Standing on Earth, not rapt above the Pole,
More safe I Sing with mortal voice, unchang’d
Readers will have noticed that the SU website has not been updated recently.
As many of you know, my teenage son was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia last July. I am pleased to say that he is currently in remission following brilliant treatment from the NHS. However, the whole process was and continues to be exhausting, and he still needs daily care as he has not yet returned to school. This is why I have had less time for politics generally and less time for the website in particular.
God willing, the situation will continue to improve, and I have not discontinued my interest in the SU website, I just need a rest. I will continue to post here but less frequently, and I have a couple of projects in hand that should result in articles on famine in Mao’s China, and a bibliographic essay on the history of what was actually existing socialism in East Germany.
As an oblique reference to International Womens’ Day, let us celebrate the brave stand taken by Rep Tulsi Gabbard, the Congresswoman for the 2nd Hawai’ian Congressional District, who recently resigned as Vice Chair of the Democratic Party’s National committee (DNC) to endorse Bernie Sanders
Gabbard is an impressive politician, originally born in American Samoa, and the first Hindu ever in Congress. She is currently one of two serving Congresswomen who are combat veterans, having volunteered for two tours in Iraq, and she is now a major in the Hawai’ian National Guard.
Gabbard has taken a very strong stand in opposition to Obama’s policy of seeking regime change in Syria, and she is supportive of Russia’s military action in Syria in aid of the sovereign government in Damascus.
Rather unusually for an elected American politician, Gabbard also links to an article from Peoples’ World from her website, which is broadly equivalent to the Morning Star here in the UK.
Gabbard has a sophisticated understanding of the moral contract with the military, where young working class people are put in harm’s way by the decisions of politicians, not only for the interests of national defence, but also due to illegitimate objectives of regime change and interventionist wars. Yet those same politicians also fail to deliver jobs, care and security for veterans of those wars.
The timing of the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU – June 23rd – could not be better for those on the right and far right of the country’s political spectrum. With a refugee crisis of biblical proportions lapping up on Europe’s shores, and with the collapse of the political centre ground across the West in the wake of the enduring impact of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, the right has suddenly found itself vying with the left to occupy the political space that has opened up as a result.
This in itself is no bad thing, for just as the reactionary ideas and politics of Donald Trump in the US and Nigel Farage in the UK have gained traction in recent times, so has the socialist and progressive politics and ideas of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn in both countries. However in the context of a referendum on Britain’s continuing membership of the EU, in which we are witnessing an egregious conjunction of left and right, there are serious grounds for alarm.
There is no viable left wing, socialist, or progressive case for Britain leaving the EU – and certainly not in the current political and economic climate. What there is in truth is a campaign for exit (Brexit) that is dominated by the ugly far right politics of anti immigration, xenophobia, and British nationalism. That section of the left that is also campaigning for Britain exit from the EU, basing their arguments on the anti-democratic nature of its institutions and its neoliberal economic orientation, not to mention increasing militarization, is merely allowing itself to be recruited as unwitting footsoldiers by right and far right in what qualifies as a catastrophic collapse of judgment, if not principle.
Jean Monnet’s vision of European unity
The EU started life as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951, which later became the European Economic Community (EEC), established by the Treaty of Rome in 1958. The original EEC was made up of West Germany, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Italy in a common market and customs union. It was the brainchild of French diplomat and political economist, Jean Monnet, whose vision of European unity was born of the experience of two devastating European wars by the middle of the twentieth century, and the desire to avoid another by fomenting closer economic cooperation, ties, and integration across the continent between former belligerent states, in particular France and West Germany. “There will be no peace in Europe if the States rebuild themselves on the basis of national sovereignty,” the Frenchman said, “with its implications of prestige politics and economic protection.”
His idea was that member states would cede a little national sovereignty in exchange for peace, and continue to do so until a fully fledged European Union came into being.
