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SOLIDARITY AND THE PANDEMIC

This is a response to the article Neither Idiots nor Sheep by comrade Sander. In it, Sander explores the impact that the virus has had on the economy and criticizes those, who, particularly in the left, essentially deny the reality of the virus by joining the no-vaxx camp, often mingling with reactionary forces on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Sander brings up the uncomfortable point that although capitalism will seize upon any crisis for its own ends, it is in the interest of both the ruling class and the working class to overcome the medical emergency. It is in the interest of the capitalists to have a “healthy” enough working class in order that they can continue squeezing profits in an uninterrupted process. It is also of course in the interest of the working class to have medical care against an objective life-threat. In this strained situation the polarization that has occurred fueled by conspiracies, misinformation and rightwing agendas seems to run contrary to a basic need for solidarity in overcoming an adversity which is social in nature.

I can find no fault at all with this criticism but I am left wondering in what shape this solidarity will manifest?  

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AGAINST CAPITALIST WAR !

The following powerful text was written by the comrades of La Oveja Negra in Argentina.

No war is easy to understand, no “geopolitical” situation is simple to grasp. Even less so when it is assumed that there are no social classes in the world: there are only countries, leaders and political ideologies. Thus, there are those who support and justify the massacres and the horror of war. There are those who forget or want to make people forget that wars are fought for money. As comrades in Russia point out at this moment, behind the war there are only the interests of those who hold political, economic and military power: “For us, workers, pensioners, students, it brings only suffering, blood and death. The siege of peaceful cities, the bombings, the killing of people have no justification.” (leaflet of the Section of the International Workers’ Association of the Russian Region KRAS-AIT)

War makes explicit the horror of a society based on accumulation and profit. It is capitalist peace by other means. What is happening in Ukraine is added to the wars and invasions that unfortunately are nothing new (Palestine, Yemen, Syria) and to the millions of dead from hunger, misery, work, preventable diseases or suicide.  

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DON’T FIGHT FOR “YOUR” COUNTRY !

Everybody hates war. Most of all the people who send other people to die on the battlefield. They claim that they abhor it, but alas, they’re forced to it by the other side. The other side, which is encroaching on our traditional hunting grounds. The other side, which is invading a “sovereign” nation. We have no choice! We must defend ourselves… Which “we” are you a part of? Relentless propaganda on both sides pushes everyone to pick a side, to become an active participant or cheerleader in the war. Because the other side is truly horrific. And it always is.

The Russian army is accused of war crimes. A strange term, “war crime.” A redundant one, really, because war is by definition a crime, the greatest of all crimes. Whatever the goal, the means are always mass murder and destruction. There is no war without atrocious massacres. The term suggests that there are two ways of waging war: a civilized one and a criminal one. If ever there was a difference between the two, it was erased by advances in military technology. Since the early 20th century, the percentage of civilian casualties in wars has grown steadily. In the 19th century American Civil War, military personnel still accounted for more than 90% of total war deaths.  

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BARBARISM RESURFACES IN EUROPE (not that it ever went away)

The onslaught of the Russian military against the population of Ukraine is grotesque. Cruise and ballistic missiles and tanks are used indiscriminately against residential areas in cities and towns, and within days of its launch a million refugees and displaced people flooded the roads and railways; such numbers have not been seen in Europe since the end of the Second World War.

Internationalist Perspective will comment more as the situation unfolds. There are many aspects to this war but, for now, we want to stress a few key points.

The geo-political context for the current war is the rivalry between Russia and the Western powers in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite its assurances in the early 1990s, NATO moved east, absorbing several of the former Warsaw Pact countries and pushing right up against Russia’s borders. Over the decades since, Russia has been involved in several wars to prevent further fragmentation and to push back against Western encroachment: two Chechen wars, another in Georgia, and – following the replacement of pro-Russian by pro-Western leaders in Ukraine – the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas area (in 2014). Following the recent crushing of popular revolts and bourgeois faction fights in Belarus and Kazakhstan, Russian forces were in a position to increase the ongoing pressure on Ukraine.

  

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NEITHER IDIOTS NOR SHEEP

2021, the second year of the covid 19 pandemic but unfortunately not the last, is over. In 2020, rather curiously, the hottest social conflicts were not directly related to the pandemic, but to police brutality, racism, the climate. In 2021, it was different. How to deal with covid became the focus of countless quarrels and riots, demonstrations, fights and endless discussions. The divide between the pro- and anti-vaxxers is deep. What is unusual is that it cuts across all groups. All classes, races, religions, countries, ages and other categories are internally divided on the question of what the situation requires.

