Author: Internationalist Perspective

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Rojava in the Vortex of Inter-Imperialist Antagonisms

Over the past several years Rojava or Western Kurdistan, legally a part of Syria, has been seen by many anarchists, libertarians, and even Marxists as the locus of a social revolution, one that demands solidarity on the part of revolutionaries, all the more so as it has been the object of brutal military assaults, first from Daesch (the Islamic State), and now from Erdogan’s Turkey. Inasmuch as the Middle-East today is literally on fire, the scene of vicious ethnic and religious cleansing, and bloody battles between rival imperialist states and armies, it is important to determine whether we are seeing a mortal threat to capital, an anti-capitalist commune OR an inter-imperialist bloodbath in which the population has been mobilized to serve the interests of capitalism.

For the past several years, as Syria has collapsed into civil war fueled by the intervention of imperialist states (Iran, Turkey, Russia and the US), Rojava has been under the control of the PYD and its fighters (the YPG), the Syrian offshoot of the PKK (The Kurdistan Workers Party \[sic.\]), led by Abdullah Öcalan. Originally a Marxist-Leninist, now in Turkish incarceration, Öcalan has had a prison conversion, and under the influence of the writings of the American libertarian, Murray Bookchin, has reinvented himself as a partisan of “communalism” and “Democratic Confederalism.”  

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Down With These Flags

llons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé…

(“Let’s go, children of the fatherland, the day of glory has arrived…”)

The opening of the ‘Marseillaise, the French national anthem

The following text is a statement IP put out after the terrorist attacks in Paris last november. It was widely shared on social media and internet lists. We received some criticism, in particular of the claim that ISIS is a capitalist enterprise and “not a religious movement”. Indeed, it would be more correct to state that it is both. Both aspects coexist within ISIS and use each other. As a capitalist state ISIS uses religious fervor for the purpose of capital accumulation, and as a religious movement, ISIS uses the instruments of the state to advance its fanatical religious goals. Those two aspects fit together smoothly, united by the common goal of conquest, although lately tensions have been reported between factions focused on consolidating ISIS’s management of its territory and factions that want to expand the global ‘Jihad’, regardless the consequences. It remains to be seen how that plays out. The role that religion plays today in capturing the rage of some of the most marginalized proletarians is not something that we have foreseen.  

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This is What Democracy Looks Like

A few questions linger after these elections. Such as: is the new US president a psychopath or is he a sociopath?

Whatever the correct diagnosis may be, it can’t be denied that his election testifies to a considerable increase of discontent, disaffection and anxiety in a broad swath of the American population. Trump won, by adding to the traditional Republican votes, those of many in the white working class, who in previous elections voted for Obama or not at all. Let’s not exaggerate his appeal: only a quarter of the eligible voters voted for him; his opponent in fact got at least a million votes more than him but, as you know, he won in the Electoral College. ‘That’s what democracy looks like’, as protesters (unintentionally ironically) shout in American streets, while they’re being chased by the armed protectors of the democratic state.

There are good reasons for discontent, disaffection and anxiety in the American working class. Because of the sharp competition on the global labor market and the unstoppable march of automation, more and more people are unsure whether they will have a job tomorrow, and in what conditions. Hidden unemployment is rampant. The gap between rich and poor grows.  

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Inter-Imperialist Antagonisms in the Age of Trump

Capitalist states, whether they are defending local or regional economic and politico-military interests or seeking global hegemony, must constantly evaluate and re-evaluate their strategic interests, their alliances, and the threats that they confront.

For American imperialism, in the waning days of World War Two, before the atomic bombs led to Japan’s surrender, it seemed apparent that while Stalinist Russia was militarily essential if Germany and Japan were to be defeated, the outcome of the war raised the prospect that Russia might dominate large parts of both Europe and Asia, and thereby become a threat to the putative global hegemony of the U.S. The occupation of the Eastern half of Europe by Russia, and the danger that with powerful Stalinist parties in Italy and France too, the Western half might be brought into the orbit of Moscow, whether by elections or conquest, as well as the conviction that Mao was a puppet of Moscow, and that his “revolution” in China would extend Russian domination to much of Asia in the face of weak and declining European colonial powers, led Washington to adopt a strategy of containment of Russia, that included the Marshall plan, the formation of NATO, and two land wars in Asia (Korea and Vietnam) before the strategy of American imperialism was dramatically changed in the early ‘70’s by Kissinger and Nixon, with a Sino-American alliance that ultimately led to the collapse of the “Soviet Union” in the early ‘90’s.  

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Editorial

Internationalist Perspective 60 appears at a moment of heightened social tensions, and widespread social movements from the US to Greece and Sweden, from China to Mexico, which have their roots in the grim reality of a crisis of capitalism that has not been ameliorated over the past seven years, and which beyond its manifestation as a massive financial crisis (with new upheavals to come), manifests itself as a surplus of humanity, whose very labor power can no longer be profitably exploited by capital. What links all movements that are now erupting globally is capital’s recourse to police brutality directed at the very unrest provoked by the degrading conditions in which an evergrowing mass of the population is condemned to live, a brutality that includes police shootings of unarmed people on an ever-greater scale. Whether it is the use of lethal force against immigrant youth in Husby or Ragsved in Stockholm, or the anniversary of police killings of demonstrators in Athens; whether it is the brutality against demonstrators by the cops in Hong Kong, the cold- blooded murder of dozens of students in Mexico on their way to a demonstration, or the killing of unarmed black men by police in Ferguson and Staten Island, the roots of these assaults by the forces of order lie in the effort to protect and to buttress the basic social relations of capitalism itself.  

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Editorial – Imagine

Anxiety is rising and no wonder. The lack of economic prospects, the social dislocations resulting from capital’s penetration of the whole world and its expulsion of ever greater numbers of people from actual production and jobs, the wars over possession it engenders, with their merciless slaughter of civilians, whether through air bombardments or suicide attacks, the many millions of refugees fleeing horror and hopelessness, the climate disturbances… it is indeed a potent cocktail.

People try to make sense of it all. Politicians and other ideologues capture the discussion within their particular spectrum, which varies all the way from Islamophobia and other expressions of racism and warmongering, to empty promises based on the illusion that taking money from the rich and spending it on the poor will solve it all. What they all have in common is that they cannot imagine a world beyond capitalism. All things change, but capitalism, in their minds, is eternal. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” environmentalist Rob Nixon wrote in a November 2014 New York Times Book Review assessment of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything.

But the end of capitalism must be imagined if the end of the world, or something close to that, is to be prevented, because all the above mentioned expressions of worsening crisis have their roots in the crisis of capitalism itself.  

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