Today’s EU worships at the altar of neoliberalism
In 2016 Monnet’s dream is a reality in the form of a European Union of 28 member states with a combined population of 500 million people. For obvious reasons, however, Monnet’s dream for many of those people across the EU has been a nightmare. For not only is the EU an economic behemoth, the largest single market in the world, it is one dominated by the needs, interests, and prerogatives of finance capital, reflected in political institutions underpinned by a constitution, the Treaty of Lisbon, which legislates that its member states worship at the altar of neoliberalism.
We witnessed the grievous consequences of this neoliberal hegemony during the Greek crisis of 2015, when the so-called Troika – the IMF, European Central Bank, and the European Commission – forced harsh austerity measures onto the Greek economy and people, while callously dismissing the popular democratic mandate of its government, under Syriza’s Alexis Tsipras, to pursue an investment led alternative in order to navigate the country out of the economic depression it was suffering
Calls from the far left and right within Greece for the country’s exit from the EU rather than continue to be subjected to what the country’s former finance minister and economist, Yanis Varoufakis, described as “economic waterboarding”, were not shared by the vast majority of Greeks, who understood that Greece’s specific economic circumstances meant that going it alone would be as bad, and perhaps worse, than the austerity medicine prescribed by the Troika.
The awful events in Greece in 2015 confirmed the extent to which neoliberalism is incompatible with national sovereignty. However this incompatibility is not merely a product of the EU. It is also a factor across the entire Western world, with the exception of the United States for the historical and geopolitical reasons set out by Varoufakis’ in his book, The Global Minotaur (Zed, 2015). Most of all it emphasized the need for a pan-European anti austerity movement of sufficient size and strength to mount a serious challenge to the status quo. That one did not and still does not exist does not mean that anti-austerity as counter hegemonic current within Europe is dead, however. In this regard the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party last summer by a landslide on an anti austerity platform, is grounds for optimism.
Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist vision and public ownership
Corbyn’s socialist ideas and vision for Britain has garnered huge support across the country, attracting record numbers of new Labour Party members with his pledge to take back the nation’s railway transport system into public ownership, along with the so-called ‘Big Six’ energy companies. Corbyn is also leading Labour’s campaign for Britain to remain in the EU come the referendum in June.
Here, on the left, opponents of Corbyn’s position claim that public ownership is illegal under current EU legislation. But they’re wrong, at least according Article 345 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the EU of 1958, which states: ‘The Treaties shall in no way prejudice the rules in Member States governing the system of property ownership.’
This legislation remains extant and refutes the claim that existing EU legislation prohibits the kind of nationalization, or public ownership, being advocated by Jeremy Corbyn. But even if it did prohibit it, are we seriously suggesting that in the event that Corbyn gets elected prime minister on a manifesto that includes public ownership that he would not be able to implement it? Nonsense. If David Cameron can negotiate ‘special status’ for Britain within the EU in areas of welfare benefits and migration, then so can Corbyn on taking key industries and services into public ownership. Britain remains a major economy, not just within Europe but globally, and with that economic status comes negotiating power.
But things won’t have to go that far given that all across the EU state or public ownership within the transport and energy sectors is currently a fact of life.
The EU’s role as US gendarme and human rights
Another issue of concern when it comes to the EU has been its role as a geopolitical and economic gendarme in service to Washington, specifically in recent times with regard to the crisis in Ukraine involving Russia, the conflict in Syria, and the Iranian crisis. In this regard the symbiosis between the EU and NATO is of undoubted concern, particularly with regard to the accession states of Eastern Europe and how this has raised tensions with Moscow, leading directory to the conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Yet given the longstanding nature of the so-called ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US, and the way in which both Germany and France have also established closer ties across the Atlantic over the past decade and more, neither an EU independent of Britain or a Britain independent of the EU would alter the close relationship between either and Washington. If anything, in the event of Brexit, the British political and security establishment would place even more emphasis on its partnership with the United States in order to compensate. As for the eastwards expansion of the EU, there is no reason to presume that this process would cease either.
