Dear Editors – Is there a ‘Right of Nations to Self-determination’? (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

An organisation called Vote Palestine 2026 asked candidates in last month’s local elections to sign a pledge committing them, if elected to, among other things, ‘uphold the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people’. One of our candidates replied as below; to which another candidate replied. Here is the exchange published in the comment section of the Brixton Buzz.

Dear Vote Palestine 2026,

Thank you for your email. I must respectfully decline to sign.

As an anti-Zionist Jew and socialist standing in Brixton North, I share your horror at the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. But I cannot endorse a pledge framed around national self-determination.

The nation state, whether Israeli or Palestinian, is a prison house of nationalities. It tells workers to wave flags and forget they have no motherland to defend. Israeli and Palestinian workers alike are exploited by the same global system of wage labour and capital.

National liberation is a trap. A new state means new masters under a new flag, while wage labour, property rights, and class rule stay intact. Council divestment treats symptoms, not the disease.

My goal is not another state but the abolition of the state itself: a classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless world community where people cooperate freely. Real self-determination means workers recognising their shared enemy across all borders.

I stand with working people everywhere. I cannot sign a pledge that reinforces the nationalism keeping them divided.

Yours sincerely,

Anya Krycek

Socialist Party Candidate for Brixton North, Lambeth

Reply from Eduardo Salgado:

I think historically, things happen in stages. According to Marxism-Leninism (ML), national liberation often must precede, or be strategically aligned with, workers’ liberation because imperialism makes national independence a necessary first step to create the conditions for a successful socialist revolution. Lenin viewed the national struggle in colonized or oppressed countries as a key component of the overall world socialist revolution. The core reasoning is that national liberation acts as a necessary step to ‘clear the decks’ for direct class struggle, as it removes the foreign oppressor and allows the working class to battle its local bourgeoisie. Lenin says on this issue:

• Support the national liberation struggle against imperialism unconditionally.
• Maintain independent working-class organization and leadership within that movement.
• Use the liberation struggle to raise demands for socialist transformation (land reform, workers’ rights).

Rejoinder from our candidate:

The stageist model, national liberation as a necessary prelude to socialist transformation, is not merely strategically mistaken but theoretically incompatible with the abolition of capitalism. The historical record of national liberation movements demonstrates a consistent pattern: the ‘stage’ of national liberation does not clear the decks for proletarian revolution it institutionalizes a new form of capitalist state. The foreign colonizer is replaced by a national bourgeoisie that maintains wage labour, commodity production, and extraction. The nation is not a proto political reality waiting to be liberated, but a category produced by capital itself a way of organising populations into manageable units. To prioritise national liberation is to reinforce the very abstractions; nation, citizenship, the state that capital requires to function.

‘The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got’, from The Communist Manifesto (1848).

The Socialist Party position is that the proletariat has no stake in which bourgeoisie administers its exploitation. Anti-imperialism that stops at the nation state leaves exploitation intact. The state form itself prevents the direct social relations that would constitute a break with capital. Socialism cannot proceed through stages it must begin immediately in the content of struggle, as the practical activity of breaking with wage labour, money, and the state. National liberation changes the flag and people in government, it does not interrupt the reproduction of capital. To make it a ‘necessary step’ is to permanently defer the only act that could end exploitation: the immediate social transformation of society by and for the working class. We don’t seek the people’s commodity production we seek abolition of the proletariat.

Editors’ note:

Questioned on ITV on election day, Green Party leader Zack Polanski was reported as saying that ‘no country has a right to exist’. His critics saw this as a reference to Israel, but it would equally apply to Palestine, indeed to Britain and every other state. States may exist but have no ‘right’ to; which rather undermines the Vote Palestine pledge that many of his party’s candidates signed up to.

Blogger's Note:

A version of this correspondence was previously published on the blog back in May of this year.

Editorial: New year, same shit . . . (2026)

Editorial from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year, 2025, could only be considered a success story for capitalism in the sense that the world didn’t end in total destruction. For many though, it was a disaster. Think Gaza, where survivors starve among the ruins after a genocidal slaughter that will only cause further wars. No wonder states don’t want to pay to rebuild Gaza, just to see it levelled again. Think Darfur and South Sudan, with massacres committed by the Rapid Support Force using weapons purchased by the United Arab Emirates from western states including the UK, and allegedly donated as part of an arms-for-gold deal. The gold mines of Darfur have been a ghastly resource curse. The locals have paid with their lives so that capitalist deals get done.

Two corrupt power blocs on the European landmass continued putting human beings into the meat grinder of war, while the very people elected or appointed to serve the Ukrainian people instead trousered over a hundred million dollars intended to protect energy infrastructure and keep the winter lights on. This is what nationalism gets you. Workers die in trenches while the bosses find ways to get rich out of it.

Many other wars got less media coverage, including the ongoing multi-sided slaughter in Myanmar, a real-world example of the Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’. When a big earthquake struck the country in March, killing around 5,000 people, some rebel groups called for a ceasefire as they sent aid workers into affected areas. The military junta, according to reports, had no such humanitarian concerns and instead bombed and strafed the aid workers.

Despite glimmers of hopeful news as Generation Z protesters overthrew a brutal regime in Nepal, world politics in 2025 seemed to be all about tearing up of the rules-based order, led with orgiastic zeal by Donald Trump and his coterie of talentless sycophants. Seeing the world’s politicians cravenly kissing this man’s feet in the hope of favours was stomach-turning, and it didn’t work anyway. The far-right in almost every country has been given a huge boost as this deluded Caligula lays waste to every human principle of fairness and decency, merit and reason, equality and environmental safety. No capitalist politician is ever going to ‘fix’ capitalism, but some seem determined to make it worse. The name of Trump may come to be spat on by posterity as a loathsome icon of narcissism, ‘grab ’em by the pussy’ sexism, and kleptocratic greed. He’s already being sued over his stupid ballroom, so maybe that will be demolished too.

But in a way Trump has done the world a favour, by ripping off the civilised veneer and showing everyone what capitalism really is, instead of what it pretends to be. It was never a rules-based order. It’s always been ‘might equals right’ and screw the little guy.

Meanwhile over in the UK, the fractured left try once again to unite around a vague wish-list of reforms aimed at making capitalism just a tiny bit less awful. What they should be doing is calling for the end of capitalism, because that’s the only thing that will work. Instead they clamber back on the carousel horse of reformism to go round one more time, learning nothing, changing nothing, in a perpetual triumph of hope over experience. This year, if you can find a way, help us get the message across: end capitalism, before it ends us.

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In spite of momentous historical changes, the fundamental patterns of inequality reemerge across the centuries with remarkable consistency, the patterns of extreme wealth concentration, class immobility, surplus value extraction, special privilege, and ideological systems capable of masking the contradictions. This suite of social traits seems almost constant. 

(CounterPunch)

Write, but do not offend. Speak and comment, but do not divide. Observe cruelties, barbarities and murder, yet refrain from having an opinion. This is the constipating, stifling regime being put in place via suggested codes of conduct for organisers of writer events in Australia. The object of this intellectual veiling: discussing the exterminating war in Gaza. Across the country, the straitjacket of forced social harmony is being applied. 

(Dissident Voice)

Vietnam raises over $13 million for Cuba in historic charity drive. 

