The great winner has been SYRIZA, the left coalition led by Alexis Tsipras, which has beaten PASOK to second place quite handily. While the KKE barely profited from the conditions, SYRIZA and the more principled anti-capitalist coalition Antarsya did. SYRIZA is in a very strong position indeed – all the more since ND leader Antonis Samaras has already indicated being unable to form a pro-austerity coalition as formally invited to do. This puts the onus strongly on Tsipras to make the results count in political terms. Yet whether he will be able to do so can be questioned. Firstly, the division of the vote on the left clearly indicates the popularity of the notion of ending austerity without ending the existing relationship between Greece and the European Union, or even the relationship between Greece and NATO and the wider world-system. Tsipras expressly campaigned in favor of keeping the Euro and the commitment to the European Union, something KKE is traditionally against (as are most left-wing parties in Europe). However, a default for Greece, the only non-austerity option, is not likely to be borne without repercussions by the bourgeoisies benefiting from the Eurozone system – first and foremost those of Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, secondary those in France and others. They will not be amenable to adjusting the austerity impositions and the deflationary monetary regime embedded in the Eurozone’s ruling agreements just to favor a debtor in bad faith. At the same time, a clause in the new EU treaty – little remarked upon at the time, but now crucial – expressly states that any Eurozone member state that decides to suspend use of the Euro thereby renounces membership of the European Union. And two-thirds of Greek trade is with EU member states; it relies on them heavily for import of machine goods for industry and agriculture, Germany not in the last place.

This puts SYRIZA and their fellow thinkers face-to-face with the paradox. To reject austerity is to default; but to default is to break the Eurozone agreement’s constraints. Only if they can diplomatically achieve the suspension or revision of those agreements can they proceed on this basis, in which they may now find a friend in the newly elected François Hollande. The fall of the Dutch government, stubborn as a mule in imposing its hypocritical restrictions on other member states, may also be of help. But I would not count on this possibility too hard, and it is hard to imagine Tsipras does either. The best way to achieve this may well be simply to call Berlin’s bluff – present them with a fait accompli of Greek default, and hope the combined pressure of the possibility of Spanish and Portuguese default and weakening of Merkel’s allies in austerity will do the trick. The only other option is to actually follow the exit to the end, and actually renounce the EU membership, reintroduce the drachma, and devaluate on the basis of a popular front programme for reviving Greek employment and making the Greek upper classes pay for the burden they have imposed on the people while evading their own share of the cost. A broad popular front programme of this kind has a chance of working, if done by a competent government not afraid to act swiftly against capital flight and using this opportunity to act against the oligarchies of PASOK and ND bureaucrats and the mercantile capital still dominant in the Greek economy. Whether Syriza is that government is not at all sure, given its internal divisions between social-democrats and socialists, and its mutual hostility with the KKE.

The great risk is that the result of this impasse is yet more elections. Under no circumstances should Syriza accept this unless at the minimum it was guaranteed the plurality bonus is abolished, so that there will be no more dependency on the rotten husk of the ND leadership. Quick elections on the exact same basis as the current ones cannot but favor the forces of the right. Already, Chrysi Avyi, as feared, has obtained 21 seats – and its leader Michaloliakis used the opportunity for a truly Hitlerite speech containing overt threats. If elections proceed without result, this puts further tension on the formal liberalism of the system without resolving its contradictions, paving the way for military coup or worse. It is no coincidence, and must be remarked upon again, that the PASOK leadership of the Papandreou government used one of its last opportunities to act as government to replace the chiefs of staff of the different military branches. Precisely the lack of public notice given to this indicates the possibility is far from imaginary. Moreover, if there are elections fought on substantial issues on how to face the crisis, this will favor the socialist approach, which is the only one that can demonstrate how the contradictions in Greece are those of capital itself. But a failure of procedure that does not resolve these problems under worsening conditions will increase the public’s exasperation and desire for Order; and this is a route historically to be feared. Already the fascists representing national capital and outraged burghers have more power than anywhere in Europe bar Hungary.

Syriza must choose its options carefully, and the left must be ready to act in alliance if and when the confrontation comes to a head, be it externally or internally. They must confront the power of the oligarchy inside and outsidethe country head on. Smaller nations, like Iceland, show it can be done – now it must be done on a larger scale. The bourgeois politicians must not be allowed to use this opportunity to stall or force an outside solution, whether by Berlin or blackshirts. As it was once said about them, so the Greeks must now say to each other: Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

Several such cases have presented themselves recently. In White Plains, NY, a black citizen by the name of Kenneth Chamberlain accidentally set off his life alarm. When police arrived, he refused them entry, stating he did not need their help; by all accounts, he used considerable means to prevent further police entry, such as jamming the door. The police, operating without a warrant, burst in anyway and shot him with a Taser gun. In the altercation that followed, real bullets were used, and Chamberlain was killed. It is at any time a remarkable case when a man who is not suspected of any crime is heard on tape to declare that the police are coming to kill him, which the same police force then promptly proceeds to do. However, the case is made all the more remarkable by the decision of the grand jury in Westchester County not to indict the policeman who did the shooting.

Westchester County is the second richest county in New York and the eighth richest in the United States on average; Chamberlain was an ex-Marine, presumed to suffer from mental trauma, who lived in one of the poorer parts of the county. It is by all accounts a tragic story, but it would require a remarkable degree of wilful blindness not to see the structural elements in the affair. A white police force battering their way into a black man’s house in the projects; racial slurs being used; a police force, like all such in the United States, ready to shoot first and ask questions later, all in the name of protecting a public they have been drilled to see as their enemy at home; the frequency of untreated mental problems among the veterans of the endless American wars, untreated despite the fly-by-night patriotism and ‘support our troops’ slogans emanating from the militarist American political culture; and the very same policeman doing the shooting in this case having been accused of police brutality against two Jordanians in 2008. One does not need to be John Nash to see what liberal equilibrium this adds up to.

Of course, this case itself happens in the wake of the infamous shooting of Trayvon Martin. Here, a teenager out to buy some snacks was shot dead in a confrontation with a suburban white vigilante with a record of harrassment and paranoia about outsiders. As this happened in sleepy Sanford, FL, the local police, our friends and guardians, declined to so much as arrest the killer for the deed. Only after enormous public pressure and attention to the murder did an investigation even get under way, a clear indication of the value your average ‘safe’, white community puts on the life of young black men. The crucial element in this case was that citizen George Zimmerman, the killer, used a claim of self-defense to free himself from blame. Florida Congress had recently passed a law stating lethal violence in self-defense could be used under any circumstances, purposely overruling the normal practice of requiring violence in self-defense to be proportional to the threat faced. If it had not been for the public outrage, this ‘Stand Your Ground’ law may well have allowed citizen Zimmerman to get away with murder. Crime levels are consistently dropping across the Western world, not least in the United States, but white paranoia about criminal outsiders, foreigners, and racial minorities continues unabated.