Another reason for opposing Brexit is the consequences it would have for Britain’s continuing membership of European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) which enforces its writ across Europe. Though separate from the EU, the ECHR has been thrown in as part of the toxic brew cooked up by Tory Europsceptics and their far right fellow travellers, led by UKIP’s Nigel Farage. Brexit would almost certainly lead to Britain’s withdrawal and, with it, the removal of a vital layer of human rights legislation for those who find themselves at the sharp end of British justice. This particularly applies to asylum seekers and others facing deportation to countries where they are in danger of being tortured or worse.
For all these reasons and more – workers’ rights and consumer protection, etc. – there is no strong progressive case for Britain leaving the EU, despite its many and manifest flaws. And certainly not when the beneficiaries should it come to pass will be the ugly forces of reaction and nationalism.
Nationalism not socialism is the driver of the campaign for Britain’s exit from the EU, and If successful it will feed a regressive national consciousness at the expense of its class counterpart.
by Gavin Rae
As the news spread around the world about the discovery of new documents, concerning Lech Wałęsa’s alleged collaboration with the Communist authorities, the man himself was addressing the new right-wing parliament in Venezuela. This former trade union leader and avowed champion of democracy and human rights, was supporting the return of the right-wing in Venezuela. He then flew to Miami, to meet Cuban oppositionists and was once again received as a hero. Wałęsa was in his element – the heir of Reagan; the great anti-Communist who had helped to bring down the Soviet Union. Yet at home he was once again being accused of being a Communist agent and the betrayer of the Solidarity movement. Still others defended him as a hero of the nation who had brought freedom and sovereignty to the country. These conflicting narratives have little to do with the actual truth of Wałęsa’s past, but reflect the ongoing conflicts within the Polish elites and the present state of Polish capitalism.
Capitalism has always emerged out of destruction, swindle and usually violence. The Highland clearances; the destruction of indigenous populations; the expropriation of the peasants’ land. In order for capitalism to grow, it not only needs an initial accumulation of capital but also the creation of a particular social relation. Labourers must be separated from their own means of production and subsistence, whether this be their land or their workshop. Once achieved two groups of commodity holders then come into direct contact with one another. Firstly, are the owners of money, the means of production and subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values they possess by buying other people’s labour power. Secondly, are the class of labourers themselves, who must survive primarily by selling their labour on the market. And once achieved, the whole sophisticated machinery of capitalism is set in motion, as it expands into ever wider circles of economic and social life, bringing greater sections of society into this commodity relation.
As capitalism emerged from the womb of ‘really existing socialism’, so a new process of capital accumulation had to occur. This time capital confronted an industrialised economy, with its class of organised labourers. Unlike during the transition from Feudalism, work was already socialised and organised in large factories or offices. However, labour did not exist as a commodity that was freely exchanged on the market. The state’s monopoly control over production and the policy of full-employment, meant that the vast majority of work and economic life was organised outside of market relations.
And in order for the new to flourish, the old had to be destroyed. Throughout Eastern Europe a programme of rapid privatisation and liberalisation was undertaken, producing an economic collapse of unprecedented proportions and a simultaneous increase in poverty and social destitution for millions of people. Simultaneously, private capital began to circulate and expand, creating new found wealth and riches. Often oligarchs grabbed the spoils that were made available, particularly in the countries of the ex-USSR, where the economic collapse was most severe. There was nothing fair or honest in all of this. Corruption, political connections and sometimes brute strength determined who were the winners in this competitive game of expropriation.
Poland did not escape this course of events, although it was less severe than in most other Eastern European countries. The economic collapse was the shortest in the region (the economy ‘only’ shrank by around a quarter between 1989 and 1992) and double digit unemployment, high poverty and inequalities were seen as an inevitable stage of a painful transformation. Poland’s own creative destruction involved a deep deindustrialisation, with at least two-thirds of the country’s medium and large industrial enterprises collapsing, leading to around 2 million people losing their jobs. This provided the room for international capital to move in and quickly monopolise large areas of the economy. Although this was not an oligarchical capitalism similar to that further east, a new group of the rich and wealthy consolidated itself in the country. And once again there was nothing fair in this. It was often those with the strongest political connections, both within the former Communist and Solidarity elites, that prospered the most.
