The shooting down of a Russian plane by Turkey has opened people’s eyes to the bigger picture behind the dirty war against ISIS. There are much bigger dirty wars going on, and they are the proxy wars between the US and China/Russia imperialist blocs to back client regimes capable of smashing the workers revolutions. The Middle East is now a war zone in the growing confrontation between the two main imperialist blocs. It is high time for the Western left to break from its social imperialist legacy and fight for socialist revolution.
RT socialists in bed with Russian imperialism
Meanwhile the RT (Russia Today) left that takes it’s world view from the Russia state media giant, is still pretending that the Syrian civil war is no more than a US sponsored war to remove Assad, while Russia is defending the ‘democratically’ elected Assad regime. Liberal John Pilger says that Assad is ‘independent’. From what? Today Assad is dependent on Iran and its allies, Russia and China to put down a popular uprising. UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is against the UK bombing ISIS. Good but not good enough. He still looks to the UN to stop the civil war in Syria. Corbyn is taking a classic social democratic stand against the right wing Blairites who back imperialist war. He argues that a war under the aegis of the UN is somehow not imperialist. For him imperialism is not inscribed in the DNA of capitalism, rather it’s a disease that is “not nice to have”. By this reasoning, the ‘social imperialist’ (socialism at home and imperialism abroad) left rejects the reality that Russia and China are imperialist powers and defends them as ‘progressive’ regimes opposed to the world arch-enemy, US imperialism and its NATO allies.
Now that the frontlines between the two imperialist blocs are becoming clearly staked out, it’s obvious even to idiots that the Syrian revolution has for 5 years been suppressed by both imperialist blocs as part of the ‘great game’. We can see Russia’s dramatic upstaging of the US in the war on ISIS as evidence that Putin is no pawn of the US or EU. He has‘come out’ as an imperialist rival capable of breaking up NATO, dumping Turkey but drawing France and Germany closer to the orbit of the Russia/China bloc.
It is high time that the labour movement declared its independence from both imperialist blocs and stood for the class independence of the worlds workers. First it has to abandon it’s Eurocentrist faith in ‘good’ capitalist regimes like that of Assad who have killed 400,000 and exiled millions. It must recognise the Syrian civil war as today’s Spanish civil war, and send volunteers and arms to defeat Assad and to reinforce the secular armed masses of MENA to advance the revolution and overthrow the reactionary pro-imperialist regimes and kick them and their imperialist masters out!
Imperialism screws MENA
The Syrian people, like all those of MENA (Middle East and North Africa) are pawns in a power game between the two rival imperialist blocs. The main imperialist proxies (leaving out Israel a US tool), SA on the US side and Iran on the Russia/China side, happen to be Sunni and Shia respectively, so the battle lines have increasingly taken a sectarian form to rally and discipline their forces. There is a history to this.
Since it was kicked out Iran by the revolution in 1979 followed by the counter-revolutionary Shia Khomeini, the US and and its Israeli stooge has aimed its ‘axis of evil’ policy at Iran. The US backed Saddam in the Iraq/Iran war which Iraq lost. Saddam began to challenge the US in Kuwait in 1991 leading to the first Gulf war that killed over a million Iraqis in that war or by starving them with sanctions. At the same time the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the capitalist road in China made the US appear invincible. The 9/11 blowback punctured this illusion and Bush launched the frenzied ‘war on terror’ to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. The US smashed the Baathist regime because it began to swing towards Russia. He used the occupation to destroy the largely Sunni army leadership. It turns out that many of these leaders formed the beginning of what would become ISIS while in jail.
Born again Russia and China
The rise of China and Russia as new born imperialist powers in the 1990s and 2000s changed the balance of power in MENA and forced the US to compromise in tolerating regimes in Syria and Iraq that did not rock the boat. Israel, Saudia Arabia, the Gulf States and Turkey, did not recognise this ‘power sharing’. They opposed the Shia dominated regimes as extensions of Iran.
When in 2011 the Arab Spring broke out and the popular masses threatened to revive the Arab Revolution, the reactionary regimes tried to steer any development of the revolution for democracy and socialism into sectarian regimes. Behind the scenes NATO and SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) lined up with their Islamic proxies to contest the control of oil in MENA, but the main enemy was now the Arab revolution picking up momentum and threatening to overthrow their client dictators. This created openings for al Qaeda to re-emerge as the Sunni counterweight to the rival Shia sects sponsored by Iran and now backed by the China/Russia imperialist bloc. The Arab revolution would be declared dead and buried in a morass of sectarian infighting.