The Martin case is just another sad demonstration of the real lethal consequences of institutionalized hostility and fear on the part of a racial majority, feeling threatened in its enjoyment of the unearned privileges the racial caste system has granted it. The threat comes from the mere potentiality of real, substantial equality threatening to erase the very possibility of the very racial ladder itself; an equality nowhere remotely achieved, but always looming wherever social segregation becomes difficult, educational levels increase, and the political domain cannot be kept entirely free of the influence of those at the bottom of the ladder of race and class. The result is a law which gives everyone the freedom to defend themselves from threats with lethal force. As the Martin case shows, this majestic equality entails in reality a freedom of the high caste to retaliate against the lower that it fears may supplant it and end its rule.

To show that this is the reality, not whatever freedom of the individual or the rule of law the Party of Order may wax lyrical about, one need but look at yet a third case, that of CeCe McDonald. Here, citizen McDonald, a black transgender woman, has been charged with second-degree murder. While walking past a bar with a group of friends in Minneapolis, MN, she was set upon by a number of whites. The aggressors, first provoking them with racial and transphobic slurs, proceeded to physically assault them. McDonald herself was struck with a bottle. As the fight escalated, one of the attackers, a certain citizen named Dean Schmitz, was stabbed; he died of his wounds in hospital. McDonald was arrested and charged, whereas none of the assailants were. Just recently, McDonald has plea bargained to accept a conviction for second degree manslaughter, which will see her imprisoned for several years in the notorious American prison system.

In the United States, more people are imprisoned per capita than in any other country in the world. In the United States, the heartland of imperialism, more people are imprisoned today than ever were in any of the Soviet Union’s so well described prison camps. This burden falls, as always, especially heavily on those groups ‘where race burns class’; the fact Schmitz’s swastika tattoo, the most notorious and hated insigne of fascism, was ruled inadmissible as evidence of racist intent just adds insult to this injury. Institutionalized racism here joins institutionalized transphobia. But the real significance of the case rests in the contrast to that of Trayvon Martin, and that of Kenneth Chamberlain described above. In each of these cases, the supposed equality of the law is really a different beast. Chamberlain’s attempted self-defence against a white police force without a warrant cost him his life. McDonald’s very real self-defense against a gang of white bigots saw her imprisoned. But Zimmerman’s supposed self-defense against an unarmed black teenager would have been accepted without question, had not activists focused the public’s attention on the case. Even then, it took a Special Prosecutor, more legal exception than legal norm, to formulate charges against him.

These tragic cases are but recent examples. One can point to much larger-scale symptoms of the same causes, such as the International Criminal Court’s sole convictions being war criminals from Africa, while those of Europe and North America make millions from public speeches or hold leisurely golf vacations. One can point to the contexts in the responses to the specific cases; such as the initial failure of the white, middle class oriented LGBT organizations in the US to take the McDonald case seriously. One can point to the similarities in terrorism cases, where the most far-fetched plan hatched by an unstable mind is evidence of terrorist conspiracy when proceeding from an Arab defendant, but the many cases of political terror against minority victims or left politicians by young white men are immediately interpreted as ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. And so on and so on. In each and every of these phenomena, the common denominator is their meaning as symptoms of underlying inequalities and denial of emancipation, that in power trump whatever equality the formality of bourgeois law may presuppose. As long as this emancipation has not been effected, nobody can trust in the law; nobody can be ‘on the side of the law’, as long as the law is not on their side. What use then the law?

1) Anatole France, Le Lys Rouge (Paris, 1894)

Things, in other words, do not look good for the Hellenic Republic on the eve of this historical election, and the political polling reflects this. While the liberal-conservative ND maintains its position somewhat, especially combined with the support of the anti-austerity splitoff, as everywhere else the social-democratic reformists of PASOK have undergone electoral collapse. There is some reason for rejoicing over this, as the corrupt, family and region based duopoly of PASOK and ND has done nothing for the Greek people and has betrayed them at every turn. It was they who saddled the Greek people with impossible debts while spending this money on prestige projects, enriching the middle class in Kolonaki, and buying weaponry to threaten the Turks. It was they who took the inheritance of the overthrow of the Colonels and subsumed Greece to the rule of German and French capital and hitched them to the NATO imperial bandwagon in the name of preserving stability. So, good riddance to them. The left parties, split along sectarian lines but each representing a meaningful proposition for the country, are doing as well as 30% combined; although we must not forget the likelihood of a low turnout among the country’s left out of a justified disillusion with ‘liberal democracy’.

A real concern however, as always with such developments, is the possibility that the rise of the revolutionary democracy is pre-empted by attempts at capitalist restoration at the expense of any remaining democratic norms and restraints – i.e., fascism. This is no mere illusion, and this is shown clearly in Greece. The tabloid press as well as the mainstream papers and TV stations have launched a renewed philistine offensive to pin the blame of Greece’s predicament on the influx of mainly illegal migrants to the country, whether Albanian, from Africa or otherwise. Such cheap foreigner-baiting is a perennial fact of life in Western countries, but always rises in times of crisis and presents a real threat to the safety of foreign workers in Europe and elsewhere. While poor economic climates do deter migration to some extent, the very real differences in wealth for working people between the West and the rest will continue to draw migrants. In the absence of a committed socialist vision among the working class, it is not too difficult to bait them by pointing to the effect of migrants on lowering the wage level, on adding labour competition, and so forth. This is a vulgar economic view, and precisely the sort of superficial analysis Marxist theory is created to combat, but so far neither the KKE nor others have taken their duty entirely seriously in this regard – a reflection of the power of the labour aristocratic ideology in all Western countries.

In addition to this, there has been the rise not just of the reactionary party LAOS, but more significantly of Chrysi Avyi, the “Golden Dawn”. This eloquently named movement is an explicitly neo-Nazi party, presenting a vision of a Greece by and for “Aryans” only, to which by some trick of historical imagination the Greeks themselves are apparently to be counted; having switched from the silly worship of Zeus to a neo-Orthodoxy, they appeal to clerical elements in competition with LAOS; and they explicitly use Nazi symbolism in flags, rallies, and so forth, taking care to make themselves a physical presence in working class neighbourhoods in Athens and elsewhere. Normally, such movements remain fringe, fall apart under internal contradictions, and cannot move beyond the occasional lynching of an unfortunate migrant. But under the pressure of the crisis, the situation hardens, and this movement in its explicitly fascist form is now polling at 5%, sufficient to present MPs in the Vouli in May.