The advantage for the economic elite in the developed capitalist world is that its theft has long ago been hidden and forgotten. Its original accumulation of wealth submerged in the fog of time as it has passed through the generations. In the ‘post-Communist’ world it is laid bare and continues to be contested. It is this contestation, within the elite, that underlies the latest wranglings over the historical legacy of the former Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa. Was this the leader of a trade union who led the strikes in that Gdańsk shipyards, that evolved into a social movement of 10 million people and then negotiated the peaceful fall of Communism in Poland, leading to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union itself? Or rather was he a Communist agent, who took money from the authorities and collaborated with the government in order to sustain the system long enough so that a section of its leaders (in collaboration with the Solidarity elite) could line their pockets once the green shoots of capitalism began to emerge?
Both of these versions of history are accumulated myths, and of the most primitive kind.
The first is now perpetuated by a liberal elite, connected to international capital, who see their privileged position as being under threat. They forget the fact that at its height Solidarity was a trade union movement, which demanded a real socialisation and democratisation of ‘really existing socialism’ and for the creation of a Self-Managed Republic. They close their eyes to the betrayal of this movement by the Solidarity elite and at how the intelligentsia forgot about its alliance with the working class. They ignore how the first Solidarity government and its President Lech Wałęsa, ushered in the first set of neo-liberal reforms in Eastern Europe, against the agreements of the Round Table negotiations that paved the way for the transition of power. Furthermore, they put out of their minds how they themselves spent much of the 1990s disparaging Lech Wałesa. He was a good opposition leader and someone who could lead a strike they said; but ultimately an uncultured man and a simple electrician who failed to even master decent Polish (Nie chcem ale muszem).
The second version of history is now gathering pace, under the government of the Law and Justice Party. Wałęsa: the agent and collaborator. The person who worked for the secret services in the 1970s, delivering them information in return for cash. The Solidarity leader who betrayed his movement by forming an alliance with the former Communist leaders to construct a new corrupt elite. The President who opposed a process of lustration* against the Communist elite. This version of history is repeated most loudly by those who fell out with Wałęsa in the early 1990s, many of which are prominent members of the present government. They blame all the ills of capitalism in Poland on what they see as this unfair usurping of power by a corrupt elite. It assumes that if this elite were to be removed, so capitalism could press the reset button. A new fairer and normal capitalist economy would then at last be able to develop.
This is a struggle between two sections of the elite, each accusing the other of the same thing. For the liberal elite, the PiS government is a throwback to the past; a party that replicates the centralised and undemocratic practices of the previous system; that offers populist solutions whilst undermining the market economy. Meanwhile, the conservative right claim they want to redress the injustices of the past, and complete the ‘Solidarity Revolution’, through a fresh process of lustration and ‘decommunisation’. Both of these groups continue to compete for the historical legacy of Solidarity and claim the mantle of the real anti-Communists.
The course of growth through destroying the productive elements of the previous economic system has now exhausted itself. Whilst the liberal intellectuals have spoken of a period of unprecedented growth and prosperity, around 2 million people have chosen to chance their luck abroad. This liberal elite’s former foes within the Solidarity movement are now seizing the day, and capitalising on social dissatisfaction to carry out its own purge at the top, that seeps down to the bottom. And as Poland sits in the middle of a disintegrating Europe, in a global economic system possibly facing a new financial crisis, in a world ridden with wars and uncertainty; so the government averts its population’s eyes to these new show trials in the media. Collaborators, files, agents, code names….