Instant repression such as in Bahrain, fake Muslim Brotherhood democracy followed by military dictatorship in Egypt, or NATO intervention in Libya, held the revolution at bay.
Only in Syria did an armed popular revolution threaten to overthrow a dictator. The US intervened mainly to starve the FSA of heavy weapons (as it had done in Libya) in the hope that Assad and the FSA would fight to a bloody draw. After 4 years the FSA looked like defeating Assad so Russia and Iran stepped up their military support. The US also tried to take over the popular revolution with by arming and training special forces without success. The long bloody stalemate in the civil war opened up a vacuum waiting to be filled by the radical Sunni sects like ISIS/Daesh willing to overthrow the Shia aligned regimes in Iraq and Syria. But Daesh was not prepared to act merely as a proxy for the US bloc, its origins in the former Baathist Iraqi regime meant it wanted to rewrite the old imperialist borders and stake out exploit its Sunni backing to build an Islamic State.
All of this proves that all the lying rhetoric coming out of both imperialist blocs about a ‘war on terror’ is bullshit to mask their own rotten role in screwing over MENA for at least a century. Their power grab today when the global crisis is pushing the US to aggressively challenge both Russia and China means that neither of which will back down if their strategic interests are involved. Daesh threatens the strategic interests of both blocs because it’s rhetoric directly challenges the DNA of imperialism to invade and plunder with its own virulent DNA to recreate a world wide Islamic State. Daesh is not a problem because it cuts throats and rapes women, but because it is not prepared to bow down to both the US or the Russia/China imperialist blocs. Those who defend either the US or Russia/China bloc in the name of ‘democracy’ in a ‘war on terror’ against ISIS are no more than apologists for the imperialism that dominates, invades, occupies and represses the Arab masses.
Survival Socialism!
How do we want to die? Ground down by a terminal crisis of global capitalism? In one or other of the proxy wars that fosters national, religious or tribal divisions all of which slaughters 100,000s of workers to smash their democratic or socialist revolutions? Surveilled and executed in our streets in a mayhem of global terror? Or will we survive all these only to face a slow death by climate or nuclear meltdown? Of course these are all in the last analysis manifestations of the decline and collapse of global capitalism. Economic crisis makes wars necessary and the massive waste and destruction of war-torn capitalism makes climate collapse more certain. I should by now be obvious that capitalism has to die for the working masses of the world to survive!
The question of whether this or that particular proxy war will blow up into a world war depends on how far the rival imperialist ruling classes will go to beat their rivals. If history is any indication they will go all the way. At a certain point bluff and counter-bluff may lead to adventurist actions that spark a meltdown. For example, Erdogan shooting down a Russian plane has been met by Russian sanctions on Turkey and economic and trade sanctions are always the opening gambit to war. But at each point in this destruction economic, military and ecological disaster can be stopped. They are man made, and more importantly, made by capitalism. Whether we succumb to the implosion of global capitalism critically depends on how quickly we can build a mass anti-imperialist movement in the West and the East that can unite our forces to halt the drive towards crisis, war and the sixth great extinction.
You can be sure that the only thing that will stop the imperialists and their client states from dragging the popular masses into a widening global war of terror is mass resistance. That is why it is essential to oppose imperialist warmongering from the West and the East and not to be diverted by the ‘war on terror’. Only by stopping imperialism at home from intervening directly or indirectly in MENA and by backing the popular secular forces fighting for democracy against imperialist and Islamic reaction can the Arab revolution rise again with any prospect of victory.
A new international revolutionary party
For this to happen, the political left that holds back the revolution with parliamentary talk of reformist compromises with the capitalists has to be removed. These are the Corbyns, the Sanders, the Syrizas, the union bosses, the NGO bureaucracies and the left commentariat that covers for them. Since the First Imperialist war, the working class has been capable of overthrowing capitalism. The only thing missing was a revolutionary party able to defeat the treacherous social imperialist leaders that acted as the agents of the ruling classes. In Russia a Bolshevik Party emerged and the revolution succeeded. Elsewhere social democracy prevailed and the revolutions were defeated and the epoch of fascism began. Today we need a new international revolutionary socialist party that can fulfil the task of overthrowing capitalism today!
