Coronavirus has sped up changes to global order and sovereignty is making a comeback

By Stan Grant, Vice Chancellor's Chair of Australian/Indigenous Belonging at Charles Sturt University and a journalist.

According to Prime Minister Scott Morrison, sovereignty is in, ideology is out. Well, he is half right.

Sovereignty is certainly making a comeback. End of ideology? Not so fast.

Let's deal first with sovereignty.

The coronavirus crisis has only hastened what was already underway. 

What is known as the global liberal order has endured a blowback in recent years, with a renewed emphasis on sovereignty leading to a more assertive nationalism.

Thirty years since American political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared "the end of history" — the triumph of liberal democracy over communism ushering in an ascendant global capitalism — history has most definitely returned.

Brexit was a rejection of centralised European power and a desire for Britain to forge its own destiny. 

Donald Trump's slogan, Make America Great Again, put American interests first. True to his word he has challenged the shibboleths of free trade and multilateralism.

President Trump has pushed back against NATO partners demanding they pay their way. He brought on a trade war with China to correct what he saw as Beijing's manipulation and exploitation. Simply: China was taking American jobs.

He pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord.

China itself is strongly nationalistic. Xi Jinping has fostered a "China against the world" narrative, reminding his people never to forget what is seen as 100 years of humiliation by foreign powers.

Xi has asserted China's sovereignty in the disputed South China Sea defying a ruling from an international tribunal in The Hague.

Elsewhere nationalist leaders are popular: Vladimir Putin in Russia; Viktor Orban in Hungary; Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey; Brazil's President Jair Bolsomaro or Duterte in the Philippines.

A blowback against immigration has fuelled a resurgent political right wing across Europe.

Conservative or right-wing politics has certainly benefitted from the nationalism wave.

National sovereignty triggers concern about a return of a survival of the fittest mentality. At its worst, critics say virulent nationalism leads to war. Nazi Germany always held up as the prime example.

Yet nationalism has its defenders too. Israeli political scientist Yoram Hazony says nationalism speaks to a deep human need to belong. 

In his book The Virtue of Nationalism, he writes:

"Each of us in fact wants and needs something else….collective self-determination: the freedom of the family tribe or nation".

The post Cold War cosmopolitan dream of a world without borders, looks brittle right now. The coronavirus crisis has revealed the strength and weakness of nations. 

Besieged Italians did not look to the European Union but their own government for answers. Americans need American solutions. 

In Australia we have looked to our government not just to keep us safe but keep us afloat.

As philosopher Craig Calhoun writes in his book, Nations Matter: Culture, History and the Cosmopolitan Dream, at the outset "nationalism is not a moral mistake".

As he says: "Nationalism helps locate an experience of belonging in a world of global flows and fears".

National sovereignty is back. But ideology is not vanquished.

Despite what Morrison says, Australia's response to the coronavirus is ideological. 

The Government has junked traditional Liberal Party free market ideas for state control.

Paying the wages of laid off workers, free child care, rental support, all of this along with unprecedented intervention into the lives of Australians and erosion of freedom: police enforced lockdown; social distancing.

The Government has run up debt and willingly gone into economic recession because that is what it deems necessary to fight the virus.

Libertarians and free marketeers are in fits. But they are on the losing end right now.

Neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of the past four decades has been in retreat, weakened by the global financial crisis: coronavirus could bury it.

Consider the words of the father of neoliberalism, Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek, social justice he once said was "a mirage".

Hayek's great disciple, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (she once produced her copy of Hayek's Constitution of Liberty and proclaimed "this is what we believe") famously said there is "no such thing as society".

Who would echo Hayek or Thatcher now?

A return of national sovereignty raises questions about what form that will take.

Italian scholar Gianpaolo Baiocchi reminds us "the political project of popular sovereignty is not an end state".

The right's version of sovereignty he says is a "parochial separateness" that "excludes others".

Baiocchi warns that to some, sovereignty "implies closure, finality, borders, negation".

Instead he talks of a people's sovereignty. A political "we". 

It challenges western nation colonial states to contend with sovereign political rights claims of Indigenous groups for instance.

The return of national sovereignty does not mean that the limits of that sovereignty are set.

The world order is being remade. It was before coronavirus, it is accelerated now. 

Liberal democracy was already in retreat and authoritarianism on the rise. The increasing power of China was challenging American hegemony.

A decade ago, journalist and political thinker Fareed Zakaria said the "rise of the rest" could usher in a "post-American world".

A global order that centres national sovereignty requires us to chart new territory.

One hundred years ago the world was re-made after World War I. 

Before he became British prime minister David Lloyd George called the war "a deluge, a convulsion of nature … bringing unheard of changes to the social and industrial fabric". [see http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35884]

How true those words would be today.

Historian Adam Tooze, in his book The Deluge, says the break up of the Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian empires meant that "although sovereignty was multiplied, it was hollowed out". 

The one nation that emerged more powerful was the United States. By 1928 Tooze says, Hitler was warning against the growing American dominance.

He writes: "It was precisely the looming potential, the future dominance of American capitalist democracy that was the common factor impelling Hitler, Stalin, the Italian fascists and their Japanese counterparts to such radical action".

World War I led to the Great Depression and ultimately to World War II; by 1945 Winston Churchill described the period as the second Thirty Years War.

Upheaval can breed upheaval. Changes to the global order take us into the unknown. 

From the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the 2008 global financial crash; the rise of China to now, the coronavirus crisis: old certainties have been shaken.

We are still a connected world. Globalism is not so easily unwound. Indeed, a global response is necessary in part to defeat the virus.

What will the post coronavirus world look like? Do we take an authoritarian turn? Does government continue to play a bigger part in our lives? Does the state trump free markets?

As the end of World War I ushered in American dominance, does China emerge from this moment more powerful?

