[GM95] A Productive Party Meeting at Viareggio

For the first time ever, in the annals of our small party, we were in a position to hold our meeting in Viareggio, a town with a strong working class presence in agriculture, in the maritime and shipbuilding industries and with entrenched proletarian traditions; the latter only slightly dampened by the town having become a ‘seaside resort’ in the last century. The meeting would take place within the spacious and tranquil surroundings of a circoscrizione di quartiere, a local ward centre.

 As usual the meetings on Saturday and Sunday were quite intense, and given over to the relation of numerous reports, some of them dealing with difficult subjects whose exposition was anything but obvious or straightforward. For now, we will only summarise the topics covered, whilst the full reports will be published in due course in Comunismo or Il Partito Comunista.

These different studies all draw on the collaboration of many comrades, and take place on a time-scale which can’t be reduced to the here and now. Without fear of contradiction we can say that they rely on the work of all current comrades, and of those who are no longer with us as well.

The party’s method does not involve indulging in gossipy ‘spot the mistake’ competitions, the typical “sport” of the bourgeoisie’s ghastly politicians and smarmy intellectuals; for whom, having no further truths or indeed anything worthwhile left to impart, there remains nothing but shouting louder than their fellow puffed up ignoramuses and con artists, or slagging them off with sour ripostes.

But having said that, we don’t mean to imply that the party is immune from making mistakes, that it never gets anything wrong, or, for that matter, won’t make mistakes in the future. Quite the opposite. What we do affirm, nevertheless, is that in order to look after its long-term objectives, the Communist Party must carry out its work in a way that transcends ‘personality worship’ and organisational sectarianism. In a party that has the stamina to attain the Communist historical consciousness of the path which lies ahead, even potential ‘mistakes’ may be useful insofar as they exercise our ‘collective dialectical musculature’ by prompting a deeper investigation of the relevant subjects, and bringing ever new, less investigated implications under the sway of doctrine.
 

THE CRISIS OF CAPITAL

As is customary at our meetings, there was a presentation to those assembled, about the Great Moribundity’s ‘hospital file’: the result of a lot of hard work, we will only attempt to give a brief overview here of the huge amount of data which was drawn together and elaborated in this report.

The lengthy period running from 1937 to 2005 was covered, concentrating on the big six imperialisms. We are also currently gathering information on China and India so that can be included as well. On the table, the first line for each country in clear type indicates the number of years of the relevant period, the second line, in bold type, indicates the average annual rate of growth of industrial production. (See table in the following Turin Meeting Report).

There is certainly plenty to reflect upon in this vast and evocative panorama of world capitalism, subsoil of all social determinations, great and small, when we look back over these counter-revolutionary centuries of ours, for although our historic enemy may be clearly triumphant on the political level, we see it economically going into inexorable decline.

The most recent periods, shown in italics, are incomplete and therefore only provisional insofar as they haven’t been concluded by peak of maximum growth. In fact some rhythms are even shown in the negative.

What stands out is the great cycle of capitalist aging, which has reduced growth, even in the very powerful capitalisms, to virtually nothing. To show that the glory days of capitalism are clearly over, we need only look at the average rates of accumulation in Italy and Japan in the post-war period (of truly ‘Chinese’ proportions) and compare them with the minimal growth today.
 

THE REARMING OF THE STATES

Every now and again the media gives us some meagre information on the amount the various States are spending on arms. Over the past year the raw figures (which still show ‘little Italy’ to be one of the world’s prodigal spenders on navy, air force, army and police, etc) are often accompanied by complaints from senior figures in the army about cuts to ‘defence’ spending, or by requests from the so-called “radical left” to limit this expenditure.

If the following statement from a Marxist of the calibre of Trotski is true, as it most certainly is, there is much to be alarmed about: “States do not fight because they are armed. On the contrary, they forge arms when they have to fight”.