(Vietnam Net)

Asked whether Gazans would be allowed to leave, Al-Hayek was unequivocal. “The Palestinian people do not want to leave Gaza,” he told The Media Line. “We repeat each time: We will remain in Gaza until Judgment Day. Here we were born, and here we shall die.” 

(The Media Line)

Hotel accommodation benefits large contractors like Clearsprings, Serco and Mears, while Britannia Hotels made over £150 million in profit since it started to accommodate asylum seekers in 2014. Such contracts even brought the founder of Clearsprings to the Sunday Times Rich List. This company provides housing services to the Home Office that were associated with the highest mortality rate among resident asylum seekers between 2020 and 2023. 

(Counterfire)

Ah, those pro-lifers. Walking, talking, shooting oxymorons. You can tell the pro-life extremists. They’re the ones who want their enemies – the women and men who support a woman’s sovereignty over her own body – dead by any means at their command. Hard to get more pro-life than that. Mike Lee, the brilliant Republican US Senator from Utah, went on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, and posted about the fatal shooting of Democratic politicians in Minnesota, that, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way”. 

(CounterPunch)

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Wednesday that the United States has seized nearly US$700 million in assets connected to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Confiscated property includes multiple luxury homes in Florida, a mansion in the Dominican Republic, two private jets, a horse farm, nine vehicles, luxury yachts, jewelry, watches, and cash. 

(Dominican Today)

This is the humanist vision of Alien: Earth, which recognizes our distinctiveness is not in the power of our minds or the machines that we produce. Rather, it is found in humanity’s ability to transform itself, to create and recreate its own internal nature for new conditions, including those yet to come. In doing so, the show goes beyond mere anti-corporate sentiment and instead asks if we can create a new purpose for ourselves, unburdened by the demons of our past and the demons that our future might hold.

(Jacobin)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Palestine: the failure of Jewish nationalism (2025)

From the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

What’s happening in Gaza and Palestine today shows the failure of the Zionist project, conceived of towards the end of the 19th century, to set up a separate state for Jews.

The Zionists preached that what Jews, including Jewish workers, should do is not simply integrate into the states in which they found themselves but agitate for a separate Jewish state — somewhere, anywhere. Uganda and Madagascar were considered at one point. In the end, on religious and ancient historical grounds, the Zionists decided that this should be Palestine, then a province of the Ottoman Empire.

Arguably, it was a crazy project from the start. To settle people from Europe in another part of the world, where the people and their rulers were unlikely to accept this, was a recipe for trouble. But at the time — the end of the 19th century — this would not have seemed so crazy, as it was common practice for European states in a position to do so — Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and belatedly Italy and Germany — to settle Europeans in various other parts of the world, mainly Africa, on land traditionally occupied by locals.

The idea of a separate state, to be a safe home for Jews, seemed particularly attractive after the experience in WW2. Israel was to be that safe home. But it could never be. Israel was established as a recognised separate state in 1948 but was opposed by the local rulers who immediately went to war to try to prevent it but lost, resulting in hundreds of thousands of the local population being expelled from where they lived.

Ever since, Israel has sought ‘secure frontiers’. After winning the Six-Day War In 1967, again initiated by the rulers of surrounding states, Israel annexed the Golan Heights from Syria and East Jerusalem from Jordan and occupied the rest of Palestine including Gaza and also Sinai. They later withdrew from Sinai but kept ‘security control’ of the rest, creating a sort of Greater Israel. Following the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria last December Israel has occupied more of that country.

The Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023 confirmed that Israel was not in fact a safe place for Jews. And Israel’s response — not an eye for an eye, but 40 eyes for one eye and rising — has made things more insecure, through the growth of anti-semitism, for those Jews who choose not to settle in Israel (most Jews in fact).

So, in terms of providing a safe home for Jews, Zionism has been a complete failure. Jews living outside Israel (most of these are in the United States, as many in fact as are in Israel) are in a much safer position.

Israel may well reconquer Gaza but history suggests that in the long term its present government’s policy of trying to hold down a hostile population larger than the number of Jews living there cannot succeed. It is bound to fail, just as apartheid did in South Africa.

What this shows is that socialists were correct in opposing from the start Zionism and its project. Socialism, not a separate Jewish state, was the solution to problems Jewish workers faced. In the meantime, Jewish workers should integrate into the workers’ movement in the state where they lived. Many did — more in fact than went to live in Israel — and took part not just in the workers’ movement but also in politics generally. Some of the key figures involved in current discussions and decisions about the Gaza war chose this sensible path. For instance, Trump’s special envoy Witkoff, the French President Macron, and Ukraine President Zelensky.

Most of the Leninist left enthusiastically support armed action to abolish the state of Israel. That would just be to continue the senseless cycle of massacres and counter-massacres that have gone on since the first Jews arrived from Europe. Today Israel is where 70 to 80 percent of the Jews living there were actually born. More than half have no family connection with Europe but rather with the Middle East and North Africa, so can hardly be called colonists. It is now just another state, which like all states needs to be captured by the working class to establish socialism and then abolished along with all states, not singled out for abolition under capitalism while all other states remain.

Most of those on the marches — and probably of those expressing support for the banned Palestine Action group — will basically just want an end to the daily killing and destruction in Gaza and are understandably frustrated that nothing is being done about it. For them, ‘free Palestine’ will mean simply that the population there and in the West Bank should be free from the political oppression by the Israeli state that it undoubtedly is suffering. Naturally those oppressed want it to end and socialists obviously sympathise with this. But how to bring it to an end?

Most governments say they favour the setting up of a separate Palestine state alongside Israel. That would certainly end political oppression by the Israeli state for the new state’s subjects but, a relief as that would be, it would not end capitalist exploitation; from that point of view, it would just be another capitalist state and a different ruling class.

In any event, a two-state solution doesn’t seem practicable in present circumstances as, to work, it would require a change of attitude by the rulers — and indeed of most of the Jewish population — of Israel. That is not impossible, but the effort required to bring this about would be better employed in convincing all sections of the working class living in the historic territory of Palestine that they have a common interest in ending their exploitation by uniting to bring capitalism to an end. Even within capitalism they have an interest in there being political democracy, which includes the equal treatment of all the subjects of a state (and indeed of non-citizens living there too).

In the end, the only effective and lasting way out is going to be the ‘no state’ solution, the abolition of capitalism on a world scale and the establishment of a classless, stateless world community based on the common ownership and democratic control of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources.

Adam Buick

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The top 1 percent in the U.S … had a combined net worth of $49.2 trillion by the end of 2024. The combined value of almost 100 million U.S. homes during the same time was $49.7 trillion. 

(Newsweek)

‘Woke’ is not a precise, scientific term. But it typically refers to the attempt to combat forms of oppression – like racism and sexism – on the basis of identity politics, through means like quotas, changes to language, and raising awareness … ‘woke’ policies seek to ‘fight’ oppression on an individualistic basis, whilst completely jettisoning any idea of class struggle, or seeing oppression as being rooted in capitalist society. 