Nations matter. Sovereignty matters. Especially now. The Prime Minister is right about that. But don't think for a moment ideology doesn't matter too.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-13/coronavirus-changes-to-global-ord...

As mentioned by Gus, the first casualties of this freedom-crushing fear has been artisans, artists of all kinds and restaurateurs — the real hearts of a free society. See: god hates us again...

Roughly a third of American voters think that the Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” appears in the Constitution. About as many are incapable of naming even one of the three branches of the United States government. Fewer than a quarter know who their senators are, and only half are aware that their state has two of them.

Democracy is other people, and the ignorance of the many has long galled the few, especially the few who consider themselves intellectuals. Plato, one of the earliest to see democracy as a problem, saw its typical citizen as shiftless and flighty:

Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; at other times, he’s idle and neglects everything; and sometimes he even occupies himself with what he takes to be philosophy.

It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from reading any literature in which the characters have speaking parts, which might lead them to forget themselves. The scheme was so byzantine and cockamamie that many suspect Plato couldn’t have been serious; Hobbes, for one, called the idea “useless.”

A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs. (In fact, in Mill’s day, select universities had had their own constituencies for centuries, allowing someone with a degree from, say, Oxford to vote both in his university constituency and wherever he lived. The system wasn’t abolished until 1950.) Mill’s larger project—at a time when no more than nine per cent of British adults could vote—was for the franchise to expand and to include women. But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance.

Read more:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/the-case-against-democracy

Nothing like educating people about their democratic CIVIC constructs rather than telling them that "god loves them"... Ther are a million more "bible classes" than "politcal education courses" for kids — and the professional political charlatans love this state of protected ignorance. 

See also:

By CJ Hopkins

So the War on Populism is finally over. Go ahead, take a wild guess who won.

I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t the Russians, or the white supremacists, or the gilets jaunes, or Jeremy Corbyn’s Nazi Death Cult, or the misogynist Bernie Bros, or the MAGA-hat terrorists, or any of the other real or fictional “populist” forces that global capitalism has been waging war on for the last four years.

What? You weren’t aware that global capitalism was fighting a War on Populism? That’s OK, most other folks weren’t. It wasn’t officially announced or anything. It was launched in the summer of 2016, just as the War on Terror was ending, as a sequel to the War on Terror, or a variation on the War on Terror, or continuation of the War on Terror, or … whatever, it doesn’t really matter anymore, because now we’re fighting the War on Death, or the War on Minor Cold-like Symptoms, depending on your age and general state of health.

That’s right, folks, once again, global capitalism (a/k/a “the world”) is under attack by an evil enemy. GloboCap just can’t catch a break. From the moment it defeated communism and became a global ideological hegemon, it has been one evil enemy after another.

No sooner had it celebrated winning the Cold War and started ruthlessly restructuring and privatizing everything than it was savagely attacked by “Islamic terrorists,” and so was forced to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, and kill and torture a lot of people, and destabilize the entire Middle East, and illegally surveil everybody, and … well, you remember the War on Terror.

Then, just as the War on Terror seemed to be finally winding down, and the only terrorists left were the “self-radicalized” terrorists (many of whom weren’t even actual terrorists), and it looked like GloboCap was finally going to be able to finish privatizing and debt-enslaving everything and everyone in peace, wouldn’t you know it, we were attacked again, this time by the global conspiracy of Russian-backed, neo-fascist “populists” that caused the Brexit and elected Trump, and tried to elect Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, and loosed the gilets jaunes on France, and who’ve been threatening the “fabric of Western democracy” with dissension-sowing Facebook memes.

Unfortunately, unlike the War on Terror, the War on Populism didn’t go that well. After four years of fighting, GloboCap (a/k/a the neoliberal Resistance) had … OK, they had snuffed both Corbyn and Sanders, but they had totally blown the Russiagate psyop, and so were looking at four more years of Trump, and Lord knows how many of Johnson in the U.K. (which had actually left the European Union), and the gilets jaunes weren’t going away, and, basically, “populism” was still on the rise (if not in reality, in hearts and minds).

And so, just as the War on Populism had replaced (or redefined) the War on Terror, the War on Death has been officially launched to replace (or redefine) the War on Populism … which means (you guessed it), once again, it’s time to roll out another “brave new normal.”

The character of this brave new normal is, at this point, unmistakably clear … so clear that most people cannot see it, because their minds are not prepared to accept it, so they do not recognize it, though they are looking right at it. Like Dolores in the Westworld series, “it doesn’t look like anything” to them. To the rest of us, it looks rather totalitarian.

In the span of approximately 100 days, the entire global capitalist empire has been transformed into a de facto police state. Constitutional rights have been suspended. Most of us are under house arrest. Police are rounding up anyone not cooperating with the new emergency measures. They are pulling riders off of public transportation, arresting people whose papers aren’t in order, harrassing, beating, intimidating, and arbitrarily detaining anyone they decide is “a danger to public health.”

Authorities are openly threatening to forcibly pull people out of their homes and quarantine them. Cops are hunting down runaway grandmothers. They’re raiding services in churches and synagogues. Citizens are being forced to wear ankle monitors. Families out for a walk are being menaced by robots and Orwellian drones.

Counterterrorism troops have been deployed to deal with non-compliant “rule breakers.” Anyone the U.S. authorities deem to have “intentionally spread the coronavirus” can be arrested and charged as a coronavirus terrorist. Artificial intelligence firms are working with governments to implement systems to log and track our contacts and movements. As a recent Foreign Policy article put it:

“The counterterrorism analogy is useful because it shows the direction of travel of pandemic policy. Imagine a new coronavirus patient is detected. Once he or she tests positive, the government could use cell-phone data to trace everyone he or she has been in close proximity to, perhaps focusing on those people who were in contact for more than a few minutes. Your cell-phone signal could then be used to enforce quarantine decisions. Leave your apartment and the authorities will know. Leave your phone behind and they will call you. Run the battery down and a police car will be at your door in a manner of minutes …”

I could go on, but I think you get the picture, or … well, you either do or you don’t.