Since 1998, following several years of reduction in global military spending due to the collapse of the immense Russian empire, and to the drastic reduction in military spending mainly in that region, but also in the United States, spending has started to rise dramatically. Between 1998 and 2004 the rise has been about 27%, reaching the enormous figure of 1,035 billion dollars, and by 2005 it had gone up to 1,100 billion dollars.

How is this spending divided between the various States?

In general, the data provided by SIPRI, (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), which are the ones circulated in the press, are calculated in dollars based on the official rates of exchange. On that basis, the division of military expenditure between the 15 States which spend the most, sees, for the year 2005, in first place the United States with an expenditure of 455.3 billion dollars (47% of total world spending), in second place, but lagging far behind, Great Britain spends 47.4 billion at 4.9%; France is third at 46.2 Billion (4.7%); Japan is fourth at 42.4 billion (4.3%); China is fifth at 35.4 Billion (3.6%); and sixth, reunified Germany at 33.9 billion (3.5%). In seventh place is ‘Little Italy’ which, at least from the point of view of military spending, finds a place amongst the ‘big boys’ with 27.8 billion dollars and a not insignificant 2.9% of the world total. Next comes “Putin’s” Russia, at 19.4 billion (2.0%), followed by Saudi Arabia 19.3 (2.0%); South Korea 15.5 (1.6%); India 15.1 (1.5%); Israel 10.7 (1.5%); Canada 10.6 (1.1%); Turkey and Australia with the same 10.1 (1.0%), adding up to a total of 975 billion dollars at 2003 prices.

But if military expenditure is analysed in terms of “purchasing power parity”, that is, taking account not of the official currency exchange rate but of the actual physical quantity of armaments, the situation changes completely and gives a picture which is far closer to the real relations of force between the imperialist powers (still based on SIPRI data).

The United States still remains, of course, in first place, but we see their percentage of world expenditure reduced slightly from 46.7% to 41.4%. In second place it is no longer Great Britain but China, with 14.6% of world expenditure, establishing itself as the upcoming super-imperialist. India is in third place, another Asiatic power in full ascent. Comes next in fourth place is Russia, a country recovering fast from the crisis which followed the break up of the old USSR.

And what is more, in just a very few years Russia has recovered its prior position amongst the world’s biggest sellers of arms. And it is no accident that its biggest customers are China and India.

On the basis of these more accurate criteria, France, the European country highest on the list, followed by Great Britain and Germany, all drop behind Russia.

Japan, whilst fourth in the previous table, now finds itself in eighth place. However, if you take into account that the ‘Land of the Rising Sun’ wasn’t even supposed to have an army and to be reliant on the allied occupying force of the United States, it is certainly no mean result.

Italy comes after Japan in ninth place, which is more reasonable than the seventh place it occupied in the previous table.

So here is the second table, also shown at the meeting, which gives information about the fifteen States which spent most on the military sector in 2005, calculating the rate of exchange on a parity with purchasing power:

              STATE EXPENDITURE   %
    1  USA              455,3    41,4
    2  China            161,1    14,6
    3  India            81,8     7,4
    4  Russia            66,1     6,0
    5  France            51,2     4,7
    6  United Kingdom    46,2     4,2
    7  Germany           36,9     3,4
    8  Japan             35,2     3,2
    9  Italy             34,5     3,1
   10  Saudi Arabia      29,1     2,6
   11  Turkey            24,3     2,2
   12  South Corea       23,1     2,1
   13  Brazil            20,7     1,9
   14  Iran              18,5     1,7
   15  Pakistan          16,1     1,5
             WORLD     1100,1   100,0

