ALB
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And their answer — step up the trade union struggle!
“we communists must tell proletarians that the rejection of war starts for proletarians with the intensification of the trade union struggle for wages and for a decrease in working hours.
The bourgeoisie will not be able to wage its war unless it can convince with its lying propaganda broad layers of the working class. We must counter this propaganda not only by responding with our truths to the lies of the ruling class. We must respond by directing the workers’ struggle to the material needs of the proletariat, a practical experience in which the lies and fallacious arguments of the bourgeoisie and their servants in the workers’ ranks are of little value.”As if the idea that political consciousness (other than Labourism) will emerge from the day-to-day struggle over wages and working conditions hadn’t been repeatedly shown to be wrong.
ps. I hesitate to mention it but they also talk about “class brothers”.
Lenin never disguised the fact that his model was the German war economy only to be controlled a supposedly “proletarian state” (ie a state controlled by the self-appointed “vanguard” of the working class) instead of by the Junker-capitalist state. It led him to insert yet another stage before communism — state capitalism.
Here’s two passages from The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, written in September 1917, ie before the Bolshevik coup.
“The dialectics of history is such that the war, by extraordinarily expediting the transformation of monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism, has thereby extraordinarily advanced mankind towards socialism. Imperialist war is the eve of socialist revolution! And this not only because the horrors of the war give rise to proletarian revolt—no revolt can bring about socialism unless the economic conditions for socialism are ripe—but because state-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs.”
“…socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/11.htm#v25zz99h-360
Sometimes people misspell hypocrisy as hypocracy but that’s not bad as a new word meaning rule by hypocrites.
What we said last time;
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-war-in-gaza.html?m=1
“In the 50-day military operation by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza in July to September 2014, 2,199 Gazans were killed, 70 percent of them civilians, 10,895 were wounded and 65,000 people left homeless. A third of hospitals were destroyed or damaged. Mufeed al-Hasayneh, Minister of Public Works, said Israel’s offensive on Gaza has caused over $5 billion of damage to homes and infrastructure. Some 10,000 homes have been completely destroyed, and 30,000 homes partially destroyed. In Shujaiyya, where some 110,000 people live, 60 percent of the homes were completely destroyed (Ma’an News Agency, 5 August 2014)”
They have already exceeded the killing and destruction of last time and they haven’t even started properly yet this time.
It looks as if the crazed Zionists in charge of the Israeli state are about to overplay their hand. The whole world is against what they are doing and are about to do to the population of Gaza. It’s not a question of breaking the so-called “rules of war” which are scrap of paper for those who win and are used only as a pretext to further kick those who lose. It’s about common humanity. Everybody can see that they are behaving in a completely inhumane way. As might is right in today’s capitalist world they will probably achieve their aim, but at the cost of exposing Zionism as a particularly nasty and cruel example of nationalism.
Yes but socialism is the only framework within which this could be done as the division of the world into competing capitalist states vying for economic and political dominance make it impossible under capitalism.
The same goes for other global problems such as global over-warming, world poverty, etc. they can only be dealt with rationally and properly within the framework of the common ownership and democratic control of the world’s natural and industrial resources.
So it could just be a mistranslation. The statement seems to have been written in French and then translated into the other languages. Their German translator appears to have been aware of the problem and translated it as:
“Auf beiden Seiten der Grenze sind wir Klassenbrüder und -schwestern!”
Paula, you can contact the ICC here to point out their lapse in apparently ignoring one half of the working class:
https://en.internationalism.org/contact
Here is the statement again you will be complaining about;
It will be interesting to see what they will reply.
The Labour Party, despicable lot that they are, supports the Israeli state’s “right” to try to starve the population of Gaza into submission but this has understandably disgusted a couple of their councillors in Oxford:
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23853529.oxford-labour-councillors-resign-keir-starmer-comments/#
There is this letter from a couple of years ago:
Unbelievable. Now the Israeli government announces a plan to ethnically cleanse part of Gaza by advising over a million people to leave the area voluntarily. Hopefully this is just a threat but the leaders of Israel could be sufficiently unbalanced to try to carry it out.
Talk about a rogue state. And the US and Britain are sending warships to support Israel
Yes, that’s a good statement, in plain English. Better than the CWO one, whose heading “The Latest Butchery in the Middle East is Part of the March to Generalised War”, reflects their mistaken view that another world war is economically necessary for capital accumulation to continue.
Both are far better than that other one that calls on Israeli soldiers to turn their guns on their officers. What they should be doing, if anything, is not agreeing to serve in the Israeli armed forces in the first place (as a few do each year).
Well, if socialism is pie in the sky and capitalism the only game in town, what do you see as the answer within capitalism to the oppression of Palestine’s non-Jewish inhabitants?
Our opposition to Zionism does not mean that we support the PLO or Hamas. While we can sympathise with our fellow workers when they are so obviously being oppressed, we cannot support armed uprising – even less massacres of fellow workers – to establish a Palestine state.
It is not just Jewish nationalism that we condemn. We condemn all nationalisms equally. The ‘Palestinian nation’ is just as much a myth as the ‘Jewish nation’, or any other nation. Just like most Jews, most Palestinians are workers and should also seek freedom from oppression through uniting with workers from the other parts of the planet to establish a world of common ownership and democratic control. A Palestine state would be just another capitalist state in which workers are exploited for profit, as they are in all capitalist states.
Nationalism is the ideology which seeks to justify the capitalist division of the world into separate ‘nation-states’, each competing to gain a place in the sun for its ruling class and each with killing machines at its disposal. We utterly reject this view of the way humanity should organise itself.
Our view is that all oppressed peoples should seek their liberation, not as members of nations or religions or ethnic groups, but as workers. They should unite to abolish the division of the world into so-called nation-states and to establish a world cooperative commonwealth of in which we will all be free and equal members – citizens of the world, not subjects of nation-states.
