Material World: a world without war (2022)

The Material World Column from the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

We go into another new year and as in previous years, it is under the looming prospect of war. Working people may once again be called upon to take part in another slaughter where men, women and children will suffer.

It is easy to blame individuals for starting wars, and some are certainly guilty, but the fundamental culprit is the capitalist system. Since capitalism is a predatory social and economic system, predatory personalities tend to rise to power who view the world through a lens of aggression. But it’s not merely a capitalist delusion, they are in fact surrounded by enemies.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated into independent regimes of oligarchs, and when China’s Communist Party promoted private enterprise as government policy, the intellectuals who had insisted that the Cold War was a conflict between competing ideologies were proved wrong. Meanwhile the small Marxist voices that had always explained the rivalry between the Great Powers as an economic one for the control of raw materials and trade routes were shown to hold the more accurate analysis. The danger of war arises inevitably out of the very nature of capitalism.

As 2022 begins we are faced with a number of flashpoints that could feasibly ignite into war. These are:

1. The important sea-lanes of the South China Sea with its scatter of strategic small islands, as well as the unresolved status of Taiwan. The UK, USA and Australia have established the AUKUS security pact, complementing treaties with Japan, the Philippines and others, aimed at the encirclement of China. Capitalism forces countries to compete in the world market and to strive for aims that cannot be satisfied. The rivalry between China and the US is unavoidable and a trade war can so easily escalate into an actual blood-and-guts war.
2. With echoes of the Eastern Front, at the borders of Ukraine and Belarus, Russian forces confront those of the NATO alliance. Army manoeuvres are regularly taking place to be prepared for military conflict.
3. Iran, an aspiring regional power in the Middle East, enduring the slow strangulation of stringent economic sanctions, challenges the neighbouring oil sheikdoms using proxy militias, and the Gulf States now have a new friend in Israel. A shadow war is already being engaged in with the mining of ships and in the Straits of Hormuz, the main sea route for oil tankers, the scene is of regular stand-offs between warships.
4. And then there is the Horn of Africa, where countries are too poor to feed their peoples yet have the ability to build armies and engage in wars which too often involve other countries.

Of all the many problems that capitalism has not solved, war is a perennial and always ominous threat.

War is fought for the interests and advantages of the ruling class, to protect or extend capitalist profits. Of course, no politician will ever admit going to war for such shabby motives. Every war has to be justified with such reasons as ‘humanitarianism’, the defence of the national interest, or upholding international ‘justice’, otherwise, very few citizens would sacrifice their lives or surrender their liberties so willingly. Each nation’s political leaders will argue that ‘our’ government’s foreign policy is ‘just’ while ‘their’ government’s foreign policy exists because their leader is a warmongering militarist adventurer. ‘Our’ side was forced into a ‘defensive’ position due to the other nation’s ‘aggression’. The noble talk about protecting ‘democracy’ is cant and hypocrisy. Every war is justified by a massive propaganda effort to demonise the enemy. It is the bait to hook us into giving our approval to an orgy of armament spending and profiteering.

Capitalism breeds wars. In order to secure peace we need to create a cooperative commonwealth where things are no longer produced for profit, but to satisfy people’s needs. This involves a struggle known as the class war, and this is the only war which workers should engage in. Yet the tragic reality remains that men and women still seem more willing to work and die for capitalism than to work and live for socialism.

If we are to eliminate wars we must understand that we need to transform the minority class ownership of the means of production and distribution into common ownership, producing for use instead of for profit.

ALJO

Refugees: No safe place (2022)

From the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

To be a worker in capitalist society is to be deprived of any form of ownership of the means of living and therefore of having any real control of your own life. Being forced to sell your labour-power to an employer can lead to a precarious existence where you may end up becoming unemployed or even homeless. If you are unlucky enough to live in a war zone, you may be forced to flee your home and attempt to seek a new life elsewhere. You would then fall prey to ruthless smuggling gangs and come up against the brutality of state forces ranged against you. Sadly, this was the fate of 27 refugees who drowned while trying to make the treacherous crossing over the Channel on 24 November. This tragedy was not unforeseen, in fact it was one waiting to happen given the heavy traffic in the Channel. These were not the first deaths arising from these crossings nor will they be the last. Like the unemployed and the homeless, refugees and migrants are vilified as scroungers and ne’er-do-wells.

