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HOT AND COLD WAR

1. THE STARK PRESENT

The summer of 2023 has drawn to a close. The pandemic is in the lull, ‘normality’ has resumed but the grim atmosphere has not disappeared. The climate crisis is getting worse, disasters attributed to “Mother Nature” dominate the news. But the economic crisis also proliferates. What both crises have in common is that they affect people very unequally. They show that we live in a class society.

The Dow Jones, the so-called barometer of the US economy, has been doing quite well. Those with a lot of money can still make it grow. The rest of us are doing less well. Inflation is eroding wages. Millions of Americans are currently losing their health insurance. There are increasing numbers of homeless people. The gap between rich and poor is widening in every country, but globally, the gap is deepening between countries capable of playing a competitive role in the ultra-productive information economy and all the others.

Mass flight from poorer countries is the result. The information revolution has unified the global economy but at the same time it is expelling many. The deeper the global crisis sinks and the more the information technology increases productivity, the more ‘superfluous’ people there are.  

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An Anti-War Assembly in Milan

On September 15th the Centro di Documentazione Contro la Guerra organized an open assembly called “La Guerra in Ucraina non va in Vacanza” (The war in Ukraine doesn’t go on holiday) to which IP participated. The venue was located in a central nerve of Milan at the COX 18, an occupied space since 1976, also home to the well known Calusca City Lights, now the Archivio Primo Moroni, an extensive archival project of leftist literature. The purpose of the assembly was to denounce the barbarism that is still underway in the Ukraine after 19 months from its inception, with still no end in sight.

The assembly lasted about two and a half hours and the format was very open: after a concise introduction given by the organizers, in which they restated their position of “revolutionary defeatism”1, Sandro Moiso who writes for the journal Carmilla spoke for about 45 minutes delineating the current “world disorder”; afterwards, the floor was open to discussion.

Many people intervened without any formal restraints, stating their positions, adding nuances and posing questions. The tone was never academic and many voices were heard. According to the organizers the modest turnout of about 30 people was a bit disappointing since the aim was to open the discussion of the war to a wider audience and not only to “few experts who are already certain of everything ”.  

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A CONFERENCE OF LEFT COMMUNISTS

Last May, at the invitation of Internationalist Perspective and Controversies, some left communists from six countries gathered in Brussels to talk and listen to each other.1 Aside from IP, Controversies, and a few unaffiliated comrades, activists of the following were present:

Old Mole Collective

ex-FOR (Fomento Obrero Revolucionario)

Collectif Smolny

AAAP (Association Archives Anton Pannekoek)

AFRD (A Free Retriever Digest)

Bilan et Perspectives

Cercle de Discussion de sympathisants et sympathisantes de la Gauche Communiste de Paris,

Critiques Grand Large

For logistical reasons, we were not able to invite all those we would have liked to invite. Some whom we did invite were not able to come but sent written contributions (like the Spain-based group Barbaria). Some others declined our invitation, fearing that the debate would degenerate into hostile confrontation, or that the differences in positions would be too big to make meaningful discussion possible. Even some who did come to the conference had the same fears. Fortunately, among all the participants there was a willingness to hear what others had to say. Nobody tried to “win the debate”. Rather than a confrontation in which participants seek only to reinforce their own positions, there was exposure to different ideas.  

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The Titan and the Migrant Boat: A study in Contrasts

Fort Europe

June 22

Since its disappearance Sunday morning while diving to visit the Titanic’s resting place, the story of the Titan submersible has seemed like a movie we’ve all seen. A group of plucky adventurers or explorers are trapped in a seemingly inescapable situation and running low of air, food, water or whatever they need to survive. Sometimes it’s on a mountain. Sometimes in space. In this case, it’s at the bottom of the ocean. Somehow, due to their own ingenuity, the gang survive, although not all of them, and at the very last minute.

But this is not a movie. And no one is really expecting that miracle rescue. According to official reports, the air would have run out sometime between 6 and 8 AM this morning. That is, if they even survived that long. It’s cold at the bottom of the ocean with an ocean pressure of about 6,000 psi (about two tonnes), and the craft was essentially a cigar shaped vessel the size of a mini-van with a window that OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush (who is currently on the titan) admits he broke rules to make. He then charged passengers $250,000 dollars to ride in what now seems like a cheap death trap which reportedly uses a Logitech gaming console (retailing for about $50 on Amazon) to pilot it.  

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AND THE WAR DRAGS ON

15 months have passed since Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine and still the war drags on. Hundreds of thousands are killed or maimed, is that enough? No, it is not enough. Not for the capitalists of both sides in the conflict, locked in their power plays, callously sending the children of the working class to the killing fields while checking their overseas bank accounts.

There is no end in sight to this war. Both sides prepare a spring offensive. It seems the slaughter can only end when one or both warring parties run out of cannon fodder. That is becoming a problem for them. Hundreds of thousands have fled both countries to avoid being forcibly enlisted. In Ukraine there are special apps circulating which send warnings on where the recruiters are on the prowl. Russia still has hundreds of thousands of soldiers in reserve but the Kremlin doesn’t trust them. Why else is it not sending them to the battle? Or is it to maintain the illusion that this is not a war, just a “special military operation”? Instead of using these trained battalions, the prisons are skimmed and all those willing to join the mercenaries and the young recruits (most from distant provinces) at the front, get a ‘get out of jail free card’.  