After taking into account the data set out in the table we resumed with Trotski’s slogan: “Calls for ‘disarmament’ have, and can only have, nothing in common with the prevention of war. The program of ‘disarmament’ only signifies an attempt – up to now only on paper – to reduce in peacetime the expense of this or that kind of armaments. It is above all a question of military technique and the imperialist coffers. The arsenals, the munitions factories, the laboratories, and, most important of all, capitalist industry as such, retain their power throughout every ‘disarmament program’. But States do not fight because they are armed. On the contrary, they forge arms when they have to fight. In case of war, all the peace limitations will fall aside like so much chaff. Back in 1914-1918, States didn’t fight with the armaments they had stocked up in time of peace, but with what they had forged during the war. It isn’t the arsenals but the productive capacity of a country that proves decisive (…)
      The question of disarmament is one of the levers used by imperialism to prepare for wars. It is pure charlatanism to attempt to distinguish between defensive and offensive machine guns, tanks, aeroplanes (…)
      War is not a game that is conducted according to conventional rules. War demands and creates all the weapons that can most successfully annihilate the enemy. Petty-bourgeois pacifism, which sees in a 10 percent, or 33 percent, or 50 percent disarmament proposal the “first step” towards prevention of war, is more dangerous than all the explosives and asphyxiating gases put together. Melinite and yperite can do their work only because the masses of people are poisoned in peacetime by the fumes of pacifism”.
     The issue is therefore clear: we mustn’t deceive anyone that a disarmed, or less armed, capitalism is possible. To gain access to, and protect, their markets and sources of raw materials, the imperialist powers use money but also armed force. The present oil wars make this very evident.
     Another factor not to be underestimated is that arms production constitutes in itself an extremely important sector of industry. Again on the basis of SIPRI figures (as reported in the June 14th issue of the Italian left-leaning newspaper Manifesto): “Since 2004, thanks to the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the world’s major arms firms have seen their takings go up by 34% and total profits now stand at 10.12 billion dollars. Not surprisingly 63% of the profits have ended up amongst the takings of the 40 top American companies involved in arms production”. In the present climate of quasi-stagnation in the economies of the major Western countries, these figures are not insignificant.
     The main arms firms are American, with their main customer the United States army: their profits therefore derive from squeezing the American tax-payer, who sees a quarter of federal spending invested in arms. And that is why the citizens of the ‘land of the free’ find themselves constantly menaced, today by “rogue States” yesterday by “soviet communism”, by international terrorism and other such nightmares, in order to convince them of the need for ‘social discipline’ and to get the proletariat to continue to slog its guts out!
     We finally concluded with excerpts from Anti-Dühring: “Militarism carries in itself the seed of its own destruction. Competition of the individual States with each other forces them to spend more money each year on the army and navy, artillery, etc., and thus more and more hastening financial catastrophe (…) Always and everywhere it is the economic conditions and instruments of force which help “force” to victory, and without these, force ceases to be force. And anyone who tried to reform war from the opposite standpoint (…) would certainly reap nothing but a beating”.
 

THE AMERICAN WORKERS’ MOVEMENT

The party work on the American workers’ movement paused to consider the period of the War of Independence, which the American bourgeoisie like to call a “Revolution” but Marxist analysis considers instead as a war between States, insofar as political power didn’t pass from one class to another and there was no overthrowing of one mode of production by another.

Even if traces of pre-bourgeois production remained in the large estates of the great landowners, direct assignees of huge properties by the Crown, the system of production was by now analogous to the one predominant in England for over a century; from when the English Revolution (and such it genuinely was) had deposed the absolute monarchy and reduced it to what it still remains today, a pale imitation of a faded power.

The war was of one part of the population against another, both sides roughly equivalent in numerical terms, and it was fought against the mother country; it could also, therefore, be described it as a civil war.

After having described the increasing fiscal pressure which England brought to bear on the colonies, and the limits which were placed on the latter’s territorial and economic expansion, the report went on to show how it was actually the proletariat of the big cities, along with artisans and other layers of the petty bourgeoisie, who organized resistance to the colonial power whilst the magnates were originally hesitant about backing it.

When later on the stage of all out confrontation between the English and colonial armies was reached, the big mercantile and financial bourgeoisie, and above all the big landed proprietors, would continue to equivocate and play a waiting game, fearing, as they did, the armed subordinate classes far more than any oppression from across the Atlantic.