While the capitalist ruling class and its apologists defend the worst excesses of capitalism in the name of ‘democracy’, we have to say that bourgeois democracy is a sham reserved only for those who can buy it. Parliaments are talkshops that divert us from the world of the workshops in which the working billions create the world’s wealth. We are forced to work for a wage because we have no other means to survive. Now that our survival itself is threatened by the capitalist system facing a terminal crisis and ecological collapse it is time for the working class to take control of the global economy and get rid of the system that exploits both workers and nature.
Comrade Dave Brownz is a NZ socialist blogger asking hard questions of global capitalism.
Dave, the devil is in the detail. You say We are forced to work for a wage because we have no other means to survive. Now that our survival itself is threatened by the capitalist system facing a terminal crisis and ecological collapse it is time for the working class to take control of the global economy and get rid of the system that exploits both workers and nature. . After being reasonably in alignment with your article the call to revolutionary arms lost me a bit, not because it is the wrong thing to do but because any socialist revolution will inherit a system of production that is inimical to our living arrangements with the planet. The real revolution will probably not be staged by humans but by the biosphere itself in rejecting industrial humanity. A socialist revolution could pre-empt this but without radically remodeling our current living arrangements the planet will again bat last. I doubt that humans, including Marxists can envisage a future in which low tech rules, high tech does not exist and the ability to drive an SUV to the “mall” will be a long forgotten dream. Try and sell that picture to prospective revolutionaries and they will cry out in anger (over their I-Phones and Facebook).
Modern-day commentators conveniently forget (or don’t even know) the history of the region: the British and French had the plan to carve it up to suit their own agendas long before the First World War had even ended. Over century ago it was mostly about oil and which nations got it.
Fast-forward a century and it is still about oil and which nations get it, which western political commentators prefer not to mention, since oil is the irreplaceable foundation of modern industrial societies and we have now reached the crunch point, both in terms of extraction and combustion, as you allude to.
The quick profits obtained from relatively-easily-extracted Middle East oil and gas are too much of a lure for the various factions of industrial empire to ignore, even as climate catastrophe threatens to wipe out humanity.
“Subdue the ‘rebels’ and get the pipeline from Qatar to Turkey built” say the multinational companies that control the western world these days.
Russia doesn’t want to play that game any more. And Russia has got better ‘stuff’ than other players.
This all must end very badly, since the ‘players’ will expend the last of their resources fighting over the last of the global resources -anything other than abandon the industrialism which is ‘killing’ the planet (the planet will eventually recover, of course, it’s humans that are f******).
The way to rescue humanity from extinction is to scrap all the old industrial technology that extracts and converts carbon for profit and then to utilise the most high tech aids that are available to produce for need.
The measure of high tech is the labour time saved. The internet and modern communication is part of that. Applying it in such as way as to reverse global warming is the challenge for us all.
The pre-condition is post-capitalism.
How do we get rid of global economy ? we cant even get rid of a bad government in NZ .
Getting rid of the global economy isn’t what we are really saying. What we are saying is make banking intermediaries go extinct like the abacus.
Corruption of concentrated power, Greed at the expense of the environment and people in slavery, also known in the west as banker occupation. In Europ, nothing embodies there forms of corruption more untrustworthy currency (in NZ it would be our clean green image, we do Feke all actually) but in Europ there monatary system is a complete basket case, highlighted by the Greek crises.
In Greece and wider Europ, to get around the dysfunctional euro, more to the point there dysfunctional leaders, IMF, ECB, central bankers, accountants ect ect, to completely cut them out of the exchange of goods, Greeks now use Bitcoin, this new emerging market saw Bitcoin over the last year go from 1 to 5 billion worth of goods being traded in Bitcoin.
It is in humanities nature to improve ourselves. There is billions of Bitcoin floating around Europe, and to capture crypto wealth you need the best ideas, instead of the old Ponzi scams were use to.
Bankers will try and control this new means of payment. But what they don’t understand is Bitcoin is triple entry accounting, meaning every transaction gets a receipt, obviously if every transaction banks made came with a receipt that could be easily looked up online. If for example some one came across a receipt (or as crypto users say a token) that said Barclays received a million Bitcoin from ISIS, well I hope you get the picture. Transparency is something banks will always shy away from.
There is no one central server for Bitcoin, so you can’t just lock it up in a room. Because the server (the infrastructure) and the algorithms are bought and stored on smart devices.
As monatary systems become increasingly dysfunctional, as banks start with holding funds like what is happening in Europe. Bitcoin will fill the demand for a safe and means of per to per transactions.
Assad is independent from what you ask. A Rotschild Central Bank.
