Editorial for Revolutionary Perspectives 25 (Series 4).

As the troubled year of 2024 drew to a close, Pope Francis threw open the holy doors of Rome’s four basilicas on Christmas Eve, and declared 2025 would be a year where “hope does not disappoint”, a “year of jubilee”. Yet it is difficult to see what most people have to be jubilant about, especially for those in the world’s multiple war zones where the notion of “jubilee” can only be a bitter irony since the origin of the word comes from the Hebrew for the ram’s horn (jobel) that announced the start of a jubilee. In the Bible, these “occurred every 50 years and involved the cancelling of debts, a period of rest for people and the earth, and land being restored to the landless”.⁽¹⁾ Not much hope of any of that, least of all for the Palestinians. Rather the contrary as the Zionist project of the current Netanyahu government is intent on driving them out of both Gaza and the West Bank (which Israel continues to colonise in defiance of UN resolutions).

However, since it was the season of “goodwill to all men (and women)” even that mouthpiece of Mammon the Financial Times joined in the pious hoping on Christmas Eve. In this case the editors sounded more than a touch desperate.

. . . hope is desperately needed today — by all of us after these past few years of crisis, epidemics, and wars, but above all by those trapped in unjust imprisonment, abuse and bombardment, including in the region of the biblical nativity itself. There may seem scant place for hope in situations today, such as the conflicts in Gaza, Sudan and elsewhere, where even the birth of a child brings the danger of present tragedy rather than the promise of future flourishing. And yet there is no alternative.⁽²⁾

This plea seems to recognise that the world enters 2025 a more dangerous and confusing place than ever but without really understanding why. As we have had cause to note before, there are already over 50 wars going on around the planet, each of them accompanied by indictments from human rights’ organisations, and charities like Médecins Sans Frontières, of “crimes against humanity” (rape, torture and cold blooded murder being at the top of their lists), “genocide”, and/or “ethnic cleansing”. We leave it to the aficionados of international jurisprudence to fight those battles out amongst each other. For Marxist revolutionaries, these atrocities are the product of the kind of wars that imperialist conflict has brought us for over a century. Wholesale massacres of civilian populations are not new. They occurred in the colonial wars of European conquest before the First World War from India to Namibia, and later gave us the Holocaust and the carpet bombings of the Second World War, which culminated in the calculated terror of the death camps and the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.⁽³⁾ They are part of the very nature of capitalist war in the imperialist epoch.

However, what has become clearer over the last 3 years or so is that the world is now sliding little by little towards a third all-out war of incomparable danger to humanity. In fact this was already our unavoidable conclusion before the war between NATO and Russia broke out in Ukraine in 2022.⁽⁴⁾ We have not arrived at this perspective through political guesswork but by following up Marx’s analysis of the development of the capitalist system based on his insights into capitalism’s inbuilt tendency to crisis. Today these periodic crises are now no longer susceptible to purely economic solutions. To explain this, we embarked on the series on Capitalism’s Economic Foundations where we have updated our earlier work from the 1970s to include the main economic aspects of the evolution of today’s long-running crisis. The final instalment in this series demonstrates how the long and unresolved stagnation of capitalism since the Bretton Woods agreement collapsed (1971-3) has created the imperialist tensions which once again threaten a new world war. We now have arrived at a point where heightened imperialist rivalries have reached a level not seen since before the Second World War. The stakes are now too high in the imperialist game. As the massacre in Gaza and the war in Ukraine both show, there is no possible compromise position. Today’s wars, like the First and Second World Wars, are now ‘total’ in that they are not just about line-ups at battlefronts but engulf the entirety of society, silencing voices of dissent whilst overwhelming the domestic economy and much of the citizenry. For Russia, its aggrandisement towards Ukraine is a ‘natural’ response to NATO encirclement which has proceeded inexorably since the collapse of the Soviet Union. For the USA, the war in Ukraine has been very useful in bringing its lukewarm allies into line in light of the coming confrontation with their real global rival, China. In the run up to the Ukraine war, the USA had unintentionally gradually been creating an informal alliance of the powers they had invoked economic sanctions against, viz. Iran, Russia and China. Though not military actions, these economic measures were also imperialist acts of war which have had the result of consolidating cooperation between the three Eurasian powers (despite their different immediate interests), thus dividing the world into two armed camps.