This raises the real threat of fascist consolidation in the political sphere. They go far beyond the prospects of a BNP, and shed their ‘national’ and ‘democratic’ hypocrisy to a far greater degree still than the Front National in France or even the NPD in Germany, but the rise of such movements with considerable mass support across Europe is a deeply worrying development. Hungary has already demonstrated that mainstream, liberal politics is by no means capable of resisting the fascist challenge when confronted with it. It is a real threat in a time when capitalism along liberal-’democratic’ lines seems to offer no way out and the left is not (yet) capable of rising to the challenge itself. For now, in most countries the groups are still marginal, and even in Hungary by no means yet ready to seize power. But the historical examples of fascism in Europe demonstrate how quickly such a transformation can occur – it takes but a few years of extended crisis and inability of the parties of the mainstream to deal with it. This is by no means inconceivable today.

Does this mean Greece is in a Weimar situation? My answer is: not yet. Chrysi Avyi nor LAOS has sufficient mass support to make this a reality, and Greece is in fact (to its great credit) one of the few countries where the left forces are overtaking the right in responding to the crisis of capitalism; a pattern we may yet see in France as well. Nonetheless, the predicament Greece is in must not be underestimated, nor should the consequences be. Greece has effectively defaulted on a portion of its debt already, but is still unable to repay, and must therefore default more systematically. The only way to do this within capitalism and without enormous losses of living standards is by devaluation of the currency, confiscation through taxes or otherwise of much of the assets of the wealthy inside and outside the country, and finally a repudation of the debts to foreign creditors combined with a national investment programme forcing the liquid assets to be used productively. However, such solutions are and will remain impossible on the basis of any government beholden to the interests of foreign creditors and the European Union political commitments to that class, as the German response to the possibility of devaluation (by leaving the Eurozone) has shown. Moreover, ND will never be capable of such a response as they are too reliant on precisely those classes that have benefited from the situation: the Greek commercial capitalists, bankers and shipping magnates, the tax-dodging doctors and lawyers of Kolonaki, and even the labour aristocrats from those sectors dependent on German and French investment.

For these reasons, unless some sudden change of perspective grips either the comprador technocrats ruling Greece or the creditors’ representatives wrapping themselves in the flag of the Pan-European Idea, we will continue to see a gridlocked government in Greece while the living standards can be expected to decline further. Under such circumstances, a fascist solution or a coup de main is not off the table. Already, the Greek cabinet members cannot show themselves in public unguarded for fear of their lives, and one of the last acts of the original PASOK government was to replace the heads of the military branches, whose loyalty was apparently not certain. This is not yet quite Weimar, 1932, but it could perhaps be compared to Weimar, 1928. The fascists in Greece hitherto lack any annexationist impulse, and have none of the class potential to that effect that supported the NSDAP in Germany, as I analyzed in previous writing. We must therefore hope the left in Greece can overcome its divisions in the face of this remote, but real threat. With an eye to elections in France, to the situation in Hungary and Romania, and the prospects of a socialist answer to the crisis of capitalism, much may turn out to depend on this.

Lord Ahmed denies having done so, and claims his statement was merely an expression of opposition to the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. This may be so. But the substance of the claim is interesting. Firstly, it seems fair to say that if the wholesale murder of civilians is to be deplored – which it surely is – on the part of Lashkar-e-Toiba, who are held responsible for the assassinations in Mumbai in recent times, then the same should surely apply to the orchestrators of several wars of a nature most devastating to civilians in the Middle East. Secondly, the immediate response on the part of the “Labour” Party to prepare to expel Lord Ahmed is telling. From its very origins onwards, this so-called “Labour” Party has failed every challenge set before it in the domain of chauvinism and expansionism abroad. It joined the Asquith government in the imperialist butchery that was World War I. It supported the campaigns against the ‘tribes’ in Iraq, the ‘neutrality’ policy in Spain, the rejection of a Soviet alliance in 1939; it supported colonization and imperialism in the Empire and worked as vigorously to maintain these possessions as one would expect of a society of shareholders in rubber futures. It supported the Suez adventure, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the adventures in Iran; it supported the two Gulf Wars and the occupation of Afghanistan, the fourth such by the United Kingdom. It has, in other words, appeared as the agent of the labour aristocracy in foreign affairs, the ‘left foot of imperialism’.

In a time when the International Criminal Court expresses the universal aspiration of mankind to a justice that is more than just partial, national, and one-sided, and when due to the forces of global ‘free trade’ the various nations and peoples are made ever more immediately aware of each other’s circumstances, such institutions as the ICC and the UN nonetheless manifest themselves as the Kantian-universalist banner under which imperialism is now forced to march. This makes their real functioning all the more despicable and all the more transparent. The ICC has only prosecuted and imprisoned those defeated or isolated by the great powers, it has been totally unable to challenge the militarism of these powers themselves. This despite the fact the Nürnberg precedent clearly indicates that “waging aggressive warfare” is a hanging offense. Under these circumstances, then, to clearly outline the hypocrisy on the part of the US government and its lackeys abroad is an important political step. To identify the American rulers as not being above reproach and not to be taken in by their sanctimonious aura of “good will to all men” is of great significance for any critical political understanding.

Militarism and chauvinism pervert the judgement of the citizen, lead to pointless hatred and slaughter, and achieve only division where their should be unity between working people. Active support for imperialism is tantamount to support for those classes in whose interest it is undertaken. Choosing the cause of the white labour aristocracy in the West over the cause of internationalism and the cause of the global working people is a political and strategic blunder, as great as that of 1914. For those reasons, whether or not Lord Ahmed actually said what is alleged, we say that he should have said it. And if push does come to shove on this matter, we say it is not the Labour Party that should expel Lord Ahmed, but it is Lord Ahmed that should expel the Labour Party, which has betrayed the interests of working people worldwide.

“My deeds upon my head! I crave the law,
The penalty and forfeit of my bond.”