And that is the really terrifying part of the War on Death and our “brave new normal” … not so much the totalitarianism. (Anyone who’s been paying attention is not terribly shocked by GloboCap’s decision to implement a global police state. The simulation of democracy is all fine and good, until the unwashed masses start to get unruly, and require a reminder of who’s in charge, which is what we are being treated to currently.)

No, the terrifying part is how millions of people immediately switched off their critical faculties, got into line, and started goose-stepping, and parroting hysterical propaganda, and reporting their neighbors to the police for going outside for a walk or jog (and then sadistically shrieked abuse down at them like the Goodbye Jews Girl in Schindler’s List as they were wrestled to the ground and arrested).

They are out there, right now, on the Internet, millions of these well-meaning fascists, patrolling for signs of the slightest deviation from the official coronavirus narrative, bombarding everyone with meaningless graphs, decontextualized death statistics, X-rays of fibrotic lungs, photos of refrigerated morgue trucks, mass graves, and other sensationalistic horrors intended to short-circuit critical thinking and shut down any and all forms of dissent.

Although undeniably cowardly and sickening, this kind of behavior is also not shocking. Sadly, when you terrorize people enough, the majority will regress to their animal instincts. It isn’t a question of ethics, or politics. It is purely a question of self-preservation. When you cancel the normal structure of society and place everyone in a “state of emergency” … well, it’s like what happens in a troop of chimpanzees when the alpha chimp dies or is killed by a challenger. The other chimps run around hooting and grimacing until it’s clear who the new dominant primate is, then they bend over to demonstrate their submission.

Totalitarians understand this. Sadists and cult leaders understand this. When the people you are dominating get unruly, and start questioning your right to dominate them, you need to fabricate a “state of emergency” and make everyone feel very afraid, so that they turn (or return) to you for protection from whatever evil enemy is out there, threatening the cult, or the Fatherland, or whatever. Then, once they’ve returned to the fold, and stopped questioning your right to dominate them, you can introduce a new set of rules that everybody needs to follow to prevent this kind of thing happening again.

This is obviously what is happening at the moment. But what you probably want to know is … why is it happening? And why is it happening at this precise moment?

Lucky for you, I have a theory.

No, it doesn’t involve Bill Gates, Jared Kushner, the WHO, and a global conspiracy of Chinese Jews defiling our precious bodily fluids with their satanic-alien 5G technology. It’s a little less exciting and more abstract than that (although some of those characters are probably part of it … all right, probably not the Chinese Jews, or the Satanic-Alien Illuminati).

See, I try to focus more on systems (like global capitalism) than on individuals. And on models of power rather than the specific people in power at any given time. Looking at things that way, this global lockdown and our brave new normal makes perfect sense. Stay with me now … this gets kind of heady.

What we are experiencing is a further evolution of the post-ideological model of power that came into being when global capitalism became a global-hegemonic system after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In such a global-hegemonic system, ideology is rendered obsolete. The system has no external enemies, and thus no ideological adversaries. The enemies of a global-hegemonic system by definition can only be internal. Every war becomes an insurgency, a rebellion breaking out within the system, as there is no longer any outside.

As there is no longer any outside (and thus no external ideological adversary), the global-hegemonic system dispenses with ideology entirely. Its ideology becomes “normality.” Any challenge to “normality” is henceforth regarded as an “abnormality,” a “deviation from the norm,” and automatically delegitimized. The system does not need to argue with deviations and abnormalities (as it was forced to argue with opposing ideologies in order to legitimize itself). It simply needs to eliminate them. Opposing ideologies become pathologies … existential threats to the health of the system.

In other words, the global-hegemonic system (i.e., global capitalism) becomes a body, the only body, unopposed from without, but attacked from within by a variety of opponents … terrorists, extremists, populists, whoever. These internal opponents attack the global-hegemonic body much like a disease, like a cancer, an infection, or a virus. And the global-hegemonic body reacts like any other body would.

Is this model starting to sound familiar?

I hope so, because that is what is happening right now. The system (i.e., global capitalism, not a bunch of guys in a room hatching a scheme to sell vaccines) is reacting to the last four years of populist revolt in a predictable manner. GloboCap is attacking the virus that has been attacking its hegemonic body. No, not the coronavirus. A much more destructive and multiplicitous virus … resistance to the hegemony of global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology.

If it isn’t already clear to you yet that this coronavirus in no way warrants the totalitarian emergency measures that have been imposed on most of humanity, it will be become clear in the months ahead. Despite the best efforts of the “health authorities” to count virtually anything as “a Covid-19 death,” the numbers are going to tell the tale. The “experts” are already memory-holing, or recalibrating, or contextualizing, their initial apocalyptic projections. The media are toning down the hysteria. The show isn’t totally over yet, but you can feel it gradually coming to an end.

In any event, whenever it happens, days, weeks, or months from now, GloboCap will dial down the totalitarianism, and let us out, so we can go back to work in whatever remains of the global economy … and won’t we all be so very grateful! There will be massive celebrations in the streets, Italian tenors singing on balconies, chorus lines of dancing nurses! The gilets jaunes will call it quits, the Putin-Nazis will stop with the memes, and Americans will elect Joe Biden president!

Or, all right, maybe not that last part, but, the point is, it will be a brave new normal! People will forget all that populism nonsense, and just be grateful for whatever McJobs they can get to be able to pay the interest on their debts, because, hey … global capitalism isn’t so bad compared to living under house arrest!