Political pawns

The response of the political leaders to the refugee crisis in Calais reveals the paucity of thinking that characterises modern capitalist politics. The rational course of action would have been for the UK and French governments to co-operate to find a solution to this problem. However, Boris Johnson’s government came to power on the basis of ‘Get Brexit Done’ and ‘to take back control of the UK’s borders’. To keep his more xenophobic supporters on board a little bit of Euro bashing did not go amiss. Emmanuel Macron, with his eye on next April’s presidential election and the need to play the patriotic card to see off his rivals on the far right, Eric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen, was more than eager to pick up the gauntlet. Boris Johnson sent Macron an open letter outlining proposals he knew that he would not accept, such as joint patrols by both British and French forces on the French coast. Macron’s response was to withdraw an invitation for the British Home Secretary to attend a meeting to discuss the movement between people in the sea between France and the UK. The refugees in Calais had become pawns in this game of tit for tat.

The UK government has used demeaning terms such as ‘economic migrants’ to refer to refugees and when they do arrive on British shores they are classified as illegal immigrants. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, had the not too bright idea of the British Border patrol to push back the refugee boats to France. Any ramming by ships of these overloaded dinghies would likely cause them to capsize and their occupants drown. It is unlikely that many skippers would want to stand trial for murder or manslaughter. The forthcoming Nationalities and Borders bill will further tighten restrictions. One clause seeks to deport refugees if it is found that they passed through a ‘safe’ country.

Boris Johnson’s government shed crocodile tears over the drownings and offered their condolences to the victims’ families. Both the French and UK governments diverted attention from their own culpability by blaming the people smugglers, which ignored the fact that closing off the legal routes for refugees to come to the UK had gifted opportunities to the smugglers to make profits out of people’s miseries.

Demonisation

This tragedy has not ended the demonisation of refugees. In this op-ed piece for RT dated 25 November: ‘The four star hotels, the free healthcare and the generous benefits system have, according to French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, made the UK an ‘El Dorado’ for would-be migrants. I hate to say it, but I agree with him’ (‘I predicted a migrant tragedy months ago. Why didn’t the UK and France prevent it?’, former UKIP leader Paul Nuttall).

Kevin Hurley, a retired British police officer, in another op-ed piece about the situation in Calais, seems to suggest that the local people find many of the refugees menacing: ‘Yes, I saw some tragic Kurdish families, but they were few and far between compared to the hordes of young men loitering about or just staring. I found it frightening (‘As an ex-cop, I know how hard it is to stop the flow of illegal migrants into Britain’, RT, 30 November).

If you read the press and listen to the politicians all you will learn is that the refugees want to come here to help themselves to our goodies and what measures can we take to stop them. What you do not hear so much of is what drives them to risk their lives to come to the West.

Forced to migrate

It is no surprise to find that most of the refugees come from these countries – Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Syria. Three of them have been embroiled in wars of various kinds. Two of them were occupied by the US and the UK. However, it is not just the military warfare that is driving some of the workers in these countries to seek a better life abroad, but the economic warfare waged mainly by the Western powers. Since the first Gulf war, the US and Britain have imposed economic sanctions on the Iraqi regime. Sanctions were also imposed on Syria and Iran. The economic cost weighed most heavily on the workers, with the political leaders remaining relatively unaffected. Many of the 27 who drowned were Kurds from northern Iraq. That many of the refugees are Kurds from Iraq, Syria and Iran is no accident. They are oppressed minorities in these countries. In Iraq and Syria Kurdish forces fought with western forces against Isis. When they were no longer of use to the West, they were abandoned to their fate (‘The West has played its part in driving migrants from home’, Patrick Cockburn, i weekend, 27/28 November 2021).