1) “Peer suspended after bounty claim”. BBC News (April 15, 2012). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17723890

More examples of this have been the trend towards imprisoning people on the basis of what previously would have been considered political opposition within the law, minor offences, or even mere silliness. A man in Lincolnshire called the police after a policeman had been shot, in order to announce his pleasure with the course of events; he was imprisoned for six weeks. In another case, a man was imprisoned for two months for making a single racist statement towards a footballer (who would not even know about it); in the wake of the riots in London and elsewhere, people have been sentenced to long prison terms for such crimes as stealing a bottle of water, a totally failed attempt at gathering people for a riot, and for wishing British soldiers serving imperialism in Afghanistan to go to hell – hardly a very real threat in a society in which few people believe in such a state of the soul. Similar cases of ‘setting an example’ have occurred elsewhere. In the United States, the Obama administration has systematically prosecuted whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, even when they were actually attempting to reveal deficiencies in the state apparatus or forms of corruption rather than any political shortcomings; and this is a law which was passed during the First World War in order to effect the mass imprisonment and exile of socialists and to make outlaws of draft resisters. Just recently there was the case of Tarek Mehanna, a citizen of fundamental Muslim principles from Boston, MA, who was imprisoned for 17 1/2 years on counts of supporting terrorist organizations.

In his brilliant sentencing speech, which can be found in its entirety here, Mehanna rightly pointed out the hypocrisy of imprisoning a citizen for supporting foreign resistance forces by categorizing them as ‘terrorists’, when it is the American government and its allies that are occupying their lands and slaughtering their people. As Mehanna points out, the United States itself was founded on armed resistance against the foreign oppressor, and the principle of revolution is as indelibly associated with American society and its principles as it is in France. To the loyalists and Tories of the 18th century, the American rebels were no doubt terrorists. At the same time, when it is convenient to the American government’s purposes, terrorists abroad can become ‘freedom fighters’, as when the Mujahideen fought the Soviet Union and the Afghan government in Afghanistan; but now the US is itself embroiled in a hopeless war of attrition there, those same fanatics have become the worst international outlaws. How can they expect anyone to take this seriously? The Mehanna case, the Manning case, the case of the man imprisoned in New York for distributing Hezbollah’s soap series on al-Manar TV all show but one thing: they expose the ultima ratio regis behind the ‘liberalism’ and ‘personal freedoms’ of our societies, they expose the willingness to use force at home and abroad that makes the individual liberty of modern society a privilege limited to the few. For his courage towards furthering this cause, Mehanna has done us all a great favor; and the fact we must disassociate ourselves from his Islam-centered political viewpoint does not diminish that in the least.

Many such examples could be provided. Indeed, against Muslims generally the levels of witch-hunting an suspicion have reached unprecedented levels, as more and more the Western states see them as collectively unreliable, sui generis treasonous to the supposed achievements of our ‘liberal, democratic states’, and all that decaying rubbish. But it is a mistake to see this as limited to that context only. More generally, there has been a militarization of the police, a revival of mass imprisonment as a technique for reasserting state control, an ever-expanding state power over the new media and new forms of communication, a willingness to exercise brutality against legal and peaceful demonstrations and to further restrict the ability to hold them, renewed offensives against undocumented workers and ‘undesirables’ such as Roma people, ridiculous humiliations of working class people for petty crimes such as ASBOs, and the widespread practice of hiring out the police force as private guard dogs for capital, from New York to Athens.

These are all related phenomena. They are part of a large front offensive by the ruling classes to maintain their position against rising popular resistance. They fit the neoliberal programme of using state power to perforce bring the populations of the world into the free market utopia of the neoclassical school – a utopia guarded by border fences, secret detention sites, SWAT teams and even the use of ‘nonlethal weaponry’ on any remaining protesters. But this is not all cause for despair. It is precisely a sign of the weakness of the neoliberal state in an era of crisis. It is a sign of the total bankruptcy, quite literally, of the ideology of capitalist triumphalism that would guarantee us that there would be no more crisis, no more unemployment, no more war, only trade and mutual benefit, only liberty, equality, property, and Bentham. It is when the forces shoring up the rule of capital are at their weakest that they resort to the harshest measures – one need but look at Bismarck’s “Anti-Socialism Law”, at the Palmer and Mitchell Raids, at McCarthyism after WWII, at Operation Gladio and De Gaulle calling in the tank divisions. This is besides as true in China and Russia as it is in Britain and Greece.

In this sense, the men and women so wisely and democratically governing our nations are really doing us a favor. In exposing their economic failure, their political hypocrisy, and their total subservience to the interests of capital, especially financial capital, they expose also their total unfitness to govern and their historical obsolescence. This is felt widely in much of the world, as demonstrated by the ever increasing dissension against the meaningless parliamentarism of the social-democrats and the prison-house of “there is no alternative”. What greater indictment of a economic-political system than that the rulers of its ruling state have to keep 60.000 people in solitary confinement in perpetuity? This is no show of historical strength. What greater sign of weakness than that all the politicians of the ruling class ever more sing hymns from the same sheet-book, while the real substance of their politics and manifestos becomes less discernable by the day? That they care not whether they lie or speak the truth, whether they are believed or not believed? The rottenness of the edifice becomes so clear now that its smell is pervading throughout Europe and will soon reach other shores, if it has not already. Not even the Chinese walls will be able to keep out the stench of putrefaction of this corpse. When military law comes to Greece, when protests are banned in Spain, when the elections in the US will provide a ‘mandate’ for further war abroad and prisons at home, when the Russian regime extends its grasp further and the oil kings of the Gulf manifest their priestly hypocrisy further, the workers of all nations will increasingly clearly see the commonality of their interests in ridding themselves of this sorry bunch. Then we shall hold a Cadaver Synod, and dispense with the liberal ‘party of order’.

1) Stephen Graham, “Olympics 2012 security: welcome to lockdown London”. The Guardian (March 12, 2012).

Galloway undertook the latter – for a salary several times that of the median worker, he failed to vote or take part in parliamentary activity almost entirely. Between 2005 and 2009, only eleven MPs voted less often than he did, and that includes the abstentionists of Sinn Fein and the speaker and his deputies, as well as two MPs who died in office. Galloway claimed to have compensated for this by his public activities – making speeches against imperialism, challenging the reactionaries of the US Senate in their own chamber, and so forth. But he had precious little to show for it. Galloway also plays to religious, sectarian sentiments; he fails to clearly distinguish a meaningful anti-imperialism from hypocritical sycophancy towards regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria; the Respect Party itself has consistently shown its opportunism in its dalliances with reactionary religious groups and movements in the UK. His embarrassing participation in the reality TV programme “Celebrity Big Brother” only underlines his activities as being fundamentally opportunistically self-interested, self-aggrandizing, and making a mockery of socialism, which does not need such ‘friends’.