Indeed, had Iran faced Israel and the USA on its own it is likely that it would have been forced to capitulate to them. As it is, the war in Gaza has found Iran in a position of economic and social weakness and neither Russia nor Iran were in a position to prevent the Turkish backed overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria. What this latest episode shows, as we explain in the article on the world situation, is that the fronts of war are joining up and that the imperialist picture is constantly shifting and will continue to shift. Whilst Iran, Russia and China have had a setback in Syria they are making gains across Africa, especially the last two across the Sahel where the Europeans and US have been forced to retreat. Iran’s loss in Syria was even more acute given that it has come alongside the reduction of Hezbollah and the continuing annihilation of Hamas in Gaza. However, even if the Netanyahu government can feel really “jubilant”, the situation for the world could become yet more dangerous. If, for example, Iran should turn its efforts to achieving nuclear parity with Israel, the US could sanction an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In this situation we need to put our trust in more than the pious “hope”. A world controlled by plutocrats like Musk and Trump and all the media monopolists offers us no future. The megarich who control the means of reproduction of ideas use them to sell their imperialist propaganda, saturated in xenophobic nationalism. For a population which has seen its standard of living stagnate for 40 years their “solutions” are easy to understand. It has to be “the other”, whether “migrants” fleeing the death and destruction of existing wars or “China” who are to blame — not a capitalist system which has led to a huge concentration of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires whilst even in “rich” countries millions are are kept destitute, as in the UK for example where over 9 million people sought help from food banks last year.

We cannot rely on hope alone but on the rational conviction that around the world there is one class which is universal and which shares the common experience of exploitation. At the moment the working class is not in great shape after forty years of attacks which have reduced its living standards and its organisational capacities. However the system cannot do without our labour (see the review of Richard Wolff’s book in this issue) since that is the source of its profits. The working class has been written off as a revolutionary force many times but has then fought back to confound the critics. As a reminder of that we are presenting leaflets, translated for the first time, from the 1905 Revolution in the Russian Empire. This was not only the first large-scale class movement since the Paris Commune of 1871 but also came out of a war (between Japan and Russia, which had started 6 months earlier). Its consequences were to lower living standards and led to the first demonstration on Bloody Sunday (22 January 1905). Despite its unpromising roots it went on to threaten the rule of Tsardom right across the Russian Empire and of course was an inspiration for the next revolution provoked by war in 1917. Today, when at least 60% of the world’s workforce are classed as ‘precarious’, i. e. with no or limited legal rights, much less a guaranteed minimum or other wage, the situation of the whole world working class increasingly resembles the ludicrous dichotomy of wealth within old Russian Tsardom.

As we go to press, the area around Los Angeles is once again being devastated by fire (which at time of writing has destroyed at least 10,000 buildings). It is a reminder that the drive to war has also led to the abandonment of any idea that capitalism will ever do anything seriously about climate change. 2024 was the hottest year on record with average temperatures 1.6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. The Paris climate conference of 2015 solemnly declared its commitment to keep the increase below 1. 5 degrees.⁽⁵⁾ Despite this the Right are still in denial and simply dismiss all the evidence as “a hoax”, whilst the Green Parties of various nations want to carry out policies which preserve the source of the problem – the profits system – and advocate policies for which the working class will have to pay the most (another “populist” trick for the Right to take advantage of). Whether it is the further extension of the effects of global warming or the prospect of nuclear war capitalism offers us only an increasingly uncertain and unsustainable future. The alternative today remains the same as in 1905 – socialism or barbarism. Either a world where all humans can have a dignified and worthwhile existence without social classes, exploitation and war, or greater subjugation of the mass of the population to the whims of the world’s richest as they take us towards armageddon.

This is why we are urging all who share our critique to get together to start creating the basis for a world workers’ movement, before it becomes impossible to do so. No war but the class war!

Notes:

(1) This succinct summary comes from the Catholic charity CAFOD at cafod.org.uk for which we are very grateful, since the Biblical references are more obtuse. The main source is the book of Leviticus. “And you shall count seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall be to you forty-nine years. Then you shall send abroad the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the day of atonement [aka Yom Kippur – CWO] you shall send abroad the loud trumpet throughout all your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants; it shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family” (Leviticus 25, 8-10).

(2) ft.com

(3) leftcom.org

(4) As we noted at the end of 2021: leftcom.org

(5) bbc.co.uk