Morning Comrades.
I know I said earlier in the week that I was going to talk a little about just what the lederhosen slapping insanity is going on in Germany and I might still do that at greater length but truth be told I am tired today, both physically and mentally especially because I am back in Germany and had to do a lot of German-ing. Trust me, for the un-indoctrincated it can be tiresome. For the time being, one of the most striking understandings I have had in the past few months is that large parts of the population is, still, utterly, ideologically convinced of their superiority, a accomplishment of their Nazi’s that, in comparison to other European societies, allows to fully negate any genuine reflection. They say they do, and the whole schtick of de-nazifaction, really, a beautiful example of pro-capitalist propaganda since the end of WW2, does exist in their ideology, yet it doesn’t. The violence that it so often “only” material based in other societies here is entirely, and utterly rooted in this unspoken acknowledgement of their own infallibility. There is more, and smarter people have thought and written about this but I am tired. Hold me to it though, and I’ll get it done.
What I wanted to tap into today though is spurred on by a brilliant little thread I caught earlier this week by Jason Hickel, a prominent Anthropologist, whose work I follow and mostly concur with. It illustrates brilliantly why I keep banging on about philosophical concepts, especially as scientific tools to help us understand the world around us. If it wasn’t clear this is a large part of this work here, introductions to tools that help us all figure this shit show out so that we can then build the world we want. To quote:
What the present moment reveals, once again, is that Western aggression during the "Cold War" was never just about destroying socialism, as such. It was about destroying movements and governments in the periphery that sought economic sovereignty.
Why? Because economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core. This remains the primary objective of Western aggression today. And it is the single greatest source of violence, war and instability in the world system. The reason Western powers went after socialist movements across the global South during the "Cold War" (Cuba, China, the incineration of Vietnam and North Korea, etc) was because they knew socialism would enable the South to regain control over their own productive capacities - their labour and resources and factories - and organize them around local needs and national development. When this happens - when people in the global South start producing and consuming for themselves - it means that those resources are no longer cheaply available to service consumption and accumulation in the core, thus disrupting the imperial arrangement on which Western capitalism has always relied (cheap labour, cheap resources, control over productive capacities, markets on tap). …
This is the key reason that Western powers supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, and it is why they support the Israeli regime today... as Western settler-colonial outposts that can be used to attack and destabilize regional movements seeking socialism or any form of real economic sovereignty, whether in Angola or Mozambique or Zimbabwe or any of the Arab nationalist or socialist movements in North Africa and the Middle East.
Iran has always been central to this story. Western states orchestrated a coup against the extremely popular prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. He was a left-leaning nationalist, not a socialist. But he wanted Iran to have control over its own resources (notably, oil), and for the US and Britain this was unacceptable. Mossadegh was replaced by a brutal Western-backed dictatorship. The revolution that finally overthrew the dictatorship in 1979 - and constituted the current government - wasn't even left-leaning, much less socialist. But they want national economic self-determination and that is sin enough. They are a target for the exact same reasons that Iraq and Libya were targets.
The same goes for China. China's path toward sovereign industrialization - whether socialist or not - means that it is no longer an easy source of cheap labour for Western capital. And as the supply price increases so too does the sabre-rattling from Western states and media. So this is the situation we are in.
The Western ruling classes are backing obscene violence and plausible genocide in Gaza, against overwhelming international condemnation, because they must shore up their regional outpost at virtually any cost. The vast majority of the world supports Palestinian liberation, but Palestinian liberation would constrain Israeli power and open the way to regional liberation movements, and this is strongly antithetical to the interests of Western capital. And now they are provoking war with Iran, risking regional conflagration, while at the same time encircling China with military bases, ramping up sanctions on Cuba, trying to contain progressive governments in Latin America, threatening invasion of the Sahel states... It is intolerable and it cannot continue.
The violence they perpetrate, the instability, the constant wars against a long historical procession of peoples and movements in the global South who yearn for freedom and self-determination... the whole world is dragged into this horrifying nightmare. They are willing to inflict enormous suffering and misery on hundreds of millions of people in order to preserve existing dynamics of capital accumulation.
We will not have peace until this arrangement is overcome and post-capitalist transformations are achieved.
This reasoning, and I agree with it entirely, is a brilliant example of materialism, or rather dialectical materials, the core, scientific work in Marx’s work. And whilst we have covered Dialectical Materialism in depth before, I wanted to get into it with you on a little broader scale, as an introductory tool with references to modern work to help you understand the capitalist class war we are all part of.
Dip in.
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