The liberal left talk about how refugees should be treated more humanely and that more legal channels should be opened up for them to come to the UK and make their claims. This, they argue, would reduce the risk of deaths. The SWP blames the Tory government for the deaths in the Channel. They claim ‘Anti-racists have to demand open borders and a welcome for refugees’ (Socialist Worker, 24 November). However, even the SWP acknowledges that the Labour Party is also in favour of taking action to stop Channel crossings.

More political pawns

Sadly, it is not just Calais that is a flashpoint in the refugee crisis. We have witnessed violent confrontations between refugees and border guards on the border between Poland and Belarus. Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, cynically encouraged refugees to come into Belarus and attempt to cross the Polish border, where they have met fierce resistance from the Polish border patrols. As we have seen with the situation in Calais, the refugees are being used as pawns in a dispute between two capitalist powers. Lukashenko wishes to put pressure on the EU to remove the sanctions that they imposed on his regime following his rigged election last year. It appears that Russia is backing him and may have their own interests in this game.

This conflict affords an opportunity for the Polish capitalist leaders to gain political kudos from the EU, with which they have been in dispute over their judicial reforms, by appearing to be defending the EU border against outsiders. The EU’s high-minded ideals of freedom of movement and respect for human dignity do not seem to apply to these refugees. They are hell-bent on keeping them out and there was even talk of building a wall (sounds familiar). Erdoğan, the Turkish president, also used the refugees as bargaining chips when he threatened to unleash them on the Greek border. The Moroccan government also made similar threats of doing the same at the Spanish border.

World-wide

As with every crisis in capitalist society – unemployment, homelessness and workers relying on food banks – the refugee crisis has become ‘normalised’, yet there is nothing normal about it.

The refugee crisis spans the globe. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees there are more than 20 million refugees worldwide. As we have seen, war is a major driver for migration, but it is not the only one. Climate change is another which is rendering large parts of the globe, particularly the poorer parts, uninhabitable. And there is large-scale poverty.

The response of the major capitalist powers has been to tighten up their borders. Workers in these countries are encouraged to view immigrants and refugees as the other. Rather than see them as fellow workers with common interests, they regard them as competitors for jobs, welfare and health services. In the US, under Trump, a wall on the border with Mexico was partially built and migrant children were locked in cages. In the UK, a hostile environment towards immigrants was created which led to the Windrush scandal. The worldwide refugee crisis lays bare the utter brutality and cynicism of capitalism.

The leftist demands to create legal processes that treat migrants more humanely and calls for the sacking of right-wing governments can only scratch the surface. The fundamental problem is capitalism itself. In its drive for profits and division of the world into competing nation states, it creates the conditions that give rise to the wars, climate disasters and poverty that compel workers to leave their homes and seek sanctuary in safer places. What the world working class needs to do is combine democratically to obtain political power on a world scale to abolish capitalism and replace it with world socialism. National frontiers will be abolished and there will be one world community where everyone will be able to participate equally. There will be no wars or poverty and no need for people to flee their homes and seek refuge elsewhere.

Oliver Bond

What is going on in Belarus? (2021)

From the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 An interview with Dmitry Kosmachev, a member of the Minsk Socialist Circle, about the situation in Belarus, the current protests, and where they may lead.

Stephen Shenfield: In the 1990s I made visits to five of the new post-Soviet republics – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan. I got the impression that the situation for working people in Belarus was relatively tolerable. Only in Belarus did I find no evidence of people engaged in a desperate struggle to survive. The regime was authoritarian but enjoyed wide support. There were no serious ethnic conflicts.

How accurate was my impression? And how has the situation changed since then?

Dmitry Kosmachev: You are quite right. Even today things are better here in Belarus than elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. In Belarus, unlike Russia and other republics, large-scale privatization of factories, land, and farms has not taken place. Soviet-era industry has not been dismantled and is still competitive. Our trucks, tractors, and buses are bought not only by post-Soviet states but also by some Third World countries. We import our dairy products from other former Soviet republics, not from the EU. We even continue to export clothes and shoes to other former Soviet republics, despite the ubiquity of cheap Chinese imports.