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A DEBATE ON THE TRAJECTORY OF CAPITALISM

The following text is a reply to Mcl (Controverses) who criticized what IP wrote on the trajectory of capitalism. His main points were:

-how can you claim that capitalism’s decadence, or social retrogression, began in 1914 when, overall, the 20th century was an era of rising growth, rising productivity and rising living standards?

-how can you claim that the transition to real domination is a still ongoing process, while my stats show that the transition from absolute surplus value extraction to relative surplus value extraction was completed by 1850?

His own text can be found HERE

A debate on the trajectory of capitalism

A REPLY TO MCL

Dear Mcl,

to analyze the periodization of capitalism, you start from Marx’s words: “Here the capitalist mode of production is beset with another contradiction. Its historical mission is unconstrained development in geometrical progression of the productivity of human labour. It is unfaithful to its vocation whenever, as here, it checks the development of productivity. It thus demonstrates again, that it is becoming senile period and that it is more and more outlived.” 1 You add: “Capitalism fails in this mission when it no longer manages to fulfill it, that is, when capitalism no longer manages to develop this productivity of labor.”  

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HOPE AND PAIN: REVOLT IN IRAN

It has been four month since the latest uprising in Iran began. The movement has waned for now, although there are still demonstrations and riots in the provinces of (Iranian) Kurdistan and Baluchestan. There still are some strikes going on as well, by petrochemical workers in Bandar Mahshahr in the south and others, but they are not directly linked to the earlier protests. Most are against the increasing practice of delaying the payment of wages for several months, which is an effective way to increase exploitation. It leaves the workers in dire straits and when they’re so lucky to get their back wages, inflation had bitten off a great chunk of it.

In the reports of pro-revolutionaries in Iran [dndf.org] , two reasons are given for the decline of the uprising: the ferocious repression and the extreme cold. The repression was indeed ruthless but in the beginning of the movement this seemed to make the masses only angrier, more determinant. It was toned down for a while, the government made some conciliatory promises, but when the movement had crested and lost strength, it became more ferocious and more effective.

That the cold played a role seems likely. Iran had not experienced such freezing weather in more than a decade.  

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PROFIT KILLS (Again)

The following is reposted from the blog “Notes from Underground”. Since it appeared, the death toll of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria has surpassed 33.000 and it is still mounting. The suffering is immense and the aid is slow in coming, in contrast to the bombs and artillery fire that have been raining down on this region for years now. Many if not most survivors have received no help whatsoever and can rely only on their mutual solidarity, building makeshift shelters in freezing temperatures. Many children are dying from hypothermia, the New York Times reported yesterday. In Syria, many die because Russian bombs have destroyed the hospitals in the territory that was controlled by the armies opposed to the Assad government. Up to 70 percent of Syria’s health care workers have fled the country, according to a report by BioMed Central. Meanwhile, hospitals in the government controlled territory lack medicine and equipment because of Western sanctions.

Girl in collapsed building in Syria, protecting her little brother

I’ve watched with horror and a growing anger the death toll in the aftermath of the 7.8 earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria just a few days ago. The count stands at over 12,000 with numbers expected to rise.  

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EUROPEAN NATIONALISM ? NO THANKS !

While many on the left of the political spectrum, including pseudo-radicals like Slavoj Zizek, are cheerleading the Nato-camp in the interimperialist slaughter in Ukraine, others see the US as the chief instigator of the war and claim that the violence could be avoided, that Europe and Russia could work it out if Europe would stop behaving so slavishly to the US, if it could regain its sovereignity. Patrick Lawrence is a representant of the latter current. His recent essay, “The Self-Destruction of Europe”, got quite some attention.

The trigger for that piece was the leaks in late September in Russia’s main gas pipelines to Germany, Nord Stream 1 and 2, which were almost certainly caused by an attack which, experts agree, could only have been carried out by a state actor.

Baltic sea, September 28

Lawrence rightly accuses the media of paying little attention to the attack but he himself devotes only a few paragraphs to it. Rather sloppy paragraphs, moreover. Sources are missing (e.g., about the unnamed German minister who allegedly said that his government knows who the perpetrators are but can’t disclose it) and the claim that the transport of Russian gas to Europe has stopped is false.  

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A DEBATE ON THE WAR IN UKRAINE

On September 10, Internationalist Perspective co-organized a public debate in Woodbine, a community hub in New York city, on the war in Ukraine, entitled “War and capitalist crisis”.

Since then, the war in Ukraine has escalated and many more ordinary people from Ukraine and Russia have died for worse than nothing. The Ukrainian forces, armed to the teeth by the US and its Nato-allies, have retaken some territory, Russia annexed provinces in eastern Ukraine, missiles of both sides sowed destruction on both sides, Putin ordered mass mobilization, provoking scores of protests, resistance and an exodus of many thousands refusing the role of canon fodder. All this and more has happened, but the fundamental question debated at Woodbine has remained the same: is this a local conflict in which the invaded nation deserves universal support? Or is it an interimperialist conflict, resulting from the global crisis of capitalism, in which the working class has nothing to gain and everything to loose?

Opposing perspectives follow from these assessments. In this debate, moderated by Ross Wolfe , three of the four speakers argued that this is a war between competing capitalists in which the working class is the victim and that the latter therefore can only defend its interests by refusing to fight each other and fight instead the ruling class in both countries.  

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