And, if not, no problem for GloboCap. They’ll just have to lock us down again, and keep locking us down, over and over, indefinitely, until we get our minds right. I mean, it’s not like we’re going to do anything about it … right? Didn’t we just demonstrate that? Sure, we’ll bitch and moan again, but then they’ll whip out those pictures of mass graves and death trucks, and the graphs, and all those scary projections, and the Blockwart-hotlines will start ringing again, and …

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/15/brave-new-normal/

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The talk in New York is about when to return to normal. But that misses the point; normal never really left, it just changed clothes. We traded economic disparity expressed through poverty for economic disparity expressed through viral death. The real problem isn’t when we’ll return to normal, it is that we will.

All the energy that made this city more than livable, made it desirable, is gone. It’s just a big, empty place now, all the seams showing. The closed stores still have St Patrick’s Day decorations. Time stopped in March. I am a native New Yorker by birth, seven years now returned. I don’t know how many times we can all stand on the ledge and not jump. 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, Super Storm Sandy, and now this. Today the city feels more like the gray of post-war East Germany than the white hot panic of late WWII Berlin.

New York state has more corona cases than any other country in the world. About half of all U.S. deaths are here in the broader New York area. Sure, there are other hot pockets but while NYC counts the bodies in the thousands there are some states still in single figures and most others in the hundreds. The stars may soon again hold benefit concerts for us, echoing post-9/11’s “ferocious tenderness of how desperately America loves New York.” When the city talks in its sleep what many remember most is the kindness people showed toward one another that blue September, little courtesies of holding doors and allowing someone to cut the line, half smiles from total strangers in a place where such vulnerability could have made you prey just days earlier.

Not with the virus. We snap at each other, enemies now, each a potential carrier. This is a not a city which lends itself to personal space without a flash of aggressive eye contact. Walk without a mask and someone will snap at you. Two guys hissing something in Spanish at an Asian woman. Lines to enter the food store with everyone watching like North Korean border guards for sneaks. SNL and late night never mocked Bush in the immediate 9/11 aftermath. If we ever were One we are not now. Because we are for certain not all in this together as Governor Andrew Cuomo said: “Everyone is subject to this virus. I don’t care how smart, how rich, how powerful you think you are.”

That is not true. The virus is highly concentrated in the poorest Hispanic and black neighborhoods of Queens and the Bronx. The viral death rate for Hispanics is 22 people per 100,000; for blacks 20 per 100,000 while the rate for whites is 10 per 100,000. For whites even that is deceptive, given the hot spots in the isolated Hasidic Jewish enclaves of Brooklyn versus the lack of white deaths in high-income areas. Poorer people are more likely to die at home than in a hospital, and so the surge in at-home deaths, most never tested, suggests the death rate for the virus is being under-counted. Overall the virus is twice as deadly for Hispanics and blacks than whites in NYC.

In New York we speak hundreds of languages but not to each other. A map of viral cases neighborhood-by-neighborhood tells the tale. America’s most diverse city, America’s most sanctimonious city about that, is also one of her most segregated on the ground. 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/rich-and-healthy-vs-poo...

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Eighty-two years ago, on August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky was assassinated by the Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader. Trotsky's assassination was the greatest political crime of the 20th century. Alongside Vladimir Lenin, Trotsky was the leader of the 1917 October revolution in Russia, which led to the establishment of the first workers’ state in history, and the preeminent strategist of world socialist revolution.

In 1923, Trotsky founded the Left Opposition to oppose the growth of a nationalist bureaucracy, headed by Joseph Stalin, as it usurped power in the Soviet Union. In 1933, following the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany, facilitated by the disastrous policies of the Comintern that Trotsky had opposed, Trotsky began to work toward the building of the Fourth International, which was founded in 1938 as the World Party of Socialist Revolution.

In a new period of revolutionary upheavals and imperialist wars, the political and historical principles and perspectives that Trotsky fought for are of immense relevance to workers today. They are embodied in the history and daily political work of the International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site. In this exhibit, we are publishing a selection of major statements and essays about the enduring political significance of Leon Trotsky, and the investigation by the ICFI into his assassination, known as Security and the Fourth International. 

READ MORE:

https://www.wsws.org/en/special/pages/anniversary-assassination-leon-trotsky.html

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Analyzing a World in Chaos from an Island of Tranquility

BY David North

This speech was given by World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board chairman David North on the island of Büyükada (Prinkipo), Turkey, on Sunday, August 25. The event, titled, “Analyzing a World in Chaos from an Island of Tranquility,” was the second international commemoration of the work of Leon Trotsky on Büyükada, during the first period of his exile from the Soviet Union between 1929 and 1933.

North was invited to speak by Büyükada Mayor Ali Ercan Akpolat, and joining him on the panel was Dr. Rıdvan Akın of Galatasaray University. The event was moderated by Ulaş Ateşçi, a leading member of the Sosyalist Eşitlik (Socialist Equality Group) in Turkey. 160 people attended the event, with many purchasing literature and staying for a question and answer session afterwards.

--------------------

First, permit me to thank Mayor Ali Ercan Akpolat and his administration for organizing and inviting me to speak at this Second International Leon Trotsky Commemoration. The establishment of this commemoration as an annual intellectual event is of both historical and immense contemporary significance. 

The four years that Trotsky spent on Büyükada were among the most consequential of his life and in the history of the twentieth century. 1929, the year he arrived here, was the year of the Wall Street crash and the beginning of the world depression. 1933 was the year of the accession to power of Hitler’s Nazi regime, a historic catastrophe that led to World War II, the Holocaust and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Humanity is still paying the price for the defeat of the German and European working class in the 1930s.

In 1938 Trotsky defined the historical epoch as that of capitalism’s death agony. As a consequence of the defeat of the socialist revolution in the 1930s, as a consequence of Stalinist betrayals in France, in Spain, and of course in Germany itself, the death agony has been protracted. But current events are validating Trotsky’s historical prognosis. Nearly 80 years after the collapse of Hitler’s Third Reich and the end of World War II, we are witnessing the revival of fascism, the utilization of genocide as an instrument of state policy and the escalation of military conflicts toward a nuclear third world war.