(The Communist)

Trucks carrying commercial goods, which are later sold in Gaza, are charged at least $20,000…while aid trucks are also subject to extortion before crossing to the enclave. Organi is a Sinai businessman, politician and tribal leader allied with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Organi’s name has become synonymous with unofficial profits made out of the suffocating Gaza blockade, particularly from desperate Palestinians attempting to flee the fighting. MEE last year revealed that Organi made at least $2m daily from Palestinians who left the Gaza Strip via the border crossing point with Egypt . . . 

(MEE)

While his crackdowns provoked outrage around the globe, Duterte and his brand of politics remained popular at home even after he left office. His daughter… riding on her family name, was elected Vice President in 2022 in a landslide victory alongside President Marcos Jr, himself the son of a former dictator who ruled the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. 

(Time)

A ceasefire in Ukraine is not about peace. It’s about money, just as the earlier war was. As all wars are, ultimately. An acceptable ceasefire for Trump, as well as for Putin, will involve a carve-up of Ukraine’s goodies. Rare earth minerals, land, agricultural production will be the real currency driving the agreement.

(MEE)

Tren de Aragua’s growth surged as a result of mass incarceration policies that began under Venezuela’s former President Hugo Chávez and expanded under current President Nicolás Maduro. Incarceration rates began to increase in 2009 and were exacerbated by police raids deployed in 2010 in marginalized neighborhoods across the country. Venezuela’s prisons became filled with young, poor men. 

(The Conversation)

The preconditions for a communist or socialist society are (1) the development of a productive potential sufficient to support the reasonable needs of the population and (2) a clear majority who want such a society and understand what it entails. The SPGB’s position is that precondition (1) has been met a long time ago, but we are a long way off from meeting precondition (2). If and when we do have a class-consciousness socialist majority, there is nothing to prevent us from immediately implementing the new society. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to linger on with one or another form of capitalism a moment longer.

(Letter in Weekly Worker)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view).

Life and Times: A letter to my son (2025)

The Life and Times column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ‘Life and Times’ column I wrote for this year’s April Socialist Standard had the title Horror in the Middle East. Choosing Sides and talked about the support that has built up for the Palestinians in the Gaza conflict and the widespread condemnation of Israel for its role in the fighting. It asked whether this could be attributed to the oldest hatred – antisemitism. Its conclusion was that it was not antisemitism that underlies it but rather the association of Israel with the United States and ‘the anti-Americanism on the left of Western politics which dates back a long way’.

The column gave rise to discussion, disagreement and controversy on the Socialist Party’s various online forums and, when I showed it to my son, not a member of the Party, he didn’t have an entirely positive reaction either. He attributed the sympathy and support the Palestinians are getting not mainly to anti-Americanism but rather to the vast amount of media coverage being given to this particular conflict. We discussed this and agreed to disagree. But then a little later I was going through some papers of my own, and I came across a copy of a letter I had written to him over 20 years ago, shortly after the 9/11 attack. It struck me how related what happened then was to what is happening now, even if in different countries and with different protagonists. What do I mean by this? This may become clear if I reproduce parts of that letter:

‘Since you brought up the present world political situation yesterday, just an amplification here.

The virulent anti-Americanism that is prevalent on the left has a historical, if entirely irrational, origin. When Russia emerged as the champion of ‘socialism’ after the Russian revolution, throughout the world those who were on the left supported it. So bewitched were they by what was largely rhetoric that, even when Stalin murdered millions in the 30s, made a pact with Hitler at the beginning of the second world war and later set up ruthless dictatorships in all the countries of Eastern Europe, in those peoples’ eyes Russia still remained the ‘homeland’ of socialism, to be supported at all costs. The consequence was that, when, after the second world war, the world divided into two capitalist camps, led by Russia (state capitalist) on one side and America (private capitalist) on the other (the so-called ‘Cold War’), the great villain for the left was America. In an unshakeable double standards mentality, the Russian abuses were ignored or apologised for (eg invasion of Afghanistan, setting up of client dictator states elsewhere – Korea, Syria, Angola, etc.), and all similar actions by the Americans were seen as evil rapacious acts designed to extend and further American power, which they of course were. So strong was the emotional attachment to Russia that even those left-wing people and groups who criticised it in various ways and even in some cases recognised it as a form of capitalism still hung on to it at bottom as fundamentally being on the right side. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the left no longer has a country to cling on to (unless Cuba or, for some, China), but what has remained as a legacy of former times is the hatred of America as the symbol of world capitalism (not that most of them even know what the word means) and the epitome of evil.

The other things that have remained among left-wingers is a continuing opposition to those regimes or countries that America backed during the Cold War, especially Israel, and support for those countries that Russia backed during that period, especially those that have one-party states (eg, Syria, Palestine, Cuba). Ironically that rhetoric has now been bent to the service of fundamentalist Islam. If, historically, wars in the modern world have been struggles for markets, raw materials, trade routes and strategic positions, what you have here, in fundamentalist Islam, is the ideological product of ‘normal’ wars fought in the past and, in fact, much more difficult to fight than a normal war. In his writings Marx continually talked about ‘the contradictions of capitalism’. He usually meant phenomena like the existence of poverty among plenty, or of opposing factions within the owning class of a country causing political instability. And here is another (though obviously unforeseeable in Marx’s time) ‘contradiction of capitalism’, the military power that usually goes with economic power having difficulty in prevailing over the force of a religious ideology which should belong to previous centuries. Though nothing can justify the plane bombing in New York, it’s fatal to get drawn in and say you support one side or another.

At bottom it’s probably not a problem that can be solved, at least not in the short term, and even if it somehow does get solved or alleviated, it will tend to create further unforeseen problems. So whatever people say, it is in the end a problem for those who have created the breeding ground for it in the first case, those who rule.’

So how is what happened in 2001 (and the period immediately following) related to what is happening in the Middle East today? Well, these events show us how phenomena in capitalism have a habit broadly of repeating themselves. It shows the tendency the system engenders in people to take one side against another in a conflict failing to recognise the underlying causes of the conflict. Then there is also that ‘instinctive’ reaction of opposition by the left and other so-called ‘progressive’ forces to any association with the United States. And there’s also the inevitable failure of that reaction to result in any positive outcome for any of those caught up in the conflict. So the massive demonstrations we saw following 9/11 against the Western policy of invading Iraq and Afghanistan had not the slightest impact on events, and, once the invasions had taken place, the opposition to them faded into the background. In the same way, the current large-scale movements in Western countries in favour of the Palestinians and against Israel will die down as the conflict there takes its course and the outcome is decided by the governments that manage the capitalist system, an outcome which will be largely dependent on the economic and military strength of the different sides.

For this reason, were I to write another letter to my son now about the current conflict in the Middle East, the points I would make would be oh so similar to those I made 20+ years ago when yet another of capitalism’s crises had exploded and people were being drawn into the futile activity of supporting one side against the other.

Howard Moss

A mental state (2024)

From the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

An acquaintance recently confided that he now avoids news media, broadcast and printed. Because it is generally so depressing it is adversely affecting his mental health. A constant round of outrageous reports of depressing episodes of inhumanity.

As a long-time member of the Labour Party he is already disillusioned by the Starmer administration. The ready acceptance of gifts of substantial financial worth, while, with seemingly ill-considered haste, snatching the winter fuel allowance from many pensioners who really need it.