So victory was not just due to an army, which suffered all the vicissitudes of the shifting, and not always cordial, relations between the colonies; it was also due to a historic conjuncture which saw Spain, and above all the France of Louis XVI, supporting the colonial armies and militias economically, and militarily with their own armies and navies.

The war couldn’t suppress class conflict for long however. Soon there was the inevitable general price rise, and the response was petitions menacing mass gatherings and general unrest. In 1781 there was even a mutiny by a sizeable army detachment, and in the years following victory, further disturbances broke out.

And yet there were certain consequences of the revolution that improved life for proletarians, including economic recovery. The declaration of the principles of individual liberty and equality, even if with objective limitations, had clear implications for the future condition of bonded laborers and slaves. Enslavement of whites was already in decline due to the difficulty of maintaining a constant supply of them; a difficulty that was accentuated every time there was a war in Europe.

In New England, slavery was abolished in the years after the war and prohibited in the territories north of the river Ohio. In the central colonies it disappeared more gradually, but by the beginning of the 19th century very few slaves remained there. In the South, of course, the ‘peculiar institution’ would remain firmly entrenched, and it was precisely here that the bulk of the millions of slaves were to be found. And yet there was a sense of dealing with an anomaly that would soon be swept away.

One had the impression that the American people were well on the way to achieving equality. Amongst proletarians, the great revolutionary formula – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – even if hypocritical in itself and of more relevance to the rich than to the subordinate classes, aroused hopes of a better future of decent wages, shorter hours, and working conditions fit for human beings. And yet what was really new about the American War of Independence was the general rhetoric about ‘Liberty’. Each class, every social strata, ranging from tenant farmers in the Hudson valley to the coopers of Philadelphia, from Boston sailors to merchants in debt to England, from land-hungry bonded servants to the skilled laborers of New York, all of them saw their respective problems resolved in the achievement of liberty, the opening up of a new world of wealth and well-being.

In the next century, it would nevertheless become abundantly clear that the American bourgeoisie had no intention of sharing the enormous riches within its grasp with the proletariat.
 

BALANCE SHEET OF THE ISLAMIC ‘REVOLUTION’

 Once the popular and proletarian uprising against the Pahlavi State had concluded with the victory of the priest’s party, the new politico-religious coalition, contrary to the wishes of the bourgeois strata that had supported it, would embark on a long and bloody battle against the other factions. A popular referendum declared Iran to be an ‘Islamic republic’ but from that time on there would be no more room for the democratic forces, even for those of populist inspiration which had contributed so much to the success of the insurrection.

The ‘revolution’ was dead before it had seen light of day. That wouldn’t stop this historical phase from eventually being dubbed the ‘Khomeinist Revolution’, however: false noun, usurped adjective.

Even within the Shiite community itself ‘spiritual’ differences would lead to vicious struggles amongst the priesthood, as often as not mediated by the Supreme Leader and sometimes leading to bloody attacks aimed at eliminating opponents. Ruthless repression would be the order of the day, whether against the groups and parties of the lay left, or those of the so-called ‘Islamic left’ (Bani Sadr).

Between 1980, and when the Iraqi armed forces invaded in 1983, the opposition was completely crushed. Almost six thousand people were condemned to death, exile for the more fortunate (including the second lay president, Bani Sadr) and ‘political death’ reserved for those factions amongst the clergy who wouldn’t adapt to the ‘Khomeinist’ dictatorship.

The country’s new constitutional order was organized in a special diarchical structure in which a ‘democratic’ form of the traditional type, represented by the president of the Republic and parliament, was accompanied by a parallel religious power presided over by a Supreme Leader and a Council which assisted him.

Effective control of the principal powers of the Islamic Republic was – and still is – referred to the latter, whilst a role involving little more than management and administration was attributed to the institutions of parliament and president.