This situation is reflected in our social structure. For one thing, we have preserved a large industrial working class. And with industry remaining in the hands of the state Belarus, unlike Russia and Ukraine, has no ‘oligarchs’ – extremely rich capitalists who influence politics and create their own parties. The levels of crime and corruption are relatively low here, thanks in part to tough measures. The death penalty still exists in Belarus.

SS: Would you say then that Belarus has a more just society than Russia and Ukraine?

DK: No, the preponderance of state capitalism in Belarus does not make it a welfare state. For example, Russia has more progressive labour legislation than we do. In Russia there are several alternative trade union federations, while Belarus has only one trade union independent of the state. It was created and registered under Lukashenko’s predecessors. In Belarus it is almost impossible to conduct a strike in compliance with the formal requirements of labour law. Russian law requires an employer who wants to dismiss a worker to provide two weeks’ warning and three months’ severance pay, while most Belarusian workers are employed on the basis of short-term – usually annual — labour contracts, so that at the end of the year they can be fired without benefits, simply by not renewing their contract.

There has been partial privatization in Belarus. Fully state-owned enterprises have been transformed into joint-stock companies in which the majority of shares are held by the state and a minority by the director. This gives the director a financial interest in the performance of the enterprise, but he remains dependent on the state and can always be dismissed if deemed disloyal.

SS: How has the political situation changed since the 1990s?

DK: Lukashenko did have wide support in the 1990s. He did not need to cheat in order to win elections. People were afraid of what was happening in Russia and Ukraine – the destruction of the Soviet-era economy, the instability, the rising crime, the corruption. In Belarus industrial enterprises continued to operate. Crime was low, as I said.

At that time the opposition did not have wide support. They were nationalist intellectuals with an orientation toward Poland. Nor were they very honest. In fall 2001 the following joke made the rounds:

Who launched the attack on the World Trade Center? The Belarusian opposition, so as not to have to account for grants received from the US government.

In the presidential election of September 2001 Lukashenko inflicted a crushing defeat on the opposition candidate.

But as they say, ‘dripping water wears away the stone.’ There grew up a new generation of young people. They often travelled to Poland and Lithuania – countries that have close historical connections with Belarus – and there they saw a completely different level of freedom. Meanwhile Lukashenko was coming to resemble a Latin American dictator. He started to take his youngest son Nikolai with him everywhere he went. The boy is now 17 years old. This, clearly, is our Kim Jong Un.

The protests that followed Lukashenko’s victory in the presidential election of 2006, influenced by similar protests in Ukraine, showed that by then the opposition had acquired a broader base. Many previously ‘non-political’ students took part. They set up a tent camp on Kalinovsky Square, one of the central squares of Minsk. It stood there two weeks before being brutally broken up by special police.

SS: What led up to the current protests?

DK: The presidential election of 2020 was carefully prepared. Would-be candidates whom Lukashenko considered serious rivals were barred from standing. Thus he did not allow the registration of Viktor Babariko, former chairman of the board of Belgazprombank (Belarus Gas Industry Bank), which has links to the huge Russian gas company Gazprom. The famous blogger Sergei Tikhanovsky, who also intended to stand, was arrested on farfetched charges.

All the same, Lukashenko needed a sparring partner, a rival whom he would easily defeat. He thought that a woman would be a weak candidate – men would never vote for her – so he allowed the registration of Sergei Tikhanovsky’s wife, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. But it turned out that voters were fed up with Lukashenko and most were willing to vote for a woman. The president and his team falsified the results. According to the official figures, Lukashenko won with 80% of the vote. But most people were more inclined to believe Tikhanovskaya’s claim that she had won at least 60%. She has now been allowed to go abroad.

Falsification of the election results triggered an unprecedented outburst of public indignation.

SS: How do the current protests compare with protests in the past?