He is an example of the contention that though the Labour Party is not, never was and never will be, socialist, there are some with socialist ideas, however inchoate, within it. This friend came with me to hear a Socialist Party speaker in Sheffield. After the meeting he told me that he agreed with the analysis of capitalism put forward and that he was pleased to hear the case for democratic change, rather than revolution through violence too often voiced by Trotskyite and other Leninist groups.

However, he did have a major caveat, the frequently proffered defence of reform. The Tories, then the governing party, were doing increasingly dreadful things to workers and their families. It’s all very well having a principled view of socialism, but the priority is to effect change, however marginal, immediately.

There remains, for him, a strong notion that for all the failings of Labour in government, many clearly outlined by the speaker, nonetheless the welfare state in general and the NHS in particular were a triumph of socialist ideas enacted by the 1945 Attlee government.

So it is that the Labour Party continues to occupy the ‘socialist’ political ground on which even those disaffected continue to stand. The siren song of the Starmer Labour Party consists of one word, CHANGE!

Although that political vessel very quickly ran aground on the economic rocks of capitalist reality (no change there then) this particular crew member, even now, isn’t prepared to abandon ship. He is not alone.

Murderous conflicts

Then there is the Middle East, the Ukrainian attrition, and various other murderous conflicts going on. Yes, the socialist analysis of capitalism may be absolutely correct, but socialism?

A worldwide commonwealth based on the principles of production to freely meet self-defined needs in a moneyless society to which all contribute, also freely, whatever they are able? Even accepting there are frequent instances of people working together and for each other’s benefit, where is there any indication that enough human beings will ever collectively pursue such a course?

These are my friend’s questions, and why he has turned off the news. His mental health is suffering as he desperately tries to hang onto socialist notions that are constantly denied by the dystopian world as it is.

As a socialist I too at times find it difficult to square socialist principles with the evidence of human limitation I witness when I turn the TV news on. He is not alone in wondering why humanity appears so incapable of learning from its history.

Surely Russian military authorities must be aware that the reduction to rubble of Stalingrad not only did not bring victory to the invading army, but rather served as an exemplar of resistance that completely thwarted Nazi imperial ambitions.

Then, four decades later, Russian forces were driven from Afghanistan despite being in nominal occupancy of the country. Such aggression doesn’t subdue but engenders determination to fight back. Why would there be any expectation that Ukraine would be different?

America, for all its technological superiority, was defeated by a force employing the humble bicycle to transport supplies along the Ho Chi Minh trail. And following dreadful loss of life, military and civilian, the two sides then, eventually, became reconciled.

War becomes mythologised and integrated into national ideologies. Remembrance Sunday in the UK has elevated the ‘fallen’ into heroic defenders of freedom, rather than the reality of terrified young men dying in mud, squalor and savagery. When the next instalment of the war to end all wars led to the deliberate bombing of towns and cities this horror became the spirit of the Blitz, supposedly a demonstration of a character unique to the British.

The Middle East is the present martial spectacle. Recently, the BBC carried two reports illustrative of the pervasive twisted logic such conflicts produce. One was an Israeli spokesman insisting that his country is acting in proportionate self-defence. This was followed by an Iranian supreme something or other who was equally insistent that the missiles launched at Israel were a proportionate act of self-defence.

Putin, of course, claims the non-war war was launched against expanding NATO influence and Nazis in Ukraine, an act of self-defence. It would appear that most wars are merely conflicting ‘self-defences’. It seems that it’s always the other side that is the aggressor; most definitely, ‘not us!’

And while this and similar sophistry is spewed out across news media we sit and watch as the appalling death toll, mainly amongst non-combatants, including a horrendous number of children, continues to mount. As mere spectators there is an ever-growing sense of powerlessness. Critical voices raised are all too readily accused of anti-semitism or Islamophobia. But most can only look on and despair, or press the off button on the remote. Such is the source of the impact on my friend’s, and many, many others’, mental health.

Alienating effects

War is the extreme expression of the alienating effects of capitalism. All the financial problems afflicting people, public services failing because they are too expensive to be adequately run and myriad other difficulties people have to deal with that, ultimately arise from the profit imperative.

There is a general awareness that all is most definitely not well, either nationally or internationally. However, a political cognitive dissonance prevents serious engagement with how to treat those widespread ills.

The ‘Christmas Truce’ of 1914 on the Western Front is illustrative of this. Soldiers from both sides laid down their arms, including British imperial troops from India who didn’t have the Christmas imperative for peace on earth. They fraternized openly, defying their high commands, and there emerged a shared realisation that the propaganda that had convinced them of the barbarism of their ‘enemies’ was a lie. Within days they were killing each other again at the behest of their nation states.

Ukrainians and Russians, Israelis and Palestinians similarly have far more in common than might be guessed listening to their comments when interviewed. The ‘other’ remains the barbarian who must be vanquished for the general good. And so the slaughter goes on.

Is it any wonder that mental health problems have become an increasing issue in society? Talking therapies and/or pharmaceuticals may, in some cases, act as first aid. However, there is only one cure, socialism. Unfortunately, at the moment, the ‘patients’ remain reluctant to take it.

Dave Alton

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Billionaire wealth has risen by more than 1,000 percent since 1989, with the number of billionaires tripling to 164 since 2010. Over the same period, the average worker lost £10,200 through wage suppression enforced through record-low strike activity policed by the trade union bureaucracy. One-fifth of people in the UK live in poverty, and 25 percent of all children. Nearly 3 million rely on food banks. For the poorest 10 percent of UK households, living standards have fallen by 20 percent compared with 2019–20—a drop in income of £4,600. 

(WSWS, tinyurl.com/mjajcj6m)

Pastor Mboro is a self-styled prophet with thousands of followers across South Africa. He has claimed to perform miracles such as healing people during sermons and delivering a fish from the womb of a pregnant woman. 

(BBC tinyurl.com/58t68xuj)

The book begins with a poignant reminder that we are all migrants: ‘Even if you are not a migrant, your ancestors were. If they had not migrated, you would not be alive’. 

(Impact Investor, tinyurl.com/4xuemy6c)

I meet Najwa Abdul Awa, holding an image of her dead son. I ask her if she’s scared about what might be around the corner. ‘Of course not’, she replies with a smile. ‘I sent my first son for martyrdom with pride. And I’m willing to send my second and my third son too. We will not stop, she says, until Israel vanishes’. 

(Sky News, tinyurl.com/mxx8rm33)

The pro-Palestinian organizers gathered for ‘coffee with comrades’ …The main speaker, a University of Massachusetts Amherst PhD candidate, took the stage. He donned a keffiyeh and a Cuban Communist Party cap emblazoned with a red star, and began discussing readings by Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leila Khaled, a former Palestinian militant and first woman to hijack an airplane. ‘Our political system is falling apart’, William Chaney, the PhD candidate, said in an interview just before his lecture began. ‘If we want to leave the world better, we have to look back and learn lessons’.

 (Boston Globe, tinyurl.com/5ductrb3)

In America, 1 in 4 cancer patients go bankrupt or lose their homes because of the outrageously high cost of care and 68,000 die a year because they can’t afford healthcare. 

(Common Dreams, tinyurl.com/wptkejj2)

… the great lie of nationalism: the fact that there is no organic bond between an ethnic group and a specific terrain, that no stretch of soil belongs by divine or natural right to those who speak a particular language or have a certain skin-colour. The country was never yours to claim back. Immigrants haven’t robbed you of what was never your property in the first place. 

