War in Ukraine and the Middle East: Two expressions of the horror and irrational madness of capitalism!

New Introduction, 2 October 2024

Since this article was written, recent events, and in particular developments in the Middle East, clearly confirm the article’s prediction that we are seeing the growing escalation of the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The war has already expanded to Yemen with Israeli strikes against Houthi-held ports and to Syria with an attack on Damascus. Israel's offensive against Hezbollah, which began with an ultra-sophisticated, and yet entirely barbaric operation concocted by Mossad in the heart of Beirut, simultaneously detonating nearly 500 pirated telephone pagers and walkie-talkie bombs, has been followed by intense aerial bombardment of the Lebanese capital, killing hundreds of people, including many children, injuring more than 1,800 civilians by 26 September, and forcing up to a million people to flee their homes. Reports indicate that a hundred thousand of these have been seeking refuge in Syria, which already contains numerous refugee camps where basic supplies are virtually non-existent.

On September 27, another coup for the Israeli state: the killing of Hezbollah’s supreme leader, Hassan Nasrallah. These and other blows against Hezbollah clearly benefit the Netanyahu regime, which can boast of definite ‘victories’ in contrast to the deadly quagmire in Gaza.  Meanwhile, an Israeli ground offensive in southern Lebanon has already begun, with commando raids on Hezbollah bases, backed up by air power. The Israeli offensive has deprived Hezbollah of a considerable part of its current leadership, but it is a complete illusion to think that you can eliminate terrorism by wiping out a few commanders. The war in Lebanon will not have a quick and easy outcome for Israel, as it already discovered in 2006.

Hezbollah has vowed revenge and continues to call for the destruction of the State of Israel, while Tehran in turn launches a rain of ballistic missiles on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in retaliation, which will once again provoke an escalation in Israel’s response. The two sides are using the current focus on the forthcoming American elections, their uncertain outcome and the proximity of this deadline, to intensify their provocative policies, turning a deaf ear to the injunctions of both the United States and the European Union who have called for an immediate ceasefire. The local powers are clearly rushing pell-mell into an escalating and irrational military situation that threatens to set the whole region on fire. At the same time, the conflict is revealing the contradictory stance of the US, which continues to pour weapons into Israel and supplies intelligence to some of its attacks, for example the Israeli raid on Yemen. Washington has an interest in the weakening of Iran and its allies in the region - which would also be a blow against Russia, since Iran is one of its main arms suppliers. Both the US and Britain have played a direct role in Israel’s response to Iran’s missile attack (intelligence and anti-missile fire from the US Mediterranean fleet). But at the same time, Washington does not want the whole situation to spiral out of control; and Netanyahu’s growing defiance of US appeals is a further sign of the diminution of America’s authority on a global scale. 

To a lesser degree, but just as significantly, the war between Russia and Ukraine is becoming entrenched and bogged down. Zelensky has recently made a speech at the UN in an attempt to convince the ‘international community’ to support Ukraine more effectively, hypocritically presenting a ‘plan for peace’, when in fact he is admitting in a barely disguised way that it is a question of putting pressure on Moscow in order to ‘force Russia to make peace’ under the new conditions imposed by Ukraine. This only provoked a virulent reaction from Putin, who declared that ‘he would never accept peace under duress’ and reaffirmed that Moscow's conditions for a cease-fire were always the same: recognition of the regions conquered by Russia at the start of the war, and ruling out Ukraine's adherence to NATO. These terms are in turn totally unacceptable to Kiev. Moreover, Britain has dispatched long-distance Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine, and seems to have changed its stance on allowing them to be used against targets inside Russia. If the US, Germany and others in the west give the green light to their use in Russia, this would constitute yet another step towards the abyss. In response, Putin has changed the protocol for the use of nuclear weapons, which now allows their ‘asymmetric’ use in the case of a threat to crucial installations on Russian soil, even by a non-nuclear power. As a result of all this, the prospect of reopening negotiations between the two main protagonists in the conflict is once again being buried. On the ground, on the other hand, the fighting and mutual destruction are not only intensifying but once again threatening to take an even more menacing turn with the resumption of bombing raids around the nuclear reactors at the Zaporizhzha power station, while each side blames the other for playing with fire.

These wars show that when it comes to playing with fire, the entire ruling class of this barbaric system is guilty as charged.

******************************************************************************************************************************

This summer, murderous tensions in Ukraine and the Middle East escalated in a destructive spiral whose outcome could not be clearer: nothing profitable will ever come out of these wars for any of the belligerents.

A never-ending escalation of war
The Russian army's advances in Eastern Ukraine have been met by new incursions, this time directly onto Russian soil, by the Ukrainian army in the Kursk region. A further step has been taken, threatening the population and the world with an extension of the conflict and an even deadlier confrontation. All the belligerents are caught up in an extremely dangerous spiral: Zelensky, for example, is just waiting to be able to strike Russia more deeply thanks to the European and American missiles he is receiving. And this only fuels the Kremlin's murderous headlong rush, with the strikes in Poltava adding 55 deaths to the endless list of victims.

For its part, Belarus is still a force that could play an active part in the conflict: with the Ukrainian raid on Kursk, this possibility has increased. On the common border between Belarus and Ukraine, the Lukashenko government has stationed a third of its army, and its June military exercises were a reminder that it has Russian nuclear weapons on its territory.