The anti-vaxxers are a minority but not a small minority. They have an influence on policy and also on the course of the disease itself. Some of them find the name “anti-vaxxer” inappropriate because they are not against vaccines per se but against the obligation to be vaccinated. It should be a personal choice. What this means in today’s context is that they demand the right to refuse to follow the measures to limit infection, or to decide for themselves which ones to follow or not. But no one has a purely personal relationship with an infectious disease. A pandemic is by definition a social danger that can only be overcome socially.  

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Interpretation or Change?

 “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”   – Marx, Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach

Of late, some members of IP have shown considerable interest in some works of academic Marxists.   I offer here some observations on academic versus revolutionary Marxism.

Not all academic Marxists are academics; Michael Heinrich, I understand, is not.   But he is certainly an academic Marxist, unmotivated by the need to change the world; this he declares bluntly since, for him, the revolutionary subject is a chimera.   For revolutionary Marxists this negativity is inconsistent with Marx’s view that to effect revolutionary change a revolutionary subject is needed and for the creation of a communist society that subject is the proletariat.   For Marx, the proletariat as revolutionary subject was an insight; for us, there is historical evidence of its actuality and potential as shown in the 1870 Paris Commune, in 1905 in Russia, in the 1917-1923 revolutionary wave that was expressed across the capitalist world.   For revolutionary Marxists, the revolutionary subject is not a conjecture.   Which does not make it easy to describe the link between the social movements of today and the appearance of the global social force of the proletariat tomorrow – particularly in view of the time elapsed since the last revolutionary wave.  

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“Hide and Bide”

or

Did China really rise without trace?

At the 2017 Chinese Communist Party congress, Xi Jinping openly broke with Deng Xiaoping’s 1990 maxim for the Chinese Communist Party: “Hide your strength and bide your time.”    According to Xi, China was now in a “period of strategic opportunity.”   This may have been a reference to Trump’s recent election to the US presidency and the UK Brexit decision weakening the European Union.   The term had been used by previous Chinese leaders at times when the US was particularly distracted by other matters.   At any rate, Xi said that it was “time for [China] to take centre stage in the world.”

The nearly five years since have seen overt Chinese and American antagonisms magnify considerably.   The situation is important for several reasons:  materially, because it constitutes a major component of the power framework within which humanity lives, and theoretically, because the development of China over recent decades gives us an opportunity to assess how well our analyses have dealt with the reality of capitalist economic development historically.

The comrades who left the ICC in 1985 and formed IP at the time defended the ICC’s economic analysis of capitalism, the key element of which was that the current epoch of decadent capitalism was putting a brake on the development of the productive forces.    

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Mac Intosh

Our comrade, Mac Intosh, died on 27 August. His sudden death has shocked us profoundly. He has been a mainstay of Internationalist Perspective since our founding in 1985; he will be sorely missed as a dear friend and comrade.

First and always, Mac Intosh was a militant, a revolutionary Marxist for whom participation in the class struggle was all; he made many valuable theoretical contributions to the political life of the left communist movement – all with the perspective of strengthening the participation of revolutionaries in the class struggle.

His early political experiences were shaped by the onset of the Cold War in his late teens. He was then animated by the growing demonstrations against the Vietnam War and, most importantly, by the upsurge in class struggle in Europe in 1968 and the years following. These intellectual and emotional leanings enabled him to denounce both of the major imperialisms in the Cold War and the national liberation movements that had grown in South America, Asia and Africa and their ideologues in Western Europe and North America. They also prepared him to greet enthusiastically the upsurge of class struggle among the industrial working class of Europe which heralded a new era of class conflict following the decades of reaction.  

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Mac Intosh

We are sad to inform our readers of the death of our comrade Mac Intosh on 27 August after a very short illness.

His unexpected death has shocked us.   We shall write more about him and intend to prepare an edited collection of his writings.

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Angry Workers Editorial on the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Below is an editorial published by our comrades in Angry Workers about the latest eruption of conflict between Israel and Palestine. While we obviously condemn the brutal occupation and the conditions imposed on the people in Gaza, we remain critical of all nationalist movements. As the article makes clear, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas organizations are no heroes and hostile to proletarian class interests.

We wholeheartedly agree with the Angry Workers’ conclusion that the only way out of this mess is through an internationalist convergence of working class struggles.

José

Over the last two weeks, the Israeli state has launched devastating aerial attacks on Gaza, and Hamas have fired over 3,000 rockets towards Israel. The dead now number 13 from Israel (including 1 child and two migrant workers from Thailand) and 248 in the Palestinian territory (including 66 children) with a further 1,900 wounded. Everywhere, the bourgeoisie and middle classes, along with their representatives in the press and state, have wept over the mounting corpses in the hopes that their crocodile tears will wash away the evidence of their complicity in this barbarism. It is crucial that the working class, both in the Middle East and the world over, sees through this pantomime.  

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