(UnHerd, tinyurl.com/2d8a9ah2)

In general, human beings are remarkably altruistic. Rather than feeling destructive impulses, most of us feel a natural impulse to help others, to nurture their development and alleviate suffering. 

(The Conversation, tinyurl.com/2u85xn4w)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Party News: three leaflets (2024)

Party News from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

To end the rage, end capitalism

The media love it when racists riot, because disaster sells.

There’s less interest in the real story, of cooperation, of solidarity against racism, of mutual support, shown by the vast majority of people.

People like you, here at this event.

There are those who say that humans are by nature greedy, selfish and cruel, and that peaceful and cooperative co-existence will never be possible.

That’s nothing but an excuse to justify a violent, warring system that, deep down, we all hate, in which billionaires lounge on their yachts while the rest of us scrape by, obey their stupid laws, and do all the hard work of running society.

It’s capitalism that drives many to a nameless rage they take out on innocent people around them through racism, homophobia and domestic violence.

And it’s capitalism that has become, to quote campaigner George Monbiot, ‘a weapon pointed at the world’, a system of runaway profiteering that is threatening our collective survival.

It’s time to declare we’ve hit peak capitalism.

We can do so much better.

We have the tech and the know-how to upgrade to a sustainable world of democratic common ownership, with no nation states, leaders, rich elites or money.

Making everything free will make everyone free.

Making everyone free will end the rage.

If you want this, say so – tell people you want to move beyond capitalism, because you’ll be surprised how many agree with you.

And contact us to help get the message out.

– Leaflet handed out at ongoing anti-racism events.

Green capitalism? No chance!

We need rational stewardship of the biosphere for our survival.

But the world is in the hands of a tiny capitalist minority, all in furious competition with each other to stay ahead of the pack.

All their grubby investment decisions are taken in private and only for profit. There’s no overall rationality, no ‘grand design’. It’s a crazy casino.

Environmentalists say you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, and that’s true. So can we tame the casino? Can we magically rig capitalism so it pursues only modest or even zero growth?

That would be a feat for the ages, like turning a tiger vegetarian, or convincing a Great White shark to give back to the community.

Capital only wants to do one thing, make a profit, faster and faster, on and on, and bugger the externalities. You’ll never make it change. You’ll never make it green.

The only way to get rational stewardship is to get rid of capitalism.

We need to take the world into collective democratic ownership, with no market system or production for profit, and no rich class of irresponsible gamblers to ruin it for the rest of us.

– Leaflet handed out at Green Party Conference in September.

Against all capitalism’s wars

Why this war with all the death and destruction wars bring? It’s not, as it might seem, another example of an undying enmity between two groups – Jews and Arabs – but a fight between different capitalist factions over land, resources and strategic routes. And not just between the government of Israel and the Hamas regime in Gaza. The greater issue is who controls the oilfields in the Persian Gulf and the trade route out of it, with Israel being supported by the West to counter the threat from Iran and Iran promoting militant Islamism to undermine Israel.

In Gaza, the Hamas organisation, who are both anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic, came to power via elections in 2007 with the stated aim ‘to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine’. But that was the end of any form of democracy there and, in their time in office, they have crushed multiple protests by rivals, expelling their officials to make sure there would never be a round of elections and killing dozens of their own people, many of them civilians. During that time the people of Gaza have been plunged increasingly into poverty with, for example, 40 percent unemployment, with their leaders enriching themselves assisted by backers from other Arab countries and enjoying multi-million-dollar land deals, luxury villas and black market fuel from Egypt.

The continuing oppression by Israel (a country by the way where 25 percent of households live on the poverty line) has also of course been a significant factor, as its government has sought to facilitate the enrichment of its own capitalist class by grabbing land and keeping a tight lid on protest. Now the lid has come off- and in the most horrific way.

There is no excuse for the horrors unleashed on innocent people by Hamas nor for Israel’s savage retaliation, killing thousands, attacking hospitals, depriving a land of food, water and power and flattening its infrastructure regardless of what may happen to the inhabitants in the short and long term. No wonder there are calls for a ceasefire to alleviate the sufferings of the people of Gaza.

Of course Israel’s government will support its own capitalist class to the hilt – after all that is its role. And it is all part of a playbook, which we see played out time and time again as governments representing their capitalist classes fail to resolve conflicts by diplomacy and resort to horrifying violence. We can only repeat the same thing we have always said when this has happened – that workers (in this case Arab and Israeli ones) have no interest in fighting one another but have a common interest in uniting with workers throughout the world to abolish capitalism and establish socialism, a world without borders where the Earth’s resources will belong to all humanity and are used to produce what people need, not profits for the few who currently own and control these resources.

– Leaflet handed out at anti-Gaza War protests.

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The richest 1% of Norwegians held 22% of net wealth in 2022, according to Statistics Norway. That compares with 34% in the US, 30% in Germany and 21% in the UK. 

(MSN)

Senior Chinese leaders… are engaged in corruption and hiding hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth by using relatives to disguise their activities, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service. By 2012, Mr. Xi had amassed at least $376 million in company investments, an indirect 18% stake in a rare-earth mineral company worth more than $311 million, and $20.2 million holdings in a technology company, according to a CRS report based on published information from news outlets about the hidden wealth. 

(The Washington Times)

Among the 2,300 sewer cleaners under the employment of the KWSC, to do manual scavenging to unclog the drains, he claims to have taught Adil the dos and don’ts of diving into the slush. ‘You have to be smart to outdo death, which is our companion as we go down,’ he says. It is not the army of cockroaches and the stink that greets you when you open the manhole lid to get in, or the rats swimming in filthy water, but the blades and used syringes floating that are a cause for concern for many as they go down to bring up the rocks and the buckets of filthy silt.

(Inter Press Service)

Umm Shadi, 50, called for Hamas to ‘end the war immediately without seeking to control and rule Gaza’. ‘What have we gained from this war except killing, destruction, extermination and starvation?’ she asked. ‘Every day the war on Gaza increases, our pain and the pain of the people increases. What is Hamas waiting for?’. 

(France24)

The military leader of Hamas has said he believes he has gained the upper hand over Israel and that the spiralling civilian death toll in Gaza would work in the militant group’s favor, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, citing leaked messages the newspaper said it had seen. ‘We have the Israelis right where we want them,’ Yahya Sinwar told other Hamas leaders recently, according to one of the messages… In another, Sinwar is said to have described civilian deaths as ‘necessary sacrifices’ while citing past independence-related conflicts in countries like Algeria. 

(CNN)

Graham stressed that helping Ukraine in its fight against Russia could also have strategic economic benefits for the U.S. and Western countries. ‘They’re sitting on $10-12 trillion of critical minerals in Ukraine. They could be the richest country in all of Europe. We don’t want to give that money and assets to Putin to share with China,’ he told Brennan on Sunday. ‘If we help Ukraine now, they could become the best business partner we ever dreamed of. They’re sitting on a goal mine. To give Putin $10-12 trillion that he will share with China is ridiculous’. 

(MSN)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Playing by the rules of war (2024)

From the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Millions of people are horrified by the Israeli war on Gaza. Protests have hit the streets in countries around the world, to the point where armed police battled students on university campuses across the US for occupying in protest against the war and America’s role in backing it.