DK: First, they are much more massive. The demonstration in Minsk on October 25 was 100,000 strong, which is quite impressive for a city of two million. There have been separate marches of students and women.

Second, these protests have occurred throughout the country, even in the smallest towns. Past protests were confined to the capital.

Naturally, such large and nationwide protests have a broader social composition than earlier protests, the participants in which were mostly students, people in the arts, small businesspeople, and workers in the Information Technology sector.

SS: Have the protests been accompanied by strikes?

DK: In August the opposition managed to organize a quite powerful nationwide strike movement. They tried again at the end of October, after Tikhanovskaya called for a general strike, but this time they failed.

SS: When you mention ‘the opposition’ I suppose you are referring primarily to the Belarusian Popular Front?

DK: No, no, you remember the Belarusian Popular Front from the 1990s, but today this organization is virtually non-existent. The opposition is now represented by other structures. Since the 90s it has become somewhat less nationalist and more pro-Western and liberal. One of the main points in the economic program of the opposition’s presidential candidate was privatization.

SS: Is there a significant section of the population that actively supports the regime?

DK: Lukashenko has many supporters, but their support is passive in nature. When he needs people to attend a rally, he summons school teachers, workers for public utilities, and others who depend on the state for their livelihood.

SS: Should libertarian socialists support the protest movement? What is your opinion?

DK: My opinion is that they should not. Definitely not! Libertarian anti-authoritarian socialists should support neither the dictator nor the liberals.

Unfortunately, however, there are several other groups of self-styled ‘anti-authoritarian socialists’ who are taking an active part in these protests. This is true of anarchists, the Green Party, and the Belarusian Left Party ‘Just World’ – former ‘communists’ who oppose Lukashenko and adhere to the platform of the Party of the European Left [a coalition of ‘communists’ and ‘social democrats’ in EU countries–SS].

A band of four anarchists even tried to start a guerrilla war. They crossed the border from Ukraine illegally with weapons, committed several acts of sabotage, and were arrested while trying to return to Ukraine.

SS: The political situation in Belarus is developing against the background of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Is there any connection between them? How is the pandemic affecting Belarus?

DK: The number of people diagnosed with Covid-19 in Belarus is 106,000, of whom 91,000 have recovered. About 1,000 have died. For a country with a population of 9.5 million this is not catastrophic.

Lukashenko has responded to the threat of Covid-19 with much less drastic measures than those adopted in Russia and Ukraine. Throughout the spring and summer no restrictions were imposed on economic activity. On May 9 the authorities even held a national football competition and a military parade to mark the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. Planes from abroad were allowed to land at the airport, though passengers were required to self-isolate for two weeks, as were people who had been in contact with Covid-19 patients inside the country.

The relatively weak official response to the pandemic may have contributed to the protests in a small way. Many people have voluntarily limited their contacts and worn masks and gloves as a sort of challenge to the authorities.

SS: Is Russia in any way involved in the situation in Belarus?

DK: Lukashenko has usually tried to maintain his independence by balancing between Russia and the EU. There is tension in his relationship with Putin. On the eve of the presidential election there was even a scandal with the arrest of Russian mercenaries who — claimed the Belarusian authorities – had come to Minsk to stage an armed coup against Lukashenko. In fact, they were just waiting for a plane to Turkey to fly from there to Africa. At Russian airports almost all foreign flights have been cancelled on account of the pandemic, whereas Belarus remains open for flights.

But when Lukashenko faced mass protests he abandoned anti-Russian rhetoric and ran to Putin for help. And Putin agreed to help. Not, however, by sending troops or special police to suppress protests, but by sending political experts – so-called ‘political technologists’ — to raise the abysmal quality of the regime’s propaganda and improve Lukashenko’s terrible domestic and international image. It is these experts who are to be congratulated for the fact that the propaganda programs of state television channels have become more professional. The hope must be that Lukashenko can learn from the more flexible political system of Putin’s Russia, which provides scope for dissent ‘within the system’ and is more selective in applying repression.

SS: Are there any countries apart from Russia with which the Belarusian regime has good relations?