The confessional nature of the state was sanctioned in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, which clearly identified that in Islam, and not in the state itself, the summit of power in Iran was located, thereby drawing a clear distinction between the roles of the President and the Supreme Leader; with effective power of government transferred to the latter and the organs specific to him.

During those three years of ferocious repression, the struggle to give a structure to the new state order, and the dynamic of the clash of imperialist interests in the Gulf area, would result in the Republic’s foreign policy becoming confused and contradictory. There would be traumatic stages like the seizure of the diplomats from the American embassy in Teheran and, later on, the military attack on Iran by Iraq. If the Islamic left, until its final elimination in the first year of the war with Iraq, insisted on the organic insertion of Iran in the non-aligned movement, another wing of the government sought a non-conflictual co-existence with the West and a measured policy towards the East. Finally, there was the political group around the Supreme Leader and the Council of the Revolution, which urged a break with the United States.

As the war with Iraq continued, and became ever more ruthless and bloody, these political contradictions would be swept aside.

The political weakness of the American president, Carter, and his failed attempt to free the captive American diplomats by military means, would cost him his re-election in 1981. Reagan, his successor, would instead purchase their freedom with clandestine deals involving arms and dollars, which could only be got into Iran with the complicity of the Israeli secret services and complicated international financial networks: this was the Iran-Contra scandal which was uncovered in 1987.

As the war continued, the United States allowed the two contenders to bleed each other dry, whilst it meanwhile provided support to the Iraqi dictator, who it would help to install and maintain in power as a counter-weight to the newly arisen Iranian republic.

After the assassinations of Behesti, leader of the Council of the revolution, and Rajai, who succeeded Bani Sadr as head of the republic, the Ayatollah Khomeini would himself step in to replace them. The circle was getting smaller, and the mullahs would now exert complete control over the ganglia of state and civil society. The weak Iranian bourgeoisie totally surrendered to the harsh discipline of the priests, who would lord it over the financial as well as the landowning and mining sectors and take over the oil business.

After eight years of war, and after a missile launched by an American ship had hit an Iranian civilian aircraft with 280 people on board – a ‘tragic error’ according to American diplomacy – the war would end, without the two contenders however signing a formal peace declaration.

The turbulent phase of the power of the priests draws to a close with the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, soon after the ending of hostilities in February 1989, and his replacement at the top of the regime by Rafsanjiani. A period of political stabilization is ushered in, and the new climate allows for a more pragmatic foreign policy, one which is more negotiated; one allowing the application of various approaches to the really knotty question: regional supremacy in the Gulf region.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is elected to the presidency of the republic, and he will remain in post until 1997, practicing a policy of economic liberalization aimed at attracting foreign investment to reconstruct an Iran devastated by the war.
 

ITALY: BIGOTTED AND MACHIAVELLIAN

If we have previously emphasized that the entire history of the Italic bourgeoisie is marked by its political intrigues and petty politicizing; if we have emphasized that Togliatti wasn’t the first to adopt its duplicitous standards, since these had already been adopted by the men of the Risorgimento, with Cavour chief amongst them, it isn’t out of moral bigotry.

If anything, bigotry is typical of the bourgeois ruling class (and not just the Italian one at that) inasmuch as it constantly finds itself objectively torn between wishful thinking and harsh material reality.

Thus the distorting mirror of national ideology means that promises are never kept, for the reason that it sees class divisions as ‘a Marxist invention’, rather than a blatantly obvious fact staring it in the face.

Thus do the Italics still claim to be followers of, or at least indebted to, Machiavelli, not knowing that the latter, accused in his day of being a ‘mannerino’, that is, a flunkey of the Medicis (and him a republican!), advocated the necessity of setting fancy speeches aside in order to learn from ‘actual reality’. He who at least had the merit of not shunning the lessons of history, of knowing how to conduct himself politically, and who loathed petty politicizing, which is the nauseating way of going about things these days

The really pathetic thing about Italic ideology is the rhetoric with which it tries to cover up its mistakes, which fails however to disguise the profound emptiness of a tradition that continually oscillates between velleity and reality. The events of the last fifteen years are no exception, even after the fall of the ‘ideologies’ which would force everyone to dissimulate…

Now that the reasons for this duplicity no longer exist, here it is being proclaimed to a country which although split in half has never been more united in squeezing the proletariat, excluded from the great blow-out and still in the grip of an irreversible crisis.