Many protestors shout that the war is ‘illegal’ and that Israel is committing genocide, pinning hopes on international authority putting an end to malefaction. It should be noted that genocide is a crime of intent, and is not synonymous with mass homicide. That narrow legal definition, though, does trigger international and domestic legal requirements to act against it: hence why America and allied governments are determined to deny that it is genocide, and will continue to do so until the International Court of Justice makes a determinative ruling, which could be years away.

People should not put their faith in the split hairs of legality, but instead on sound analysis of the causes of conflict and action built on that analysis. The faith in the power of legality is misplaced against the tremendous value of the interests at stake in being able to secure and control the supply of oil. It is worth noting, as Tony Blair pointed out in his speech at the George Bush library in 2002, that it is not about monopolising oil, but ensuring that no one state can monopolise and thus threaten the supply of oil:

‘The western world is import dependent. We base our policy on diversity of supply. You in the US import from 50 different countries, no one of which supplies more than 15 per cent of total imports. The EU pursues roughly the same policy.’

Beyond that, it is important to note that international law is not set up to prevent war, but in fact to structure and enable wars to take place. It seeks to limit war and codify its conduct, but the powers that drafted those wars would simply not allow themselves to put aside the tool of war. As Michael Walzer, the theorist of just war writes, alongside Jo-Ann Mort: ‘It is a maxim of just war theory that the rules of war cannot make it impossible to fight a just war. There has to be a way to fight’. Walzer has also said in a recent interview ‘I think the IDF has been trying to adhere to the rules in an environment that probably requires some loosening of the rules.’

As we reported in our May issue part of this ‘loosening’ has been to deploy the Lavender AI targeting system to co-ordinate targeting of Hamas operatives and officials based on mass intelligence gathering. The military doctrine that civilian casualties are permissible in pursuit of a legitimate military objective has been broadly applied (more broadly than in the past). Israel undoubtedly has enough military lawyers to build a broad permissive case for its actions (or to construct one retrospectively where necessary).

It is abundantly clear that Israel is not acting out of absolute necessity: Hamas will never have the capacity to destroy Israel. If the intelligence failures that meant that Israel knew that Hamas was drilling for a 7 October-style operation were fixed Hamas could be securely locked back up. For a fraction of the cost spent on the war, Israel could have bought a bucket load of informants to finger high-level Hamas commanders for reprisal.

Everyone agrees with the concept of the right to self-defence to protect your own and your loved ones’ lives, but most would agree that going after the friends and family of someone who attacked you would be taking it too far; and every human society has mechanisms to stop violent disputes escalating in a spiral of tit for tat. And, of course, it is possible to engineer a situation where a claim of self-defence allows an actor to pursue the use of violence to achieve other ends.

As Arthur Ransome once wrote:

‘It has been said that when two armies face each other across a battle front and engage in mutual slaughter, they may be considered as a single army engaged in suicide. Now it seems to me that when countries, each one severally doing its best to arrest its private economic ruin, do their utmost to accelerate the economic ruin of each other, we are witnessing something very like the suicide of civilization itself.’

Israel is not unique in this. Indeed, their propagandists have been pointing out that there are mass refugee and humanitarian crises being created by savage wars in Sudan, Congo and Ukraine, but that Israel and its actions are being singled out. Possibly this is so, at least in part because of the focus of the western media (spurred on in part by the interest of their states and their capitalists in the Middle East region).

Indeed, in terms of Israel’s tactics, they seem to be following exactly the same military doctrines as were used by the Sri Lankan government when they crushed the Tamil Tigers in 2009:

‘The Sri Lanka Army (SLA) advanced its military campaign in the Vanni, using large-scale and widespread shelling, at times with heavy weapons, such as Multi-Barrel Rocket Launchers (MBRLs) and other large artillery, causing large numbers of civilian casualties. It shelled in three consecutive No Fire Zones, where it had encouraged the civilian population to concentrate, and after it had indicated that it would stop using heavy weapons.’

Likewise, the Tamil Tigers violated human rights by using human shields and forced labour. Sri Lanka was protected from human rights allegations at the UN by allied states.

War is not some inherent feature of humanity. Billions of us live lives without waging war upon one another. War emerges from a social and technological architecture that enables it, and if the marchers who rightly hate war want to put a stop to it, they need to look to action that will make war impossible, not illegal.

Pik Smeet

Proper Gander: United by music, non-politically? (2024)

The Proper Gander TV column from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even more than in previous years, 2024’s Eurovision Song Contest was less about the songs than the political arena in which the show took place. The war in Ukraine has been the backdrop for the last couple of competitions, with the country’s win in 2022 reflecting the sympathy for its plight. But this year’s event barely acknowledged the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, instead being shaped and overshadowed by the Israeli state’s war with Hamas. Unlike Russia, which was excluded from the contest in 2022, Israel hasn’t broken any of Eurovision’s rules by being at war, and so was allowed to compete. Consequently, its participation became a focus of anger and criticism from the pro-Palestinian movement, online and around the venue. Eurovision’s slogan is ‘United By Music’, but this sentiment ended up sounding either naïvely optimistic or sarcastically hollow.

Protests leading up to the final on 11 May were expected, and so security in the host city of Malmö in Sweden was tightened. The area was designated a ‘no fly zone’ to deter any drone attacks, additional police were drafted in from Denmark and Norway, and Israel’s contestant Eden Golan was closely guarded due to death threats. Thousands of pro-Palestinian and anti-war demonstrators gathered in Malmö, not that this was featured in the polished official coverage. The broadcasters also downplayed the booing in the auditorium which accompanied Golan’s performance by disguising it with amplified cheering. It could be argued that this censorship is to keep the event as a celebration of kitsch, an escape from the depressingly real tragedies happening daily. But because the political situation in and around Europe is so volatile, Eurovision can’t exist in its own glitzy bubble. The stated aim of the event’s organisers at the European Broadcasting Union is that Eurovision is ‘non-political’, even though censoring coverage does suggest political motives. The audience members who booed EBU Executive Supervisor Martin Österdahl during the final were making a political point about his perceived politics. To put the EBU’s stance into practice, officials requested Israel change its song, originally called October Rain, to cut out references to the 7th October attacks. Ireland’s singer was asked to remove the word ‘ceasefire’ in body paint, and Portugal’s performance wasn’t initially uploaded after broadcast, apparently because its contestant wore nail art featuring Palestinian symbols. How the death and destruction in the Middle East gets filtered through the spectacle of Eurovision goes beyond disorientating to trivialising the slaughter.