The same risk of extending the vicious cycle of war is present in Poland, which has once again expressed its concern by keeping its troops on alert. Although NATO, of which Poland is a member, has officially refused to send troops, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk spoke at the end of March of a “pre-war era”’.

In the Middle East, the daily ignominy in Gaza has been compounded by the Israeli army's offensive in the West Bank and its intervention in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah targets, in a totally irrational forward flight. The provocative assassination of the head of Hamas in Teheran has only led to his replacement by a new leader who is even more extremist and bloodthirsty, and has lit another fuse in the regional powder keg. All this, of course, has given Iran and its allies new pretexts for getting even more involved in the conflict, stepping up their crimes and provocations.

While the hypocritical ‘ceasefire’ talks were being held in Doha in mid-August, the massacres and destruction continued unabated. Netanyahu never ceases to torpedo any attempt at a diplomatic opening, the better to accentuate his scorched-earth policy, piling up corpses in an attempt to save his skin. Each side has done nothing but increase the carnage in order to influence the negotiations.
Netanyahu and Hamas, Putin and Zelensky, and the imperialist powers that actively support them - all these imperialist vultures are caught up in an unstoppable logic of endless and increasingly destructive confrontations. This only confirms that the war spiral of capitalism in full decomposition has lost all economic rationality and is tending to escape the control of its direct protagonists and all the imperialist powers involved.

Accelerating decomposition exacerbates conflicts
These conflicts illustrate the enormous weight of the decomposition of the capitalist system, the irreversible acceleration of which is increasingly threatening to destroy humanity: through their duration, through the political impasse they reveal, through their irrationality and their scorched-earth logic. If world war is not on the agenda, because of the generalised domination of every man for himself, the instability of alliances which now characterise international relations, the intensification and progressive extension of conflicts can only lead in the long term to ever more destruction and chaos.

The non-existence of imperialist blocs ready for world war (as were the Western bloc and the Eastern bloc during the Cold War) ultimately generates even more instability: as there is no longer a common enemy or bloc discipline, each faction now acts for its own objectives, which leads them more easily to confrontation in a struggle of each against all, hindering the action of others and making it increasingly difficult to control their policies.
It is because of this tendency that the United States, while maintaining its support for NATO, sees its own factions fighting over policy, both in Ukraine and in Gaza. While the Biden administration proposed maintaining aid to its allies, the Republicans sought to limit it, in Congress initially freezing $60 billion in support for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel, before finally giving in and agreeing to release them. These fractures are accentuating the United States' difficulty in imposing its hegemony on the world. It is losing more and more control over its policies and its authority over the protagonists in conflicts.

And it is in this context that the growing polarisation between the two great powers, China and the United States, is adding fuel to the fire. While the prospect of a full-scale war between these two powers is out of the question for the time being, tensions are constant and the risk of a regional confrontation over Taiwan is only increasing. China is continuing its military exercises near and around the island, continuing and stepping up its military provocations in the China Sea, albeit cautiously, and increasing its intimidation, particularly of the Philippines and Japan. The United States, very concerned, is raising its voice and reaffirming its support for its threatened allies, while also stepping up its provocations. The situation is becoming increasingly uncontrollable and unpredictable. The risk of new conflagrations is constantly increasing.

Proletarians remain the main victims
Proletarians are always the hardest hit, whether directly in the conflict zones or away from the frontlines as a result of the attacks linked to the war economy. In war zones, they are the victims of bombardments, suffer restrictions and have to endure terror, horrors and massacres. When they are not being exploited in factories, mines or offices, the bourgeoisie uses them as cannon fodder. In Ukraine, the government recruits any man between the ages of 25 and 60 at its own discretion, either directly by abduction or with the lure of a higher salary than that of a civilian job. In addition to compulsory enlistment, the bourgeoisie takes advantage of the workers' miserable conditions to pay for their blood and their lives. All this was only possible thanks to intense nationalist propaganda, vast ideological campaigns and state-planned conditioning: “War is methodical, organised, gigantic murder. In order to get normal men to carry out systematic murder, it is necessary [...] to produce an appropriate intoxication. This has always been the usual method used by belligerents. The bestiality of thought and feeling must correspond to the bestiality of practice; it must prepare and accompany it”[1].  This is why the working class in Ukraine, Russia and the Middle East is currently unable to react, and will find it very difficult to do so in the face of the  “intoxication”’ to which it is being subjected.

It is true that Netanyahu's government is increasingly unpopular, and the news of the latest Hamas killing of Israeli hostages has provoked huge demonstrations, as more and more Israelis recognise that the government's stated aim of freeing the hostages and destroying Hamas are mutually contradictory. But the demonstrations, even when they demand a ceasefire, remain within the bounds of nationalism and bourgeois democracy and contain no momentum towards a proletarian response to the war.

The proletariat of the Western countries, through its experience of class struggle, particularly the sophisticated traps imposed by bourgeois domination, remains the principal antidote to the destructive spiral. Through his struggles against the effects of the war economy, both budget cuts and galloping inflation, it is laying the foundations for his future assaults on capitalism.

Tatlin/WH, 5 September 2024
 

 

 

---

[1] Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of Social Democracy (1915).