If the descent into barbarism and the self-annihilation of civilization is to be prevented, it is necessary that we study the past and draw from it the appropriate lessons. 

It is in the context of the central tragedy of the twentieth century—the victory of fascism in Germany—that Trotsky’s years on this island retain such immense historical significance. It is well known that Trotsky wrote two of his greatest literary masterpieces during his Prinkipo exile: his autobiography, My Life, and his monumental History of the Russian Revolution.

But Trotsky’s greatest achievement while he was on Büyükada was his analysis of the unfolding political crisis in Germany, his effort to alert the German working class to the danger posed by Nazism, and his exposure of the disastrous policies pursued by the German Communist Party under the direction of Stalin. Confined to an island 1,600 kilometers from Berlin, Trotsky understood with unequaled prescience both the inevitable consequences of Stalin’s policies and what had to be done to prevent the victory of the Nazis.

As early as September 1930, more than two years before Hitler’s victory, Trotsky wrote:

Fascism in Germany has become a real danger, as an acute expression of the helpless position of the bourgeois regime, the conservative role of Social Democracy in this regime, and the accumulated powerlessness of the Communist Party to abolish it. Whoever denies this is either blind or a braggart.

Germany possessed the largest, most powerful and politically advanced working class in Europe. It was the birthplace of Marx and Engels, and the country whose industrial development had given rise, under the influence of Marxism, to the mass Social Democratic Party (SPD). But the SPD and virtually all the associated parties of the Second International betrayed the program of international socialism in August 1914 when they supported the entrance of their capitalist governments into what became the First World War. 

The founding of the Third International under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution, was aimed at the rebuilding of revolutionary parties based on socialist internationalism. The German Communist Party (KPD) emerged as the largest section, outside of the Soviet Union, of the new International. But its development was undermined by a crisis of political leadership. The murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919, only two weeks after the founding of the KPD, deprived the party of its most experienced leaders. The problem of leadership was intensified by the growth of the bureaucracy led by Stalin within the Soviet Union, the repudiation of the program of world socialist revolution and the adoption of the nationalist program of “socialism in one country.”

Trotsky, the leader of the Left Opposition within the Russian Communist Party, opposed this fundamental nationalist revision of the Marxist program, which disoriented the new Communist parties and led to the subordination of the sections of the Communist International to the national interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. 

This disorientation found its most disastrous expression in the policies of the German Communist Party. Confronted with the rise of fascism, the essential task of the KPD was to unite all the forces of the working class in a common defensive struggle. Under conditions in which the loyalties of the working class were divided between two parties—the SPD and the KPD—the Communist Party was obligated to win the confidence of the millions of workers who still followed the lead of the Social Democrats. 

Notwithstanding the reformist character of the SPD and its bitter hostility to the program of socialist revolution, the rise of fascism threatened its own existence. Trotsky therefore insisted that the KPD was obligated to exploit the objective conflict that existed between the SPD as a reformist workers organization and the Nazis. But the Stalinists, denying the existence of this conflict, rejected all collaboration—even for the purpose of organizational self-defense—with the Social Democrats.

Trotsky subjected the ultra-left policy of the Stalinists—which defined the Social Democratic Party as “social fascist” and, therefore, as the political twin of the Nazis—to devastating criticism. He called upon the Communist Party to abandon the self-destructive policy of “social fascism,” and to issue a call to the Social Democratic Party for a “united front” against the Nazis. An agreement between the two mass parties of the working class, who held the loyalty of millions of workers in Germany, his call for united action, for combined defensive actions against the Nazis, Trotsky insisted, would create an impassable roadblock on Hitler’s path to power. Moreover, it would clear the way for the working class to go on the offensive against the German capitalist regime and its Nazi underlings.

In December 1931, in an article titled “For a workers’ united front against fascism,” Trotsky warned: “Germany is now passing through one of those great historic hours upon which the fate of the German people, the fate of Europe, and in significant measure the fate of all humanity will depend for decades.”

The Stalinists’ stupid and reckless definition of the Social Democratic Party as fascist had the effect of drastically downplaying the danger posed by the genuine fascism of Hitler. With a clarity unequaled by any contemporary, Trotsky explained the specific political role of fascism in the counter-revolutionary arsenal of the ruling class. In his article “What Next?”, published in January 1932, Trotsky wrote:

At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium—the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets into motion the masses of crazed petty bourgeoisie, and bands of the declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat; all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy. From fascism the bourgeoisie demands a thorough job; once it has resorted to methods of civil war, it insists on having peace for a number of years … When a state turns fascist, it doesn’t only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance with the patterns set by Mussolini—the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role—but it means, primarily and above all, that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism.

One can say 90 years later, there is no greater and more precise definition of what fascism is, and if Trotsky had written nothing else in his life these words would have assured his political immortality. 

In his critique of the policies of the Stalinists, Trotsky emphasized that the essential source of their errors was a nationalist orientation, which separated the fight against fascism in Germany from the perspective of international socialism. This led the leaders of the German Communist Party, influenced by the Soviet bureaucracy’s nationalist program of “socialism in one country”, to advance the call for a German “national people’s revolution”—which blurred the explicitly proletarian orientation of the party and adapted to the chauvinist agitation of the Nazis—in place of the program of world socialist revolution. Exposing this false perspective, Trotsky wrote:

The slogan of the proletarian unification of Europe is simultaneously a very important weapon in the struggle against the abomination of fascist chauvinism, the baiting of France, and so forth. The most incorrect, the most dangerous policy is the passive adaptation to the enemy by painting oneself to look like him. The slogans of national despair and national frenzy must be opposed by slogans of international liberation. For this, the party must be purged of national socialism, the principal element of which is the theory of socialism in one country.