The results of the ‘non-political’ contest were also politically charged. The final score awarded to each competitor is derived from the number of votes from juries of ‘music professionals’ in each country and phone-in votes from viewers, with countries unable to vote for themselves. Jurors are supposed to vote for a song without considering the identity of its singer, a stipulation which the viewers at home have no need to follow. The UK’s effort scored nul points from the public vote and ended up in 18th place, while the winning entry from Switzerland was one of the better songs, most of which were interchangeable power ballads or dance bangers, slickly performed. Israel’s mid-table scoring from the juries was boosted considerably by having the second largest number of public votes, meaning that the country finished in fifth place. Israel’s surprise high ranking suggests that the pro-Palestinian or pro-peace protests and online campaigns had little impact on voters’ views, and leftist activists are presumably wondering where they went wrong. Given the unavoidable political climate around the competition, it’s probable that more people voted for Israel as some kind of statement than because they favoured the song regardless. Whether the result could be called ‘democratic’ depends on how far its definition can be stretched. Still, as a framework to gather votes across a wide area, this is about as good as global democracy in capitalism gets. So, without having the ability to directly influence the war, some people have felt that Eurovision can be an outlet for views they hold passionately, whether by voting for Israel (for some reason) or protesting against its inclusion. The relevance of a song competition as a barometer of international politics highlights the lack of other ways people can collectively voice an opinion or act upon it in capitalist society. The result wouldn’t have been affected by anyone joining the boycott of the event promoted by the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. It would be hard to determine whether this campaign, apathy about the overblown circus or sunny weather contributed most to the BBC’s coverage having around two million fewer viewers than last year. But the numbers and scores don’t have any influence on the war. How and how much the event reflects public opinion in Europe is likely to be of little concern to the families struggling to survive the horrors of the war-torn Middle East.

Mike Foster

Pathfinders: Death by algorithm (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world held its breath last month as April showers of Iranian missiles descended on Israel, only to be blown out of the sky by Israel’s Iron Dome defence system. Would regional war flower as a result? Iran has around ten times the population of Israel, but Israel has an elite air force, courtesy of the USA, and some of the best technology in the world. Now insiders have revealed that it has been using AI in the war in Gaza.

According to a non-profit magazine run by Israeli and Palestinian journalists, Israel has been using AI to identify ‘tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties’. According to six Israeli intelligence officers involved in the Gaza war, some of them actually in the targeting rooms, the AI system, known as Lavender, is designed to remove the ‘human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets’. The officers say that, in the early stages of the war, the Israeli Defence Force almost completely relied on Lavender to identify the domestic homes of up to 37,000 high to low-ranking Hamas and Islamic Jihad military personnel for potential drone strikes. Such was the cursory nature of IDF oversight, which is demanded by international law, that Lavender’s outputs were treated ‘as if it were a human decision’, and the kill lists given ‘sweeping approval’ without anyone checking the raw intelligence data. This was despite it being known that the system had a 10 percent error rate.

Moreover, the AI system was designed to target militants at their most vulnerable, when they had returned to their domestic dwellings to be with their families. A second AI system, chillingly known as ‘Where’s Daddy?’, identified when the militants actually entered their family homes. ‘We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,’ one intelligence officer said. ‘It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.’

For lower-ranking militants, the army decided not to use smart bombs, which can take out an individual or a car, but unguided ‘dumb’ bombs which destroy entire buildings or apartment blocks on top of the target individual. ‘You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage’, said one officer. Two others added that the army had also agreed that ‘for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians’, while for a battalion or brigade commander, the permissible civilian deaths could be over 100.

This explains why the number of women and children killed has been so enormous. In previous operations, the IDF had strict rules of proportionality, in compliance with international law, and requirements to cross-check, verify, incriminate and confirm the target’s presence in real time. Because human targeting generated limited results, it was feasible to stick to these rules. Since October 7, targeting has been given over entirely to AI, which has produced gigantic kill lists, and all the verification rules have gone out of the window. Who the system identifies as a target depends on where the users set the bar. It could be little more than changing one’s address or mobile phone. ‘There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defense personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs.’

To call this unprecedented is an understatement. Nothing like it has been known before in Israel’s military operations, nor that of anybody else’s including the USA, not even against high-ranking targets like Bin Laden. A US general and former commander of operations against ISIS said, ‘With Osama Bin Laden, you’d have an NCV [Non-combatant Casualty Value] of 30, but if you had a low-level commander, his NCV was typically zero. We ran zero for the longest time.’ For the Israeli Defence force however, things were different. ‘There was hysteria in the professional ranks,’ said one officer, ‘They had no idea how to react at all. The only thing they knew to do was to just start bombing like madmen.’

What will be the long-term upshot of this policy of indiscriminate, AI-assisted slaughter? The Israeli whistleblowers are under no illusions: ‘In the short term, we are safer, because we hurt Hamas. But I think we’re less secure in the long run. I see how all the bereaved families in Gaza — which is nearly everyone — will raise the motivation for [people to join] Hamas 10 years down the line. And it will be much easier for [Hamas] to recruit them.’

So, never mind rules, never mind international agreements, this is the shape of wars to come, where the critical factor is not law but LAWS – lethal autonomous weapons systems which track, target and destroy human life with no human oversight at all. The irony is that capitalism’s technological revolutions have created a global productive capability that could put us all beyond any need for outdated capitalist trade relations, where we could live in peace without markets, prices, wages, debts – or wars. Yet capitalism’s internal logic is to compete for profit, to grow or die, and the inevitable extension of that logic is war. Now AI targeting and LAWS are genies out of the bottle. If we don’t abolish capitalism soon, the human race could end up being obliterated by its own technology.

Paddy Shannon

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The princes are nothing but tyrants who flay the people; they fritter away our blood and sweat on their pomp and whoring and knavery.’ These were the words of Thomas Müntzer at the head of the massed ranks of a peasant army in the year 1525. Ranged against him was the might of the princes of the German Nation. How did Müntzer, the son of a coin maker from central Germany, rise in just a few short years to become one of the most feared revolutionaries in early modern Europe? 

(Penguin Random House)

Like many of Myanmar’s young men and women, Ko Naing said he had no intention of answering the call and would instead do whatever it takes to avoid the draft. ‘The one sure thing is I won’t serve. If I’m drafted by the military, I will try to move to the remote areas or to another country,’ Ko Naing told Al Jazeera from Myanmar. ‘Not only me, I think everyone in Myanmar is not willing to serve in the military under the conscription law’, he said. 

(Al Jazeera)

The ‘one land, two peoples’ analysis of the situation is nonsensical. The land does not belong to the people [proletariat], anywhere in the world. It belongs to those [bourgeoisie] who own it. This might seem very theoretical, but the mere existence of social relations on the ground shows to whom the idea of two camps belongs, ie, the ruling [bourgeois] class.

(libcom.org)

South Africa’s Western Cape is known for its dramatic coastlines and acres of wineland. But behind the blue skies and rolling hills, the province is grappling with a heartbreaking health crisis. The area has the highest rate of foetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) in the world – a group of debilitating and life-long disabilities caused when a mother drinks during pregnancy. Whilst FASD affects about 0.7 per cent of the world’s population, in the Western Cape rates are as high as 31 per cent, and across South Africa, it’s estimated that 11 per cent of all newborns are affected each year.

(The Telegraph)

As BBC Ukraine reported in November, 650,000 Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 years old have left Ukraine for Europe since the start of the war. Zelensky’s former adviser Alexey Arestovich recently claimed that 4.5 million Ukrainian men, nearly half of the Ukrainian male population, had fled abroad to avoid military service, and that 30 to 70 percent of military units consist of ‘refuseniks’ who have gone absent without official leave (AWOL) .

(WSWS.ORG)

‘And if they’ve refused three offers of a job, or whatever the number would be, and they say ‘I’m sorry, I’m not doing any of that’, you then say – in which case you must go and do two years in the Armed Forces’. 