Yet his recent overwhelming victory in the by-election in Bradford West, where he obtained an absolute majority of the votes in a safe Labour seat, is not to be lightly ignored. It is an important political result, mainly in what it reveals about the opposition. First, the most telling fact has been the general total failure of many commentators to take the agency of the muslim working class and lower middle class voters seriously. Brendan O’Neill of Spiked wrote an article in the Daily Telegraph in which he posited Galloway’s victory as being the result of a general disenchantment with politics and therefore a purely negative vote, a ‘protest vote’, with no political content. But there is absolutely no reason to believe this other than a stubborn unwillingness to believe that minority voters in the United Kingdom are capable of recognizing their interests politically, both on the foreign and the domestic front. Galloway’s main claim to fame was always his opposition to the imperialist designs of the Labour Party, and his participation in the election in Bradford as well as in east London was in large part to force a split on this issue. He has succeeded in this, because the Muslim population of the UK has no benefit from imperialism against Muslim countries (or any other), and knows this full well. This is as much a real, substantial political position as any of O’Neill himself. Secondly, Galloway’s victory in Bradford was a reaction against Labour Party corruption – the tendency of local cliques to use the party’s influence in poor areas to create ‘ward boss’ type systems which perpetuate themselves in exchange for minor local favors, not much unlike the political systems that prevailed among poor migrants in the United States in the late 19th century.

It would be wrong, however, to dismiss it therefore as merely a contingent product of local circumstances. The very fact the Labour Party is so amenable to such corrupt clique politics, not just in Bradford but in London and elsewhere, is a telling statement about the hollowing out of its own political significance and programme. O’Neill should point out that the real political negativity is with the Labour Party, not with Galloway. This total absence of a meaningful programme, unable even to rhetorically oppose the savage regime of austerity imposed by the government, demonstrates the ultimate culmination of the Labour Party’s reformist, pro-imperialist, and appeasing strategy towards the ruling classes and the manifest iniquities and dysfunctionalities of capitalism that produce them. Since 1924, the Labour Party’s record has been in foreign policy an almost unbroken chain of treasons, supporting the Empire, the interests of British capital globally, and the oppression and murder of foreign peoples wherever it could. Domestically, it has done nothing but split itself time and again from attempts to re-establish a socialist politics in its own ranks, and has at every juncture when confronted with the demands of organized capitalism attempted a policy of full-on retreat and appeasement.

There is no reason to assume that the voters who elected Galloway in Bethnal Green & Bow, or in Bradford, would not be aware of this or capable of finding it out. Labour’s own failures in recent years only reflect the larger historical obsolescence of social-democratic reformism as a political movement and strategy; an obsolescence demonstrated by the almost total accomodation of nominally social-democratic parties with the neoliberal turn in capitalist politics, including its programme of greatly increasing the repressive powers of the capitalist states against the inevitable resistance this generates. This, too, Muslim voters will know – and not just the Muslim voters either. Although those votes are as valuable as anyone’s, Galloway won the ‘white’ wards as well. The by-election had a turnout of 50%; by British standards, this is very high. Equally, without a clear programme of exposing the historical failure of the Labour Party, Galloway failed entirely to win the seat of Poplar against the Labour candidate, notwithstanding the considerable Muslim population of that constituency.

For this reason Mehdi Hasan, too, is wrong to criticize their election of Galloway in his Guardianarticle as being too obsessed with opposition to imperialism, too obsessed with foreign policy. Not only is the idea that such opposition reveals an un-British interest in affairs abroad a notion which almost entirely accomodates to the logic that seeks to divide migrants and ‘autochthonous’ populations according to their origin, which is nefarious blaming of the victim, as comrade Snowdon points out; but more importantly, it is politically beside the point. Galloway’s strengths are precisely the failures of the social-democratic project after its neoliberal turn: not just its war-mongering and enthusastic imperialism, but also its corruption, its lack of political purpose, its manifest failure to address ever-greater inequality, its aggressive pursuit of greater repressive state power, its participation in rhetoric against poor people, the ‘underclass’, the unemployed, immigrants, asylum seekers, and so forth.

There is nothing particularly foreign-minded about resistance to this, as the growing resistance to neoliberal politics within and without Britain demonstrates. There is also nothing purely negative or oppositional about this per se. That Galloway is an opportunistic clown only means that there is room to the left of the Labour Party even for such figures to operate successfully, as long as they are clear-headed enough to expose that the social-democratic emperor has no clothes. That is a real political conclusion, one with serious consequences for the surprisingly large numbers of people willing not just to accept it, but even willing to vote on it, and this notwithstanding the exceedingly narrow framework of British parliamentary politics. As Engels said in a similar situation, many years ago: “The ice has been broken and two workers now have seats in the most fashionable debating club of Europe, among those who have declared themselves the first gentlemen of Europe”. This is a real statement about the direction in which many of the most oppressed and exploited people of the UK want to take their “rights, their freedoms, their collective future”, to quote Hasan. It is not because of, but despite Galloway. The tree of social-democratic politics is now thoroughly rotten. If it must be Galloway who first swings the axe at it, so be it – as long as it comes down.

In the quest for a scientific socialism, I think it is fair to say the former element has received undue attention compared to the latter. For several generations now, Marxists (and for that matter other socialists) have focused on defining capitalism, discerning its laws of motion, explaining and theorizing what it is and what it does, and how it is historically differentiated. This is an important task, that is not to be denied. Yet a socialist (or communist) politics is not the same as a socialist theory, and it does not have the same requirements. Like all radical movements of whatever stripe, a socialist politics is confronted immediately with the fact that its achievements need to be threefold: first, it must convince people of its understanding of present society; secondly, it must convince them that change is desirable; finally, it must convince people that change is possible, and in what way – including what it would look like. There is not necessarily any order of priority to these, although theorized for practical purposes, they will tend to flow from each other in that sequence. However, ‘centrist’ or ‘moderate’ politics – i.e., the politics suitable to the ruling establishment – has an easier job of it. All they need to do is the first, and they can safely ignore the other two, as they do not serve their purposes anyway. Liberals and conservatives do not need to convince anyone of systemic change, and can rest lazily on the comfortable bed that is technocratic management of existing conditions.