Even as the strength of the Nazis grew steadily, the Stalinists refused to change their policies. Trotsky issued an impassioned warning to the German working class:

Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for any place; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time left!

Trotsky’s warnings were not heeded. On January 30, 1933, Hitler was brought to power by cabal of ruling class conspirators without a shot being fired. Within days, as Trotsky had predicted, the Nazis launched their reign of terror against the working class and its political and trade union organizations. But far from acknowledging the massive scale of the defeat suffered by the German working class, the Stalinist regime in Moscow—which had dictated the policies pursued by its German satellite—declared that the policies responsible for the victory of the Nazis had been correct.

The cynical and deceitful evasion by the Kremlin bureaucracy led by Stalin of all responsibility for the German catastrophe signified the effective collapse of the Third Communist International. On July 15, 1933, on the very eve of his departure from Büyükada, Trotsky issued his call for the building of the Fourth International. He wrote:

An organization that is not roused by the thunder of fascism and which submits docilely to such outrageous acts of the bureaucracy demonstrates that it is dead and that nothing can ever revive it. To say this openly and publicly is our direct duty toward the proletariat and its future. In all our subsequent work it is necessary to take as our point of departure the historical collapse of the official Communist International.

All subsequent events were to vindicate Trotsky’s call for a new International. The policies of the Stalinist bureaucracy acquired a consciously counter-revolutionary character. The interests of the international working class and the struggle for socialism were subordinated by the Kremlin regime to the pragmatic calculations of its reactionary diplomatic maneuvers with the leaders of world imperialism. The mass murder of Old Bolsheviks and an entire generation of fighters for socialism during the Terror of 1936-39 was intended by Stalin to demonstrate to the imperialist powers that the Soviet regime had broken irrevocably with the perspective of world socialist revolution. The transformation of the Stalinist regime and its associated parties into instruments of counter-revolution found its culmination in the signing of the Stalin-Hitler Pact exactly 85 years ago, on August 23, 1939. One year later, on August 20, 1940, Trotsky was fatally wounded by an agent of the Soviet secret police, the GPU.

It is appropriate that this history should be recalled as we meet today. As stated in the title of today’s event, it was from this island of tranquility that Trotsky analyzed a world in chaos. We are commemorating Trotsky’s years in Büyükada at a time when the world is once again descending into chaos. This imparts to the present event an exceptional significance. 

We are not only paying tribute to the man who stands alongside Lenin as the greatest Marxist theoretician and revolutionary of the twentieth century. We are acknowledging the unique place occupied by Trotsky’s political legacy in contemporary world politics. 

To describe Trotsky’s political conceptions as merely “relevant” is a vast understatement. One cannot understand the political contradictions of the present-day world—which is among other things manifested in a worldwide resurgence of fascism—without a systematic study of Trotsky’s writings. His theory of permanent revolution is as essential to the strategy and practice of international socialism—that is, the struggle to secure the future of humanity—as the theories of Einstein and Heisenberg are to the comprehension of the physical universe. 

The objection is invariably raised—especially from academics and practitioners of the pseudo-left politics of the affluent middle class—that to assign an enduring contemporary significance to Trotsky’s political legacy is wrong. They argue that Trotsky remains a figure of the first half of the last century. Eighty-four years have passed since his assassination. The Soviet Union itself no longer exists. We live in a very different world. The Marxist emphasis, they claim, on the centrality of the working class and class struggle—so-called “class essentialism”—has been superseded by identity politics that prioritize ethnicity, race and gender. The defense of the ideas and perspectives associated with Trotsky—that is, the program of world socialist revolution—is “idolatry.” Trotsky and Trotskyism, they proclaim, are “irrelevant.” 

This is the gist of the argument advanced by a British academic, Professor emeritus John Kelly of Birkbeck College, University of London. The professor has written during the last six years two books devoted to proving the irrelevance of Trotskyism. The first volume, titled Contemporary Trotskyism, was published in 2018. The second volume, titled The Twilight of World Trotskyism, was published in 2023. One might ask why the professor has devoted so much time and effort to the study of a movement and a man that he considers to be “irrelevant?” What is it about Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement that has led Professor Kelly to expend so much energy denouncing it?

And why have the two volumes of Kelly been published by Routledge, among the largest publishers in the world with annual revenues of between $50 and $100 million. Why does this powerful capitalist publishing house expend its resources on publishing books about an irrelevant organization? It should be recalled that in 2003 Routledge also published a biography of Leon Trotsky. I had the high honor of exposing its author, Professor Ian Thatcher, as an intellectually unprincipled slanderer. Evidently, Routledge’s preoccupation with Trotsky indicates that it is by no means convinced of his “irrelevance.” 

What Kelly and those like him cannot abide is the fidelity of the Trotskyist movement to a revolutionary perspective. He singles out the International Committee of the Fourth International, with which I am associated, for the most bitter criticism. Though Professor Kelly and I have never met, he describes me as “an immodest and arrogant individual”; and objects strenuously to the International Committee’s definition of Trotskyism as “the Marxism of the 21st Century.”

Professor Kelly denounces the headline of the New Year’s statement posted on the World Socialist Web Site in January 2020: “The decade of socialist revolution begins.” In response, Kelly wrote:

Hermetically sealed in their doctrinairism and inimical to genuine empirical inquiry or theoretical innovation, the organizations of Orthodox Trotskyism are condemned to repeat forever the slogans and policies of the first quarter of the twentieth century, convinced that these ideas and these ideas alone, hold the key to their imminent transformation into mass revolutionary parties that will lead Leninist-style assaults on capitalist power around the world. [The Twilight of Trotskyism, p. 97]

In fact, the program advanced by Professor Kelly dates back to the last decade of the nineteenth century, to the work of Eduard Bernstein who set about—in the Germany of the 1890s—to transform the SPD into a party of social reforms. In words almost identical to those used by Kelly today, Bernstein argued that the revolutionary program of Marx and Engels was out of date, that the contradictions of capitalism were amenable to reforms, that conflicts between capitalist states could be resolved without resort to war, and that the living standards of the working class would steadily improve. Socialism would not be achieved through revolution, but through the gradual reform of capitalist society. But the events of the twentieth century—the two world wars, the use of atomic weapons, and the barbarism of fascism and related forms of mass repression—refuted the Utopian conceptions of Bernstein.