(Daily Express)

‘Universities should be havens for robust debate, discussion, and learning—not sites of censorship where administrators, donors, and politicians squash political discourse they don’t approve of’ said the head of the NYCLU.

(Common Dreams)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Editorial: The Middle East: capitalist powder keg (2024)

Editorial from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The tit for tat rocket attacks between Israel and Iran have brought to the surface the real issue in the Middle East — whether the US and its allies should or should not control the fossil reserves and the trade routes in the area, which are vital to the operation of capitalism in their parts of the world.

The US position was clearly spelt out in 1980 by President Carter in his State of the Union message:

‘An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force’.

This wasn’t just words. In 1991 the US waged the Gulf War after Iraq invaded Kuwait and in 2003 the Iraq War that led to the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime there. This allowed the US to establish bases in Iraq to add to those in the Gulf states. The civil war in Syria allowed it to establish one there too. Its main asset in the region, however, has been Israel, its support for which has been ‘ironclad’ and which it has armed to the teeth.

With the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, the threat to US domination has come from Iran where, in 1979, the pro-US regime was overthrown and replaced by a brutal theocracy. The economic system there remained capitalist and the new regime aggressively pursued Iran’s national capitalist interests against those of the US. Iran, too, has its ‘bases’ throughout the region in the form of ‘proxy’ militias, in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. Iran is opposed to Israel ostensibly on religious grounds but essentially because Israel is US’s main asset in the region that needs to be destroyed if US control is to be ended.

Israel, as a capitalist state in its own right, has its own agenda. Its present rulers aspire to protect its existence as a separate state, to establish its rule over the whole of the former Ottoman province of Palestine; which involves the permanent political repression of the non-Jewish population living there. As far as the US is concerned, this is a diversion from why it supports Israel and undermines Israel’s usefulness to them.

In this sense Israel’s savage war of retaliation on Hamas and the whole population of Gaza for Hamas’s massacre of Israeli citizens on 7 October is a horrific sideshow.

Where all this will end is unclear. But one thing is not. The Middle East is a powder keg as a result of a conflict between capitalist states over who shall control raw material resources, and the trade routes to transport these out of the region. Capitalism’s competitive struggle for profits breeds such conflicts. Wars, the threat of war, and the waste of armaments will exist as long as capitalism does.

Life & Times: Horror in the Middle East. Choosing sides (2024)

The Life and Times column from the April 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the community centre where I play bowls, on a Thursday evening the room next to the bowls hall is used for meetings by the local branch of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). They have talks, show films, engage in discussion, and I’ve often thought that I might be better occupied in with them discussing politics rather than playing bowls next door. But I’ve never done that, and recently, when I looked through the window on the door from their meeting room to the bowls hall, I was all the more tempted. I noticed that, though they only had a small attendance, there were banners, posters and leaflets about the current Israel-Hamas conflict strewn everywhere. They carried predictable slogans such as Stop the Genocide, Free Palestine, Stop the Attacks in Gaza, Defeat Islamophobia.

Anti-semitism?

I didn’t attend the meeting, but I did look in to buy a copy of their newspaper, the Socialist Worker. And all that made me reflect not just on Israel and Gaza but also on the attitude of left-wing organisations like the SWP towards the situation there, on the fact that they are all, without exception, staunchly supportive of the Arab side and profoundly hostile to Israel. From many quarters it is being said that this is a form of the oldest hatred, anti-semitism. But I find that hard to accept, since I know personally a number of the people who attend those meetings in the community centre and nothing I know about them suggests to me they are anti-semitic. In the same way, I find it hard to accept the claim made recently that London has become a ‘no-go zone for Jews’ during weekend pro-Palestinian marches. I have observed these marches at first hand myself on two occasions and, despite the anti-Israel slogans, I have seen no display of anti-semitism. I don’t of course doubt that some of those on the marches who are Muslims do not distinguish between Israel and people of the Jewish faith, nor do I doubt that many others in society with anti-semitic prejudices are using the situation to indulge their hatred of Jews. But nothing I saw among the large number of likely non-Muslims on the demonstrations, despite their obvious anti-Israel fervour, led me, Jewish by birth and upbringing as I am but of no religious faith, to attribute to them anti-semitic motives.

Crime scenes

But if it’s not anti-semitism, what is it? What makes them (and the left generally) want to give such unique prominence to horror and injustice in this one particular situation rather than talk about any of the other comparable or manifestly worse situations that exist in many other parts of the globe?

A recent issue of the Socialist Standard gave voice to this very question. It featured on its front cover the caption ‘Crime Scene Investigation’ and listed six horror scenarios taking place in the world at the moment – Yemen, Gaza, Ukraine, Congo, Syria and Iraq. It could have listed many other examples of groups of people, many of them minorities, being horribly oppressed and downtrodden (eg, Kurds in Turkey, Rohingya in Myanmar, Uyghurs in China, civil war in Sudan). Yet we see no particular protest about these scenarios by the groups and individuals demonstrating about Gaza. So why the focus on Israel alone? And why, when a situation like the current one arises, do they harden their already existing anti-Israeli stance and dedicate themselves to campaigning solely against that country and its government?

Anti-Americanism

As previously indicated, I see no evidence for anti-semitism as the motive. I attribute it rather to the anti-Americanism on the left of Western politics which dates back a long way and, despite all changes in circumstances, still survives. It goes back to the old nostalgic belief that there was somehow something good and positive about the first country to call itself ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’, ie, the old Soviet Union, and therefore more or less automatically something bad and negative about those countries and their governments that opposed it, and in particular the United States which had the most power and influence and to a large extent dominated and dictated the policies of the Western world. America was therefore the major enemy of the left and, despite everything that has happened since the end of the Soviet Union, that remains as a residual, almost visceral, feeling on the left and resurfaces with a vengeance whenever a situation arises in which a country is seen as being supported by the United States or is, in any sense, one of its clients. And this is the position of Israel today. And so, almost instinctively, without anti-semitism needing to enter into the equation, Israel and whatever action its government may take has to be opposed by those on the left because in it actions the hand of the American oppressor is seen.

So, no anti-Houthi demonstrations despite the fact that the Houthi terrorise the Yemen, operating stringent policies of repression against all who oppose them and against women and gay people; no demonstrations against Russia’s bombing of civilians in Ukraine; no demonstrations against mass slaughter and rape in the Congo; no demonstrations against China’s brutal treatment of the Uyghurs; and no demonstrations against the vicious slaughter and expulsion of the Rohingya by the military government in Myanmar. The common denominator of all these situations is that there is no obvious American hand in or support for the repression taking place.

Socialism as it really is

This is the kind of thing I would have tried to say if I’d attended that SWP meeting in my community centre. I would not have accused those present of anti-semitism, since I do not believe them to be anti-semitic, but I would have challenged them to examine their motives for such a disproportionate focus on only one of capitalism’s crime scenes compared to the very many others. And I would have invited them to consider joining with the Socialist Party to campaign not for better or ‘fairer’ conditions within capitalism (which at bottom is what they do) but for getting rid of the system that gives rise to those conditions and replacing it by a leaderless, borderless, moneyless world of voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and service based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need – which is what ‘socialism’ really is.

Howard Moss