DK: Lukashenko considers the Maduro regime in Venezuela an ideological ally. A monument has been erected in Minsk to Simon Bolivar [the anti-colonial leader who is the inspiration for Venezuela’s ‘Bolivarian Revolution’–SS] and one of the city squares has been renamed in his honour. State-owned Belarusian construction companies have built several blocks of apartments in Caracas.

SS: Please tell us about the Minsk Socialist Circle.

DK: The Minsk Socialist Circle is a group of 30—40 lecturers and students in the humanities at universities in Minsk. It arose out of an optional course of lectures on the history of socialist thought given at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Belarusian State University in 2017 to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution. Those of us who started the circle shared a felt need to find a new model of society to restart the socialist project that had been discredited by the Bolsheviks. We hold seminars, public meetings, and discussions with representatives of other left-wing organizations.

SS: So the idea is to make people more aware of non-Bolshevik currents in the history of socialist thought, so that they will distinguish between Bolshevism and socialism as such – and not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

DK: As Belarus was part of the Russian empire and before that of Poland, its territory was the scene of the activities of many Russian, Polish, and Jewish socialist parties.

SS: Right. My grandmother, who was from Smorgon in the north-western corner of Belarus, was in the Jewish Socialist Bund. But what about Belarusian socialists?

DK: There were Belarusian socialists as well, but fewer of them. And it was also in Belarus that there arose the first anarchist organizations in the Russian Empire. So our country has a rich tradition of socialist thought – a tradition that was never completely eradicated either through the long years of the Soviet Union or under the Lukashenko dictatorship.

SS: Are you especially inspired by any particular non-Bolshevik tradition?

DK: Yes, we feel a special affinity with those non-Marxist socialists in the tsarist empire who were known in Russian as narodniki. There is no satisfactory equivalent of this term in English. It comes from the word narod, meaning ‘the people,’ because the narodniki believed in ‘going to the people.’ In the 19th century thousands of educated young people went to the villages to preach the ideals of socialism. Hoping to gain the trust of uneducated peasants, they dressed in simple clothes and arranged to work as rural artisans, doctors, and teachers. It was the narodniki who formed the People’s Will Party and later the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries.

By the way, Sergei Stepnyak, at whose London funeral William Morris made one of his last speeches, was a narodnik.

SS: They also committed acts of terror, didn’t they?

DK: Some did. It was the People’s Will Party that planned and carried out the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. You see, the first attempts to ‘go to the people’ failed. The peasants distrusted the strangers from the cities and turned them in to the police. That led some narodniki in Russia to resort to terrorism. But the narodniki in Belarus never did so. There was a separate Belarusian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, led by a woman teacher – Poluta Bodunova, who died in the Stalinist GULAG.

In any case, there is no longer such a wide gap between conscious socialists and working people. The tradition of ‘going to the people’ can still serve us as an ethical guide.

SS: How many people do you reach?

DK: Attendance at our meetings has risen to about a hundred people. And lectures on Marxism or on the history of the socialist movement can attract hundreds of interested young students. True, that is not much by comparison with the crowds of tens or even hundreds of thousands at mass meetings of the liberal opposition. But just a couple of years ago a mere handful of people came to our meetings.

Now is a good time for socialist propaganda. More and more people are getting disillusioned with the liberal opposition. At the same time, they realize that the Lukashenko regime embodies all the worst features of bureaucratic society in the Soviet era. We do not want to lead people into a new version of the same sort of impasse. That is the focus of heated debates between us and the traditional left parties and groups, who unambiguously associate themselves with the tradition of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union. I hope that the ideas of anti-authoritarian socialism will again take root in our country.

SS: Are the members of your circle affected by the current repressions?

DK: Yes. Lukashenko is demanding that students who have taken part in the protests be expelled from institutions of higher education. Although we have not taken part in the protests, we too are threatened with expulsion. We may also be deprived of access to the premises where we hold our meetings.

SS: What prospects do you see for Belarus?