Professor Kelly fails to identify the new slogans, policies and ideas—superior to those advanced by Trotsky and Lenin—that will show the working class the way forward amid the escalating crisis of world capitalism. 

Professor Kelly accuses the Trotskyists of being indifferent to empirical research. But it is the professor emeritus—shuffling about in comfortable retirement with cozy slippers on his feet and a woolen nightcap pulled over his eyes—who seems not to notice the increasingly obvious signs of the descent of world capitalism into chaos and barbarism. He writes: “The idea that the reformist era is at an end and that world politics is reduced to a simple binary choice—socialism or barbarism—is conceptually naïve and empirically flawed.” [78]

Now that we are approaching the midpoint of the 2020s, have events tended to vindicate Kelly’s ridicule of the prognosis of the International Committee five years ago? What has been the predominant tendency in the economic, social and political structures of world capitalism since the start of the new decade? If Professor Kelly’s criticisms of Trotskyist “doctrinairism,” blind to the realities of the contemporary world, are correct, he would have to demonstrate, with appropriate empirical documentation, that the past four to five years have witnessed an organic strengthening of the world economy, a diminution of social instability—that is, a lessening of class conflict—and both a decline in global geopolitical tensions and growing vitality of bourgeois democratic institutions. 

In fact, an examination of the state of the economic, social, and political structures of contemporary capitalism vindicates the analysis of the Trotskyist movement. In every sphere, crisis predominates over stability. The decade began with the outbreak of a pandemic that swept across the world and led to at least 27 million “excess deaths,” and has still not been brought under control. Its global rampage continues. I just read today a report which reveals that within the United States alone, since 2020 there have been 1.1 billion cases of COVID. The number of deaths this year so far is up 20 percent over last year. But the policy of the ruling elites is to ignore the pandemic, and to pretend that it is no longer an issue of concern. The same indifference characterizes their response to global warming. All the problems of modern mass society, which require a global solution, are subordinated to the socially irrational and destructive pursuit of corporate profits and the accumulation of gluttonous levels of personal wealth.

Notwithstanding the immense development of technology, the global financial system teeters on the brink of collapse. In the course of the last decade and a half in the United States, massive and unprecedented levels of state intervention were required twice—in 2008 and 2020—to stave off economic disasters. The result has been the rise of national debt to unsustainable levels.

In 2007, the public debt of the United States stood at $9 trillion dollars, a staggering figure. At of the end of 2023, the debt had risen to $34 trillion. Divided among the population of 330 million people, every American is indebted to the tune of $104,000. This inflationary spiral is unsustainable. The debts must be repaid. This requires a massive intensification of the exploitation of the working class. But this cannot be achieved democratically or peacefully. As in the twentieth century, the ruling elites are compelled to seek a way out of the crisis through war and fascism.

When I spoke last year at the first Trotsky commemoration on August 20, 2023, I stated: 

We confront today precisely the situation described by Trotsky in the founding document of the Fourth International, which he wrote in 1938 just one year before the outbreak of World War II: ‘Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.’

Have events of the past year substantiated that warning? Six weeks after we met last year in Büyükada, the uprising of Gazans against the oppression of the Israeli state occurred on October 7. The Israeli state exploited the uprising—which was itself the inevitable consequence of its unrelenting denial of the basic democratic rights of the Palestinian people—to launch a genocidal war. After 10 months of war, Gaza lies in ruins. 

The total death toll, according to a study conducted by the authoritative Lancet magazine, is approximately 180,000. It could even be higher. But even as the crimes of the fascistic Israeli regime have horrified the people of the world, its actions are defended by every imperialist government. The United States has provided and continues to provide Israel with the bombs and artillery used to kill Palestinian men, women and children by the thousands every week. Under the slogan, “Israel has a right to defend itself,” imperialist regimes are sanctioning the use of genocide as a legitimate instrument of state policy. In the midst of its atrocities, Netanyahu, the Israeli Hitler, was invited to address a joint session of the US Congress, which is the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a foreign leader.

The descent of Israel into barbarism vindicates the prognosis made by Trotsky in 1940. Opposing the Zionist project, he warned, “The attempt to solve the Jewish question through the migration of Jews to Palestine can now be seen for what it is, a tragic mockery of the Jewish people.” This reactionary chauvinist project has now morally implicated the Israeli population in a crime of historic magnitude. The descendants of the victims of genocide have become the perpetrators of genocide. The Israeli working class and youth must tear itself free from the reactionary ideology and politics of Zionism. The words written by Trotsky 84 years ago have acquired a searing immediacy: “Never was it so clear as it is today that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system.”

When we met last year, NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia had already been in progress for 18 months. The war has not only continued for another year; it is escalating to the point that threatens the eruption of full scale nuclear war. The United States and NATO have made clear that there are no “red lines” that they are not prepared to cross. During the past three weeks, Ukraine—utilizing weapons and other resources provided by the US and NATO—has invaded Russian territory. Not since 1944 have imperialist forces occupied Russia. At what point, one is compelled to ask, will the Putin regime conclude that it has no choice but to retaliate not only against Ukraine but also against its US and NATO sponsors? That would be a global catastrophe.