The timing of the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU could not be better for those on the right and far right of the political spectrum. In the wake of a refugee crisis, which has seen public sympathy for the plight of the huge numbers of people fleeing conflict and chaos in the Middle East and North Africa turn first to apathy and now to something approaching hostility in many quarters, combined with the collapse of the centre ground across Europe and the US, which I explore in detail here, the prospects of Brexit coming to pass are greater now than they have ever been.
This collapse of the centre ground has not only benefited the right, of course. In the US, while the odious Donald Trump looks a shoe-in for the Republican Party nomination while spouting the kind of rhetoric which in a civilised society would seen him institionalised rather than lauded as a future president, Bernie Sanders has also attracted huge support, evidence that socialism and socialist ideas are no longer taboo in the land of the free. Sanders, in fact, has lit up the Democratic Party primaries with a camopaign that has seen the 74 year old democratic socialist senator from Vermont trounce Hillary Clinton in debate after debate.
But back to the UK and the EU referendum, where despite the attempt by a section of the left to assert that Brexit would make the prospect of implementing progressive and socialist ideas easier – specifically when it comes to taking key industries and services into public ownership – the reality is that the beneficiaries of Brexit would be the right and far right. The politics driving Brexit are the ugly politics of anti immigration, xenophobia, and British nationalism. If successful it would propel the vile reactionary views and worldview of people like Nigel Farage into the heart of the establishment, ensuring that already under pressure minority communities would find themselves placed under even more pressure.
The EU and its insitutions merely reflect the economic and political hegemony of neoliberalism. They are a transmission belt delivering policies which reflect this hegemony, which will remain a fact of life the day after Brexit. This is why those on the left who are intent on campaiging for a No vote on June 23 are playing into the hands of Nigel Farage and UKIP, allowing themselves to be recruited as unwitting footsoldiers for the far right.
There is also the Corbyn factor to consider. At a time when Labour under his leadership is garnering such huge support across the country, and with the Tories in complete disarray over the EU, for anyone on the left to oppose Corbyn over the EU now is tantamount to sectarianism of the worst kind.
There is no viable socialist or progressive case for Britain’s exit from the EU in the present political climate. There is only surrender to right wing nostrums on immigration, multiculturalism, and something called British values.
In Ankara and Riyadh a decent night’s sleep must be hard to come by nowadays, what with the prospects of the Sunni state they’d envisaged being established across a huge swathe of Syria slipping away in the face of an offensive by Syrian government forces that is sweeping all before it north of Aleppo, threatening to completely sever supply lines from Turkey to opposition forces in and around the city, and all but ensuring that its liberation is now a question of when not if.
The success being enjoyed by government forces and its allies on the ground is a testament to their remarkable morale and tenacity despite the battering they have endured over five years of unremitting conflict. Key to this reinvigoration and success in routing opposition forces – forces which only a few months ago were in the ascendancy – has of course Russian air, communications, and logistical support. Moscow’s decision to intervene at the end of September last year may have been pregnant with risk, but so far it has been validated, and perhaps even beyond initial expectations.
Moscow not Washington is calling the shots in the region now, announcing the birth of a multipolar world and marking an astonishing recovery given the parlous state of Russia throughout the 1990s as it struggled to recover from the demise of the Soviet Union. No sooner was the hammer and sickle removed from atop the Kremlin than a procession of crazed free marketeers descended from the United States, and elsewhere in the West, to impose neoliberal nostrums in return for an IMF loan that was necessary in order to avert complete economic collapse. The record shows that rather than this collapse being averted it was accelerated by the structural adjustment reforms implemented by Yeltsin and other Russian converts to the new religion.
In Washington at the time ‘end of history’ triumphalism reigned as oh how they laughed. Well, they’re not laughing now.
Regardless, at this stage in the Syrian conflict neither the Russians nor anybody else with a vested interest in the country’s survival as a non-sectarian state will be prepared to predict victory. Not with the noises coming out of Ankara and Riyadh over the possibility of both countries sending in ground troops.