DK: In our opinion, the protests are unlikely to improve the situation in the country. If Lukashenko succeeds in suppressing them, there will be less freedom and more repression. If the liberal opposition manages to overthrow the Lukashenko regime, there will be more political freedom. However, a liberal government will probably pursue a policy of privatization. Europe is still the liberals’ ideal. They do not want to know that capitalism is in a deep systemic crisis and they do not want to learn from what privatization has brought about in Russia and Ukraine.

Privatization will create a new class of powerful and wealthy oligarchs and a new split in society. Industry will be dismantled and asset-stripped. Workers will find themselves out on the street with no chance of employment in accordance with their skills, while productive enterprises are turned into warehouses and shopping malls. Agriculture will also be destroyed.

We may then see unfold in Belarus a tragedy similar to what has occurred in Ukraine. The destabilization of society may lead to confrontation between eastern regions connected with Russia and western regions drawn toward the European Union.

SS: But surely Belarus does not have the sharp cultural and ethnic division between eastern and western regions that characterizes Ukraine?

DK: Belarus has a similar division, even though it is not as sharp. In Grodno, in the west of the country, most people speak Belarusian, while in the east – in Gomel and Vitebsk – as well as in Minsk the main language spoken is Russian. Ukraine represents a worst-case scenario for Belarus. There are grounds to hope that it will be avoided. Unlike the protests against Yanukovych in Ukraine, which were almost all in the western and central parts of the country, the protests here in Belarus are nationwide. There is no counter-movement for Lukashenko or for joining Russia.

SS: What is the message of the Minsk Socialist Circle to the citizens of Belarus?

DK: In this situation, we can only appeal to people’s reason, remind them of the socialist traditions of our country, and emphasize the need for a system based on social justice, coordination of the interests of all population groups, genuine popular control over public property, and the widest self-government. Our slogan today is: Neither dictatorship nor privatization, but people’s self-government and workers’ self-management!

Editorial: Capitalist chaos (2021)

Editorial from the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Looking at the world today there are few words that more aptly describe what is going on than the word chaos. We have seen street protests which at times have descended into violent confrontations. Earlier in the year the Black Live Matters protests erupted in the United States and elsewhere in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. Many Belarusan workers unhappy with what is seen as the rigged re-election of Alexander Luschenko as president have taken to the streets to demand his resignation, Violent clashes between demonstrators and police have rocked Paris over a controversial security bill that will outlaw the photographing of police by bystanders. Wars are raging unabated in the Middle East and elsewhere. The US has experienced one of the most acrimonious Presidential campaigns in recent years revealing a great deal of anger and division within American society. Closer to home, we have the tortuous process of Brexit negotiations dragged on. The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the turmoil. Is it because we have the misfortune to be ruled by megalomaniacs and buffoons? Is human nature to blame?

In asking these questions we will come up with the wrong answers. What we need to look at is how human society is organised. Globally, humanity lives under capitalism, where the human race is divided into two antagonistic classes, the capitalist class, who own the means of production, and the working class, who have to sell their labour power to live. Capitalism can only exist through the production for profit and competition. This leads necessarily to economic crises and war. When the capitalists are unable to make a profit, as has been the case in the recent lockdowns ordered by governments to combat the coronavirus, businesses close and unemployment soars. Competition between capitalist enterprises in the market place periodically lead to crises of overproduction, as we saw in the 2008/2009 financial crash.

Competition between rival states can and often descend into armed conflict. We have seen this happen in the Yemen and in the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Unfortunately, there is also competition between workers over jobs and social benefits. Divisions appear among workers on the grounds of ethnicity and culture, between highly skilled and less skilled workers, between employed and unemployed workers. Being excluded from the means of living, workers are alienated and have feelings of powerlessness. This, at times, is manifested in anger and frustration, which leads to political support for populist politicians like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.

The solution is not a change in leaders, but a fundamental change in how we organise society. The working class need to organise consciously and democratically to take political control of the state and convert the current system of private property into one of common ownership, where everyone has equal access to the social product, without the need of money as a means of exchange. There will be no nation states or classes. Just one world community.