The Gaza genocide and the NATO-Russia conflict are the present focal points of a global struggle that places at risk the survival of humanity. The source of this conflict is rooted in the incompatibility of the existing nation-state system with the reality of a globally interconnected world economic system. Within the framework of capitalism, there is no solution, other than war, to this basic contradiction. The only viable alternative to world war is world socialist revolution.

If, as Professor Kelly claims, the ills of capitalism can be solved with reformist massages and foot baths, why are we witnessing the resurgence of fascism throughout the world. Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the AfD in Germany, Vox in Spain, and Trumpism in the United States exemplify this tendency. However, the growth of these organizations and movements does not stem at this point from mass support for the creation of a Nazi-like regime. Rather, the fascists are exploiting the frustration arising from the indifference of the traditional parties to deteriorating social conditions. The fascists, promoted in the media and funded by sections of the billionaire oligarchs, direct this frustration toward attacks on immigrants, who serve today, as the Jews did in the 1930s and 1940s, as scapegoats for the ills of capitalism.

In the bastion of capitalism and world imperialism, American democracy is staggering beneath the weight of a crisis for which the existing political system has no progressive answer. The attempted coup of January 6, 2021, led by President Trump, marked a critical turning point in American history. The claim that “It can’t happen here”—i.e., that America could never go fascist—was shattered by the events of that day. The organizer of the coup did not only escape punishment. He is again the presidential candidate of the Republican Party. During the past week, President Biden, in a moment of lucidity, made the following statement:

Donald Trump says he will refuse to accept the election result if he loses again. Think about that. He’s promising a bloodbath if he loses, in his words. And that he’ll be a dictator on day one, in his own words. By the way, the sucker means it. No, I’m not joking. Anyone else said that in the past, you’d think he was crazy, you’d think it was an exaggeration, but he means it.

This warning was made by the incumbent president. Biden explicitly stated that the United States is on the very brink of becoming a police state. No less remarkable than the statement itself was, first, that Biden did not state what he would do to defend democracy if Trump attempted another coup; and, second, that Biden’s warning was barely reported in the media. The silence expressed the indifference of the American ruling class to the preservation of democracy. In fact, there is a growing consensus within the ruling oligarchs, in the United States but not only there, in fact in countries throughout the world, that their interests, domestically and internationally, are incompatible with democracy. The ruling elites are fully aware that the staggering level of social inequality is provoking growing popular anger, and that the attacks on living conditions required by imperialist militarism will lead to a tremendous escalation of class conflict. The turn of the ruling class to fascism is an attempt to preempt and suppress, with violence, the political radicalization of the working class and its turn to socialism.

The theory of permanent revolution establishes that in the imperialist epoch, the struggle for democracy, and the defense of essential democratic rights, are inextricably linked to the struggle for socialism. The defeat of fascism requires the establishment of workers’ power and the overthrow of capitalist ownership and control of the means of production. While there can be no socialism without democracy, the preservation of democracy is impossible without socialism.

Finally, Professor Kelly concludes The Twilight of World Trotskyism with the following indictment: “After more than eighty years of Trotskyist activity, with no revolutions, mass parties or election victories to its name … the Trotskyist movement has become a dead end for socialists.” Of all the criticisms leveled against the Fourth International, this is the stupidest and most vulgar. 

The criticism removes the revolutionary process from any objective historical and political context, and implies that the Trotskyist movement has operated in a political vacuum. It confronted neither adverse objective conditions nor class enemies with vast resources at their disposal.

Kelly makes no mention of the forces that were deployed by the capitalist state and its agents in the workers movement—trade union bureaucrats, social democratic reformists, Stalinists, anarchists, bourgeois nationalists—to counteract the influence of the Trotskyist movement. To be blunt, Kelly himself, with his reformist banalities and cynicism, is one of the instruments employed by the capitalist class to undermine the growth of revolutionary politics among workers.

The test of a revolutionary party is not whether it is able, at all times and regardless of objective conditions, to lead a successful revolution. Rather, the decisive criterion is whether the party fought for policies that were based on a correct analysis of the objective situation and advanced the interests of the working class.

Since Trotskyism first emerged as a distinct political tendency in 1923, in opposition to the bureaucratic degeneration of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet state, it has acquired immense political experience. It was compelled to work “against the stream”—in unfavorable conditions during which the working class was led and misled by mass Stalinist and social democratic parties. But the correctness of the perspective and program of the Fourth International has been vindicated by history.

In 1938, in a speech celebrating the founding of the Fourth International, Trotsky predicted that the test of historical events would not leave of the counter-revolutionary agencies “one stone upon another.” That was proven true.

The mass Stalinist parties of “real existing socialism” have been shattered and discredited. The Soviet bureaucracy dissolved the USSR. The social democratic parties, indistinguishable from the traditional bourgeois parties, no longer advance an agenda for the reform of capitalism, let alone the establishment of socialism. One after another, the organizations that claim to have discovered a new road—such as Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece, the Pink Tide in Latin America—are discredited by events. One after another, the champions of a “third way” to peace and prosperity that requires neither class struggle or social revolution are exposed as either impotent fraudsters like Corbyn or sinister political criminals like the former Prime Minister of Britain Tony Blair.

The Fourth International is a party of history. It was founded to carry through to the end the essential task of the epoch of capitalism’s death agony: the ending of capitalist oppression through the world socialist revolution. It is true that the struggle for socialism has proven more complicated and protracted than was originally foreseen by Marx and Engels. But the laws of social development uncovered by the materialist conception of history and the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production analyzed in Das Kapital have not been superseded. The epoch of world socialist revolution that began in October 1917 has not ended.

Objective events are driving the international working class, which remains the principal revolutionary force in society, into ever more conscious struggle against capitalism, and, therefore, toward Trotskyism, the Marxism of the 21st century.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/08/27/sqjg-a27.html

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