Author: Internationalist Perspective

In Pontecorvo’s film Queimada, set in the 1830s, the agent provocateur, Sir William Walker, points out that a decade can show the contradictions of a century. Fast forward almost 200 years. It only took a few days into 2016, the strains of Auld Lang Syne having barely faded away, to highlight the contradictions of the whole capitalist system today. Once a decade was needed, now only a few days; the acceleration of forces and events is palpable. Indeed, although the various aspects of life under capitalism have always been linked – and those always highlighted in times of crisis – today’s expressions of crisis can move from one domain to another to expose a quite astonishing interconnectedness and immediacy as the past few weeks since the start of this year show.

This article aims to put some perspectives on the acceleration of events. One can always point to the underlying crisis of capitalism – its crisis of value – but this crisis never expresses itself without the decisions and actions of classes and groups, and the vicissitudes of events. It is on these behaviours that this article focusses. In a few pages it is impossible to review the whole world situation so I have selected a few key issues to concentrate on.  

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A Critique of the theses of the GIK and “labor coupons” (Excerpts from an exchange with Kees)

Kees, you write:

“The problem that I see is the following: as we are not in a situation of ‘abundance’ but in a situation of ‘scarcity’ there will inevitably be ‘exchange’ (or else total arbitrariness) based on some kind of calculation. The only possibility would seem to be take labor time as the basis of the calculation.”

The link between scarcity and exchange is something that also seems to me to be very important. Exchange and its main instrument, money, are an extremely effective means to ensure the circulation of goods in conditions of scarcity and a developed division of labor, as history has amply demonstrated. Too often we believe that it suffices to declare money “abolished” for it to disappear.

We cannot do away with money without eliminating the necessity for exchange. The Argentine experience of 2001, the “Movement for a social money” shows how, in a situation of scarcity, if the “official” money disappears, other forms of money reappear “spontaneously” as a product of the need to exchange in order to survive. Cigarettes were used as commodity-money during the Second World War by prisoners, and still are today in prisons in the United States.  

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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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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

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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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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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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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