Sadly, the history of Marxist theorizing so far has seen a vast accumulation, if one may make that joke, of books detailing the first element, at the expense of the others. And to some extent this has been successful – compared to the common attitudes of the late 19th century, even in the richer countries people are generally endlessly more skeptical of their governments, of the legitimacy of existing institutions, of the value of traditionalism for its own sake, and so forth. There is very much a general Enlightenment present in the public mind, all the more so with the rise of secularism. Moreover, practical experience aids with the first task. Therefore, it is in a way a relatively easy task to convince the public of the demerits and problems with capitalism. Most people will readily grant you this, even though their theoretical understanding of it and its historical role is likely to be vague and underdeveloped compared to Marxism, and there is always a role for education there. In our age of cynicism, encouraged by the loss of all socialist authority and legitimacy of whatever flawed kind by the fall of the USSR and by the liberal road in China, few people positively believe in the virtues of liberal or conservative political theory. Nor do most people think capitalism particularly works: the current crisis and its spontaneous cross-class response of sheer frustration across the rich countries makes that clear, and that’s not even mentioning the vast populations of the Third World. But the cynicism extends to socialism as well: many latently dislike capitalism, but few indeed are convinced a revolutionary change in circumstances would be beneficial to them from a cost-benefit perspective. Fewer still believe such a thing is possible practically, even if it may be a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Yet for the project of a scientific socialism to succeed, these two are the battlefields where the war must now be won. I am not saying there is no room for yet more exposition of Marxist theory of capitalism, of the dialectic, for more Marxist history-writing, and so forth. But although this may be dismissed as anecdotal evidence, I think it is telling such a great many books of Marxist theory take their critique of existing and past society to the limits, yet fully shy away from speaking of the hows and whys of revolutionary transition. Time and again the refrain is that the author has established the need for a thoroughgoing new leftist critique, for a new workers’ movement, for a new revival of Marxism, for the overthrow of capitalist logic – but sadly there is no time, no space, no opportunity for telling anyone the costs and benefits of doing so, or a guide to what one would imagine a solution to these problems to look like. Countless examples of this could be mentioned. And this is much to be regretted. When confronted, socialists are often inclined to defend this by making statements along the lines of “people will have to decide themselves”, or make reference to Marx’s refusal to “write recipes for the cook-shops of the future”. But one cannot reasonably expect everyone to be satisfied with this in the long run. Most people, being in a vulnerable position and having little power are, as our theory tells us, in principle (latently) capable of being mobilized for revolutionary change. But because of their position, they are also keenly aware of the costs of confrontation and of the uncertainty and violence dramatic changes bring. They know the history of past defeats, the history of bloody successes as well. They will not move against the entire integrated system of social relations unless they are either given no other choice by sheer despair, in which case they often lose; or if convinced that changing them is plausible, will benefit them more than it costs, and will afford them more freedoms and well-being than any possible change in the old system could afford them.

So, we must convince them of these things. The failure to do so is not just a lacuna in theory, but it is in fact contrary to the project of a scientific socialism. It is not socialist, but reformist. This is because in the absence of such conviction, most people aware of the problems in the system and the way in which it alienates and exploits them, will seek to move against it – but no further than the boundaries of the system as they find them. This is what is meant by Lenin’s famous pronunciations about the limits of “trade union consciousness” and the like. Not only that because of the struggle of working people being based in their own immediate interests and experience, there is a serious chance of them failing to comprehend the social system as a whole; this could still be remedied by theory, by labor union researchers, self-education, and whatnot. But more importantly, absent knowing what socialism would look like and how to get there, the boundaries of the capitalist logic will appear to them as the boundaries of the reasonably possible, of the worth-trying. This is the reformism inherent in the problem, defining for example the failures of the politics of the ‘Labour left’ in the UK, or the left of the Democrats in the US. Like all reformism, they then fall into the trap: the logic of capitalism will slowly but inexorably assert itself again, the attempted reforms will fall foul of capital flight, loss of creditor confidence, unemployment, or their hypothetical government will be outright removed. As we have seen in Greece and Italy, it does not even take a particularly leftist government for the owners of capital to deem it incompatible with their interests, and simply by applying the fair and honest rules of the market, to destroy it.

The failure to establish the how, the why, and the what of socialism is also not scientific. This is because it leaves open an enormous intellectual and theoretical terrain and leaves untouched a great many resources which a scientific socialism can and should marshal in favor of establishing a socialist society. Attempts at describing what a socialist society could look like are easily ridiculed or dismissed as utopian, as Marx himself did. And indeed, in the 19th century, scientific knowledge (especially in the social sciences) was sufficiently inadequate that such designs often look silly to us today, in fact were silly even then. But this need no longer be the case. It is telling that only the so-called ‘analytical Marxists’ and ‘market socialists’, people like John Roemer, have attempted to make serious, concrete, plausible designs for what a socialist society would look like. They were inadequate because they took many capitalist and liberal assumptions as a given, including capitalist competition, markets, methodological individualism, and so forth. But precisely this liberalism, by departing from the existing to a considerable extent and by using existing theory, enabled them to at least write practical political theory at the level of concrete description of socio-economic phenomena.

Their attempts were greatly underdeveloped, and often only barely serious as socialist proposals. But there is no reason for us to wait around any longer – there is a plethora of science to be used from a well-defined socialist viewpoint. In all branches of science, from evolutionary biology to anthropology, from sociology to economic history, from mathematics to computer science, we can find empirical evidence and organizational and technical insights on whose foundation we can substantiate what has lately been called ‘the communist hypothesis’. Of course there will by variation by time and place, and much depends on how a revolution takes place, and who leads it. But we need not describe in detail, as Fourier did, exactly how many are to live in what communal building or the like. What we need to do is command scientific evidence to a socialist purpose, and derive principles for the future from it. By this I mean that one ought to be able to establish principles of what may work and what will not, what we know about human organization and how this may be used for our goals, what we can do with technology and what not, how we would envision production from a technical and a social-ethical viewpoint, and so forth. Precise details will soon become obsolete and are not necessary, but general principles are sensible to ask about. If we know all this much about capitalism’s logic, we ought also be able to establish the framework of a different logic, using all the latest science, unflinchingly.

The same is to be applied to the how of revolutionary change. In many ways this will be the same as above; but there is more Marxist and other socialist theory on this, as we have historical knowledge of attempts to do this in the past, and we must learn from this. There is a veritable ocean of works on the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the Spanish Civil War, labor history, and many such topics. But neither in the form of the works of the revolutionaries themselves nor in the form of the latest nuanced studies of the historical record are they sufficient. This is because they are virtually never integrated with the above requirement. Our theory of revolution must tell us how to get from A to B in the circumstances that currently prevail, not what should have been done in the past, and it must tell us how the principles of socialist society mentioned above can follow from the existing system and the existing institutions. Not in the sense of reformism, but – as Marx wanted to do – in the sense of using what we know about our society and what we are like in it to find the weak spots, the loci of transition, in the current society. The old idea of the vanguard party was precisely legitimated, and perhaps legitimate, by virtue of its ability to find such spots, and to use the power of the organized working class against it. Yet the question of political form is less interesting than, and largely subsumed under, the question of what the locus of transition can be. Once this is clear, and what we envision sufficiently meaningfully established, the way of achieving it becomes a technical question and will be resolved by practice.