Though they claim that any such troop deployment would be carried out with the objective of confronting ISIS, only those of a gullible disposition who could possibly believe it. In truth any such intervention would carry with it the primary goal of regime change in Damascus, staving off the complete collapse of opposition forces in and around Aleppo, with Turkey harbouring the additional objective of crushing the Kurdish YPG forces that have been enjoying inordinate success against both ISIS in the north east and rebel forces further west as part of the general tightening of the noose around the city.
Saudi aircraft deploying to Incirlik airbase in Turkey, from where the US has been flying sorties over Syria in recent months, is a significant development, one that indicates the extent of panic in Riyadh at the way the conflict has turned against them since this latest offensive by the Syrian Arab Army and its allies began.
The days when an American president could pick up the phone to Washington’s allies in the Middle East and have his bidding done have passed. The impotence of the Obama administration in the face of these developments has arrived as the culmination of a decade and half of disastrous overreach in Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving US power and credibility severely weakened. Even if the President wished to follow a vigorous and assertive policy towards the region and the conflict in Syria, the cost not just in money but political and public support at home negates it as a serious proposition. In Washington what was once known as the Vietnam Syndrome is now the Iraq Syndrome.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, is acting safe in the knowledge that his popularity and support at home remains rock-solid, with a consistent approval rating of around 80 percent making him the envy his Western counterparts. It probably won’t be until historians a generation from now look at this period and crisis, doing so with the benefit of hindsight and distance, that Putin’s political, tactical, and leadership nous will be properly appreciated. The same goes for his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who’s reduced his US counterpart John Kerry to the role of a hapless apprentice looking on in awe at the finished article.
Proof of this comes with the outcome of the most recent talks on the conflict in Munich. Russia, in the person of Lavrov, arrived with its air campaign proceeding at full tilt, and left again having reached an agreement that it should continue at full tilt. The speed with which the narrative promulgated by the US and its allies has unravelled as a consequence of Russia’s presence is measured in the way they cling on to the fiction of ‘moderate rebels’. The most grievous example involved British Prime Minister David Cameron during last year’s Commons debate on British participation in the conflict. His claim there were 70,000 of these moderates in Syria, just waiting to install a nice and cuddly liberal democracy in Damascus the morning after Assad is forced out, met with howls of laughter everywhere apart from Syria, where Cameron’s ‘moderates’ have turned a large swathe of the country into a living hell.
It bears emphasising: the only moderates fighting in Syria are the troops of the Syrian Arab Army, made up of Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Druze and Christians. They and their allies, which include the Kurds of the YPG, comprise the forces of non-sectarianism in the country and the region, engaged in a pitiless conflict against the most reactionary and retrograde current of extremism the world has seen since Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were rampaging across Cambodia.
For Saudi Arabia and Turkey talking tough is one thing, backing it up is a quite another. The world already got the measure of Erdogan after a Turkish jet shot down a Russian bomber a few months ago. The Turkish president went scurrying straight to his NATO allies requesting that Article 5 of its treaty, committing its members to the collective defence of each when under threat, be invoked. His request was denied by Obama and, no wonder, given he’s had reason to doubt Erdogan’s credentials as an ally since. Turkey’s attempt to paint the Kurds of the YPG as a terrorist threat to rank with ISIS is not going down well in Washington, where the Kurds are rightly viewed as an invaluable ground component of the anti-ISIS struggle and have been receiving US and Russian air support with this in mind.
With Russia’s military presence in and around Syria entrenched, and with the US increasingly disenchanted with Erdogan’s Janus-faced role in the conflict in Syria, not to mention the bellicosity of its Saudi client over Iran and a human rights record that makes every utterance in support for the kingdom a howl of hypocrisy, we are at the absolute tipping point when it comes not only to Syria’s future but the future of the region. The stakes involved leave no doubt that the mounting threat of a Saudi-led invasion of Syria speeds the hour when Iran and Russia commit their own ground troops in significant number.
The second act of this conflict draws to a close. The third and final act is about to begin.
