capital preparing for a soft landing, the neocons are deeply embedded in both parties, united on the Ukraine project and the extension of Obama’s Pacific Pivot and the AUKUS military alliance for China containment.
War and Empire: War Drums
Russian intransigence parades as the leader of the military bloc against western imperialism. The unfolding agreements between China and Russia are exchanging raw materials for high tech semiconductors outside the SWIFT system. They are creating new North/South routes to integrate their economies with the Belt and Road to the Western Sea (Indian Ocean). The DPRK provides munitions; and Russian resources get to market allowing Russia to play drain-the-West as Ukraine fills body bags. Just as the West bled the USSR in the post WWII arms race; Russia today is draining the U.S. economy and the patience of the population.
Russia’s advantageous arctic access and willingness to “drill baby drill” has the oil oligarchs of the U.S. and Northern Europe in an apoplectic fit. With the largest fleet of icebreakers in the world, and with India contracting to make more, Russian exploitation of arctic LNG and oil give Russia an energy advantage. These Russian commodities will flow along the new silk road/BRI in de-dollarized trading ensuring an abundance of fossil fuel consumption for decades, just when the environment needs it to be slashed. Western media raises alarm over single hulled shipments of oil from the Arctic to China and Brazil. These are crocodile tears as Wall St. invests two trillion plus in oil exploration and scavenging in the global south.
Far right FOX network alarmists stoke partisan flames, making a recent incident of sea lane reconnaissance by Russia and China to be a military threat. ‘Soft on China’ Biden, was derided for only sending four destroyers to monitor the 11 ship flotilla. As the political football is tossed around, Democrats are criticized for holding back funding the military to the extent needed to ward off China and Russia. CNN countered with the State Department line that the U.S. Northern Command did not consider this a threat. Republican senators’ fury does not mention that the U.S. regularly conducts similar missions off China’s coast. All of this bluster while the U.S. pledges billion after billion for a real proxy war between Ukraine/NATO and the Russian invaders and their international allies; the “limited war,” limited only to a corner of Europe (for the present.) The returned control of Congress and its money spending to the Trumpsters will immediately pose the question, can they at one and the same time support Zionism and cut Ukraine off. Some want this. Still others wish to cut both off.
Lately the U.S. State Department is considering putting troops on foreign flag vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. put its flags on tankers transiting the Strait in the 1980’s leading to confrontations with both Iran and Iraq during their war. This profited no one. Secretary Baker said it was “about jobs:” he was wrong, and this provocation is wrong. Projecting military might is about controlling oil commodities and the profits derived from them. Russia and China may have found the hardest to harvest resources but combined they have the capacity to get it to markets.
The federal government’s deficit, the amount of increase in its indebtedness, declined, 2022 vs. 2021. But now it is zooming past $2 trillion for 2023 and the Trumpsters thrill to plans for a government shutdown. Like Steve Bannon and Grover Norquist, the Trump ideologue precursors, they dream of the drowning of the administrative government, and this can at least momentarily be accomplished by a ban on renewed government borrowing. This would also freeze funds promised to Zelensky, another Trumpster objective.
We say close all the overseas bases and bring the troops home now! We support a Proletarian Military Policy, the unionization of the ranks and files and call for a “LET’S GO HOME” movement to fight the class enemy here.
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