We wish our readers, in the absence a happy, at least a safe New Year.

Voice From The Back: Capitalism's Priorities (2009)

From the October 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism's Priorities

As various pieces of legislation pass through the US governmental machine it is often observed that the process is torturously slow. An example of this tardy procedure has recently been revealed in the proposed Health Bill. No such delay is evidenced when it comes to military budgets. "With hardly any debate, a powerful Senate committee Thursday approved President Barack Obama's $128 billion request for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for the budget year beginning in October. The move came as anxiety is increasing on Capitol Hill over the chances for success in Afghanistan and as Obama weighs whether to send more forces to the country. The war funding was approved as the Appropriations Committee voted unanimously for a $636 billion spending measure funding next year's Pentagon budget." (Huffington Post, 10 September) The health of the American working class is obviously of less importance than the military needs of the owning class.

Poisoned by capitalism

Capitalism is a poisonous society. Thousands of coal miners have suffered lung diseases, thousands more in shipyards and factories have been maimed by asbestos. In the mad scramble for more and more profits the owning class have endangered the health and even the life of the working class. From China comes this latest example of the profit system's murderous nature. "More than 2,000 children have been found to have lead poisoning because Chinese factories greedy for profit have spewed out pollutants without carrying out even the most minor environmental monitoring. Officials announced yesterday that 1,354 children under 14, who had been living and going to school for more than two years within a few hundred metres of a manganese smelter, had excess lead in their blood. Local officials said that the numbers could rise when further tests were carried out." (London Times, 21 August)

Champagne Socialists

In the past when Southern Californian fruit growers were faced with a glut and falling prices they let the fruit rot on the trees. When castigated for this apparent madness they pointed out the quite logical capitalist argument that they would have to pay pickers wages for fruit they couldn't sell. When again they were taken to task for this argument they were offered by some charitable organisations the prospect of them supplying free labour and they would distribute to the needy. Again the fruit growers had an answer to that. "Every year charitable organisations buy at cut-rate prices our unsold surplus. Giving it away would even spoil that source of income for us." The fruitgrowers may have appeared heartless but from an economic standpoint letting the fruit rot seemed the logical action. A similar solution is being followed today by French wine producers. “Hopes of a glut of cheap champagne are set to be dashed when vineyards meet next week to agree on a big cut in production to prop up prices. With sales falling, producers may be ordered to leave up to half their grapes to wither on the vine in an attempt to squeeze the market." (London Times, 29 August) Capitalism is a crazy system, obviously inside socialism we would deal with the problem by drinking more champagne.

A Ten Million Pound View 

The newspapers are full of stories of unemployed workers suffering the indignity of their homes being re-possessed. Every day we hear of the crashing property market and the resultant misery suffered by hard working families. The story is completely different for members of the capitalist class of course. "At £10m it must be the most expensive sea view in Britain. A Russian multi-millionaire liked a plot of land on the coast at Sandbanks in Dorset so much that he was happy to pay £5m for it. The plot was already occupied by a substantial house, but he did not much like it so is paying the same again to have it knocked down and replaced with something better. The purchase last September by Maxim Demin, 39, a petrochemicals trader, shows that at the top end of the property market lavish spending has survived the slowdown." (Sunday Times, 13 September) There is nothing unique about the property market. In every market – housing, education, medical treatment, holidays and entertainment – "lavish spending has survived the slowdown".

A Modest Sort 

Away back in the bad old days we had ruthless dictators with over-bearing ideas of their own importance but today's leaders are much more modest fellows. In the past we had people like the despot Stalin who regularly polled over 100 percent at "elections", nowadays in "democratic" Belorussia we have more self-effacing creatures at the helm of state. "The Belorussian strongman, Alexander Lukashenko, admitted that he rigged the 2006 election because, he said, his popularity was so vast that the true margin of victory was unbelievable and had to be cut from 93 to 80 per cent." (London Times, 28 August)