As the rate of profit continues its inexorable fall, whose fault is that? Answer that dear sirs, and you might not find it quite so easy to blame Marxism as an ideology, or to declare the latter unscientific and false…
 

THE ORIGIN OF THE TRADE UNIONS IN ITALY

The report dealt with the history of the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro in the period immediately after the 2nd World War when it was based in Naples. The comrade assigned to researching the subject had managed to track down several copies of the Confederation’s official organ, Battaglie Sindacali, the contents of which clearly evidenced the major influence which class positions had on this union.

But alongside these positions there were also non-communist tendencies present within it, which derived from the fact that members belonged to a whole range of parties, from the Partito d’Azione (Action Party) through to the Italian Communist Party and the PSIUP (Partito Socialista Italiano di Unità Proletaria).

Looking back at this union from where we are today, we are bound to confirm that it was indeed a ‘class’ union, because such were its actions; such it was considered by its members and because even the non-communist leaders, despite themselves, got swept up in the tide. In fact these leaders were compelled to hide their true opinions for fear of losing contact with the proletariat.

Wage demands for agricultural labourers, workers and office workers were unequivocal, and made regardless of their compatibility with the national economy.

Several passages from the pages of ‘Battaglie’ were quoted to show how it defended various class positions, such as calling for a single, inter-regional trade-union organisation to defend the interests of workers in all trades and sectors.

The organisation had to fight against the PCI, which attempted to sabotage it by trying to get workers to not join or not pay their dues. In Unità there were even accusations of ‘anti-communism’, which can be swiftly dealt with by pointing out that the CGL maintained it was only by international solidarity and the abolition of the capitalist system that it could alleviate the proletarian condition.

With other comrades having managed to track down additional issues as well, such that we have now acquired an almost complete set of Battaglie Sindacali, we have decided to duplicate it to make it available for further study.
 

ANTI-MILITARISM IN THE WORKERS’ MOVEMENT

This report was introduced with the observation that war is the inevitable consequence of capitalist society and its mode of production. At the same time, however, it represents capitalism’s greatest contradiction because in order to conserve its power, its class domination, the capitalist state is forced to arm the proletariat, its grave-diggers. As Marx wrote in the Manifesto: “Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians”.

Several passages from our classic texts (Marx, Lenin, the Italian Left) were then quoted to demonstrate that the proletarian party’s revolutionary stance towards imperialist war needs to be based on the following fundamental postulates; postulates which cannot be compromised or diluted in any way:

1. The party must never, under any circumstances, declare a suspension of the class struggle in time of war, much less call on the proletarian class to solidarize with its own bourgeois state. And this also holds true when a national territory is seriously threatened by the military aggression of enemy states;
2. The party must unilaterally reject any defense of the ‘homeland’;
3. At the same time it must encourage fraternization between proletarians in uniform in the opposing bourgeois armies
4. The party’s entire propaganda and tactical activity will aim to transform any war between states into a civil war between the classes.

These plain, but clear-cut, statements allow us to conclude that the policy and action of the 2nd International parties, both at the start of, and during, the conflict, represented a total abandonment of the doctrines and traditions of socialism (even the reformist version) and, in abruptly passing over to the side defending bourgeois national interests, they committed a conscious and deliberate betrayal of the working class and its historical cause.