It may be said there is a certain irony, perhaps even hypocrisy, in writing an article about the need for concrete research results in socialist theory without offering any myself. Yet I think the problem lies not so much in an inability to find any, but in an inability to see this lack as significant. In virtually all ofthe 20th century, and even up to today in otherwise excellent works on the crisis, we find the mainstay of the debates in Marxism and elsewhere are about the theories of capitalism itself, and of the political form of organizing against it. But almost nobody has sought to replicate Marx and Engels’ method of resolving these questions, one they never fully worked out themselves during their lifetime: the project of a scientific socialism, one that uses all scientific and historical knowledge to theorize not just the nature of the current society, but the principles of the future society, and the ways to make these principles the dominant logic of our life-world. So far, the systematic study of social institutions, human nature, cultural variation, economic change, and sources of cooperation and conflict have been left almost entirely to liberal, individualist scientists – from B.F. Skinner to Talcott Parsons, from Douglass North to Steven Pinker, from Elinor Ostrom to John Nash. I say then that socialists should use all their findings and understandings, apply to them the critiques of capitalist social relations so well-developed in our time, and derive the principles that can guide us in future action. Then indeed can socialists make proposals that will appear not just desirable, but plausible, well-substantiated, and effective. Contrary to Schumpeter’s sneer at Marxism, we shall then no longer just be “preaching in the garb of analysis”.

It would be easy therefore to say ‘a plague on both your houses!’, and be done with it. However, even among those already readily inclined to atheism and secularism and who see the necessity of opposing clericalism in practice as an obvious political point, there is much disagreement about the right reaction to the revived issue of atheism as a formal programme. On the one hand, many Communists and other left-wingers readily point to an established historical tradition of opposing religion and even religiosity in all its forms, and express the need for a thoroughly materialist approach to politics; others point to the sectarian, often anti-Islamic, elements in the New Atheism, and question the political viability of an anti-theist programme. It therefore seems worthwhile to revisit this issue to some extent from a Marxist perspective. When I say ‘a Marxist perspective’ here, I mean this in both senses: as just a, rather than the, perspective, and as trying to understand the way Marx and those following in his intellectual tradition might see the current issue. The subject of the relationship between socialism, or even just Marxism, and religion is an enormous one, and the excellent work of Roland Boer (Stalin’s Moustache) has explored this in much more erudite detail than I can do here. I would therefore want to focus on just a few key issues which I hope can clarify the issue to some degree, and avoid the kind of knee-jerking on each side which so badly degenerates so many socialist debates.

The first and essential thing is to revisit Marx’s most famous statement on religion, the section dealing with the significance of religion and its critique in his introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. This article was part of a larger critique of Hegel’s ideas on state and society, a project which (as most of Marx’s projects) he undertook on a grand scale but never fully worked out, losing interest in systematic philosophy in favor of political economy. However, this introduction has become one of his most famous early texts, and shows some of his great strength in putting enormous insight into a seemingly small number of pithy phrases. It is therefore worth examining in some detail, and we will see it still has immediate and complete relevance for the situation and debates described above.

For our purposes, it is interesting to note that Marx sets out by stating that “the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism”. What this means is that without a critique of religion, there can be no meaningful critique at all; if one allows the greatest level of alienation, the greatest level of projection of social forces on real or imaginary things, the greatest level of mystification of human powers to exist unchallenged, then one cannot in any serious way critique lesser forms of the same phenomenon. This is an essential point: it establishes the impossibility of a ‘religious socialism’ that fully comprehends the meaning of social criticism. While religious socialists may well be greatly active in labour movements, may well have a greatly charitable and positive attitude towards the claims of the poor, may well be hostile to capitalism or even sympathetic to Communism, the premise of religion is not compatible with understanding the nature of alienation and its reflection in ideology. The more definite way in which this works will be established by Marx a little further in the essay.

We must however note next that Marx also states that “for Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed”. The impact of the earliest members of what would later become the German Historical School on the general understanding of the nature of religion and its role in society was enormous; it was in Germany that David Friedrich Strauss for the first time attempted a serious secular, historicist reading of the New Testament and its narrative, de-mystifying it and bringing it down from the status of Holy Book to the level of a human chronicle, to be examined like any other. Such things seem painfully obvious to us now, but in the early 19th century were path-breaking; there had been many critiques of Christian (and other) theology at a theoretical level, but very little actual social and historical critique of religion and its texts. It is highly important to note that Marx considered this, the social and historical critique, to be the one ‘completing’ the criticism of religion, not the systematic critique of theology by figures like Spinoza.

Both of these elements then point us to Marx’s actual understanding of religion, and the critique of it that immediately follows. One cannot but quote one of Marx’s most famous paragraphs ever, and perhaps also one of his best ever written:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Rarely has both the real nature of religion, its nature as experienced by the religious, and finally the meaning of its critique been expressed better in a nutshell by anyone in the history of philosophy. Religion is the expression of real suffering: that is, it is the consequence, not the cause, of alienated and oppressive conditions in the actual world. Religion is a protest against real suffering, in that it is the expression of human hope under such conditions. No amount of theology has ever sufficed to gain the adherence of the masses, nor to maintain it against all the progress of scientific knowledge or the application of technology. Only its function as a vehicle for human hope does that. This is why heaven and the afterlife, or rebirth, have in all religions been more significant than hells and damnations: the latter serve to keep one in the faith once it is engaged, but the former compel the wish to believe in the first place. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions: only where alienation reigns, in one form or another, does religion find its true role as the expression of the perseverance of human hope and human will against all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

This is why so often apologetics of religion, especially among educated people, focus on its role in sustaining and soothing the will of the oppressed. This is why one finds the greatest and most true religion among those who are most oppressed, whether slaves in the plantations or prisoners in the modern world, in the despairing rebellion of starving peasants and in the tearful prayers of abandoned people. This is absolutely nothing to be lightly dismissed, sneered at, or condescended towards, and Marx was well aware of this – it is no coincidence that he reserved some of the highest and most eloquent praise in his entire oeuvre to this description of religion’s social role. This then does away with the lazy, sneering attitude of some on the left towards expressions of religion, regardless of their nature. This does away with the Dawkinsian understanding of religion as merely a mistake, a misconception borne out of a lack of scientific knowledge, or a lack of theoretical understanding. It is that, but it is more than just that, and this should be recognized. Its nature as mystification can only be understood by examining the nature of what kind of mystification it is, by understanding its social role.