The Viena talks cam to nothing. They (Russia, America and others) were suppose to come to an agreement about what to do about ISIS and the Iranian Nuclear deal.
That’s all bullshit now, from what Iv been able to gather from media reporting is that there has been no high level talks between any one other than ambassadors been called in over Paris or downing of airplanes. Even military commanders are doing the extraordinary and stepping into the media light in an effort to increase cooperation between superpowers.
Our leaders are crazy. There are no FDR or Eisenhower, Churchill types ect, there not war time leaders (Putin is, The Canadian PM could be) America is exporting there demistic psychosis, that is no reason for us to change our behaviour about war.
What we really need to do is get rid of the religious true believers from treasury that make important decisions about NZDF. Come up with a 50 acquisition plan agreed upon by both major political parties. And stick to it.
The simplest and most effective way of preserving the planet is to ignore the banks until they starve to death. Then, work two days a week and have a five day weekend. During your weekend, if you so chose , you can repair the things that have broke, socialise with people whom you love and care about , you can follow your gifts and play with them, you can build a house on a piece of land and what a great house ! No regulations, no bureaucracy , not scum insurers , no scum banksters, no bullying authority figures in the latest model 4×4 telling you this and telling you that. Just a great house built with common sense and collaboration from your friends and whanau. If it burns down, blows up or is blown away ? So what ? Shit happens and no grasping, greedy, scum bag is waiting in the wings to take advantage of your misfortunes, just the same friends and whanau to help you build another house , this time stronger etc. ( It should be said; the leaky house shit that went down ? Wasn’t the lay builder that caused that. It was qualified builders doing hyper speed cowboy jobs while making themselves millionaires using shit Fletchers materials. )
It amazes me that those who’re unlucky enough to have to live in cars / sheds / garages/ under bridges and horrifyingly with kids in tow never band together and actually build a fucking house out of what ever materials there are at hand on a piece of public land and just move in. Yeah, yeah , yeah . I know . The authorities would come along. Well, fuck the authorities shit up then for Christ’s sake. Then the police of course and then the AOS would ride in on their Gung Ho, motorised butt plugs and take out their little pop guns. Yeah, I know. If you try to build an emergency shelter for yourself and your kids on your own land out of freely available materials you will, ultimately, get shot. That’s truly the ultimate shove back from the push you would have made. Lets not pretend otherwise.
If you think the above is madness and silly and ridiculous ? Then what must you think of what we regard as normal now ? Life has become a fucking madness. We worry about an encyclopaedia of things night and day. We’re never far from anxiety and we work like fucking slaves and for what ? Mostly for faceless other fuckers getting rich off our time on our earth working for them. And even more outrageously ! Those faceless fuckers are foreigners . They don’t pay taxes here. They just fucking take from us! And those foreign fuckers use deals to do so brokered by our own scurrilous bastards here but at least we can actually get our hands on those pricks.
Penny dropped yet ?
@ Elle . I feel your frustration .
You lost me at “populist uprising”. Weren’t no such thing in Syria, or anywhere in your “MENA”.
PB much of the Western left has bought the conspiracy theory that the Syrian revolution never existed except as a project of the CIA.
They think that Bashar al Assad is a good guy.
This is an alibi for washing one’s hands of the revolution.
Here is some of the truth, there are plenty of other sources if you are interested.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/nov/26/how-hip-hop-and-heavy-metal-are-waging-war-in-syria?CMP=share_btn_fb
CB are you suggesting we all move (in spirit) to somewhere like Vanuatu without the airplanes and ships, because no bankers etc = no infrastructure, and no infrastructure means dumb arse humans just stand around waiting … to die.
There are just to many people and not enough free stuff, meaning stuff that doesn’t need fossil fuel etc to get to, like timber, food (for 7 billion), potable water coming out of the council tap (for 7 billion) clothes, shoes, child care ………… put yourself on the beach at say Port Vila, get a few friends and family together, now build …. yeah right.
As totally fucked as it all is, ‘we’ can’t make things any better when we are starting with 7 billion people to feed and keep warm.
“In Russia a Bolshevik Party emerged and the revolution succeeded.” – Comrade Dave
Then they got Stalin. Do you want another Stalin, Comrade Dave?
No. Stalin was a traitor to Bolshevism. Long story.
Stalin was the natural end result of Bolshevism. See also Mao, Pol Pot, the Kim family, Ceaucescu etc – mass murderers all. You need mass murder to create the worker’s paradise, Comrade!
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