Whilst the 2nd International parties, barring rare exceptions, forged a common front with their own national states, and therefore, although appearing at first sight contradictory, with international imperialism; whilst these parties were betraying the class, the proletariat, meanwhile, was everywhere acting on the basis of authentic class internationalism.
On all the war fronts without exception, there were, from Christmas 1914 onwards, innumerable episodes of military truces and fraternization. Faced with such a situation, and with the aim of preventing fraternization from being transformed into military strikes and thence into open civil war, the military commands would alternate toleration with brutal repression according to the circumstances.

Years of war would fail to dampen the proletariat’s spirit of rebellion, and in the fateful year of 1917 not one military front, not one army was unaffected by the phenomena of military strikes, mutinies, and revolts.

To give a full account of the full scale of these proletarian onslaughts, or even a bare summary, would be impossible. The report therefore restricted itself to covering three examples: the Christmas truce of 1914, which as everyone knows spread through the whole of the western Front; the rebellion in the French army of 1917 and the Italian Caporetto. It became very clear that these demonstrations, however significant might have been in themselves, also represented a generalized spirit of rebellion and a wish not only to have done with the war, but also to have done with the regime which had generated it and the class which wanted it in the first place. In 1917, in Russia, Italy, France, Austria and Germany, the armies all rebelled and declared their autonomous wish to declare war on war. All the conditions were in place for a successful revolutionary attack on the capitalist bourgeois power. What was lacking, except in Russia, was the party. The 2nd International, in spite of the declarations of the Basle congress and tens of others before that, passed over en bloc to the camp of defense of national capitalist interests and linked its destiny to the destiny of capitalism in general.

In 1914, social democracy consigned to the capitalist state an entirely defenseless proletariat destined to be slaughtered in the interests of the bourgeois fatherlands. In the years that followed they did nothing to prevent the ‘useless slaughter’. When in 1917 the proletariat in uniform expressed its firm will to impose peace, social democracy remained impassive as governments and army Chiefs of Staff used the most ferocious and bloody repression to force the proletariat in uniform back onto the battle fronts; to massacre its brothers in the opposing trenches and get massacred in its turn. When, furthermore, in 1919 the bourgeoisie risked collapsing under the violent impact of the revolutionary wave, yet again it was social democracy that came to its rescue and personally took charge of safeguarding the capitalist order, and drowning any revolutionary attempt in blood.
 

THE JEWISH QUESTION

The foundation of the State of Israel has been seen as an expression of the return of the Jewish people to the Promised Land, and therefore a religious rather than a political event. Needless to say, we don’t agree.

When we speak of anti-semitism today, the question is imbued with a myriad of meanings and symbols, which although unavoidable in a way can be avoided if we don’t go the way of rhetorical exaggeration.

Is it fortuitous that the State of Israel was formed after the 2nd World War, which had seen the crushing of the proletariat reach its climactic point under Nazism and Stalinism? Is it fortuitous that such a distinctive State was formed as though in compensation for the extermination of the Jews by the nazis?

Historical documentation has now proved that it wasn’t just the USA which turned a blind eye to the extermination camps, but also perfidious Albion and the Vatican, and the Red Cross also, which isn’t a State and never was…

If this event is interpreted in the light of the class struggle, we are therefore forced to admit that the entire history of anti-semitism, from the fake protocols of Zion to the campaign by the Nazis, is just a perverse manifestation of bad conscience by the global bourgeoisie, serving to muddy the waters and allow them to maintain that the final victory of democracy meant a country could be given to the persecuted: a smoke screen to conceal the far more complex truth and the real reasons for the struggle.

As far as we are concerned, all that the forming of the myriad of States after the ‘ending of colonialism’ has achieved is to carve out new highly articulated systems of oppression on a planetary scale. Israel, as a new State, is no exception; and its deadly enemy, the new Palestinian semi-state, is no exception either.

Even if thus they present themselves, in this fragile strategic area which, at the moment at least, is mainly the focus of contradictions between the imperialist powers,

Therefore, in order to avoid falling victim to bourgeois ideology, which utilizes all sorts of smoke screens and symbols to confuse the proletariat, the Marxist interpretation of how old and new States form needs to be adhered to.