This does not, of course, constitute an apologetic. For in the preceding paragraph (which perhaps would have better fit after it), Marx explains what he means by the opium of the people. Opium is a soporific – it is pleasant, in fact too much so, to the point of addiction. And it creates hallucinations and drowsiness, numbing painful feelings, but disabling a true understanding of the conditions one finds oneself in. Here we must quote the entire paragraph, as all of it is essential to the point:

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Again, this deserves careful consideration. The foundation of the critique of religion must be, as Marx says, the recognition of the fact that it is a human project, a product of human thought and will. Religion is, however it presents and justifies itself outwardly, never actually about heaven: it is always about earth. Religion is a this-worldly phenomenon. It is precisely in failing to recognize this essential nature of religion, as all human thought and ideology, that makes religious socialism impossible as a theoretical understanding, and makes the critique of religion the basis of all other critique. Religion is the ultimate form of mystification, because it takes the most fundamental and deep nature of alienation and oppression and turns it into the most fantastical and other-worldly theory imaginable (in fact, often even unimaginably so). It is, as Marx says, an “inverted consciousness of the world”. It is the most general form of this, because religion is all-encompassing, all-covering in its ambition, precisely because it is the expression of alienation in its most general, most universal form. This is why religion allows itself to be distinguished as a theoretical proposition, however much anthropological difficulty this entails in practice, from ‘mere’ magic or supernaturalism. One can be perfectly critical and secular, yet happen to believe in ghosts, but one cannot be perfectly critical and secular, and believe in an omnipotent god. The enormity of religion, in both senses of the word, arises exactly out of the grandiose claims: omnipotence, all-creating, all-encompassing, all-judging, and so forth. It is the ultimate, most universal expression of the alienation of human powers, who in their totality are projected onto an otherworldly power. This is also why, as Dawkins and others have not failed to point out, the god of a believer always exactly matches their imagination, their understanding of their own knowledge and alienation: people with a limited understanding of social and natural forces and their alienation from them have small gods, the ‘sophisticated’ have enormous, unintelligible, gods of pure power that they cannot themselves describe in a coherent fashion.

The core point remains: man – allowing for 19th century patriarchal expression – makes religion. What follows from this? It follows that the nature of religion is a consequence of the state mankind is in. It is therefore absolutely necessary to combat religious mystifications and expressions of what are ultimately real social forces, for our alienation cannot be understood without doing away with these. It is therefore also absolutely necessary to not critique religion solely at the theoretical level. Explaining on the basis of formal logic, or scientific discovery, why religion is senseless is to miss the point entirely. It is not a critique of religion, but a critique of theology, and if limited to this, all it produces is a counter-theology. That is not to say that demonstrating the incoherence and ignorance of much theology is not a useful tool in the process of critique, because it certainly is. But its effects are limited, and any clever Jesuit can always reason around it, by redefining the religious expressions of the real issue. As W.F. Hermans used to say, the Calvinist who watches television worships a different god than his father for whom television is sinful. But because of this, their dispute cannot practically be decided (other than by force). This counter-theology is merely a tool, but it is not the right critique itself. It is not sufficiently radical, which, as Marx pointed out, means striking the subject at the root.

This then must be the nature of the real critique: it must be not just a criticism of the religious mystification, but only and ever do this as part of a critique of the social relations of alienation that produce religion in the first place. In the final instance, most religious people will not be convinced to abandon religion if confronted with modern physics, or with logical proofs. But they will be so convinced, or at least can be, when they are given a source of hope in a new understanding of the world superior to the old. As Marx says in the next paragraph:

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

This, then is the purpose of the critique of religion. Our aim must not be to condescendingly confront the religious with the real knowledge that science has brought us, or reasonings of that kind. The sole justified aim in critiquing religion is by exposing it as a hindrance to mankind’s ability to control and determine its own affairs, which is its sole source of real hope, its sole potential for emancipation. It is only by losing control over our own lives, by abdicating understanding of it and being robbed of practical control over the forces affecting us, that religion becomes the source of our hope. For this reason, and for this reason only, must religion be overcome. Humanity must revolve around itself. This, as Marx knew, immediately sets the agenda for the manner in which this critique is to be undertaken:

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

Of course, all this so far just deals with religion as a theoretical proposition, and as a real social phenomenon. It does not yet determine what practical form this justified anti-religious position can and should take. The answer to that question will, as all practical politics, vary wildly from place to place and from time to time. Indeed, scientific and logical criticism of religion may at times be a very useful tool; at other times, entirely counterproductive. We should neither support it in principle nor oppose it in principle, but always keep in mind the goal to be achieved, the emancipation of mankind from its alienation and alienation’s ideological reflections, and structure our theoretical and practical opposition to those accordingly. These oppositions are therefore always political in the last instance. This political purpose of critique is then what Marx announces he will apply henceforth to the situation in Germany, in a concluding paragraph remarkably meaningful to us today, despite its philosophical language:

In the struggle against that state of affairs, criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute but to exterminate. For the spirit of that state of affairs is refuted. In itself, it is no object worthy of thought, it is an existence which is as despicable as it is despised. Criticism does not need to make things clear to itself as regards this object, for it has already settled accounts with it. It no longer assumes the quality of an end-in-itself, but only of a means. Its essential pathos is indignation, its essential work is denunciation.

This is then what the criticism of religion is for us socialists: as object of critique, it is done, settled, over with. “No saviour from on high delivers, no faith have we in prince or peer”, as the Internationale rightly says. But it is essential as a weapon of politics, and must be as sharp and as to the point in any given time or place, sharp as a lancet. Its essential pathos is indignation, not condescension; its essential work is denunciation of the real social circumstances, not scientism; its politics is that of emancipation from all alienation, as much as mankind has the will and power to achieve.

The persistent problem of the inadequacy of the revolts against the crisis is for this reason immediately related to the inadequacy of the theories that formulate their mindset. In a recent talk at Brunel University, Slavoj Zizek rightly criticized the defeatism of leftist movements, the notion that the important thing is first and foremost the existence of a movement as such rather than the results achieved and the habit of finding glorious defeats and symbolic resistance more important than messy victories. One could similarly point to the dominance of nostalgia as a mode of critique among the left, in particular in the United Kingdom. Yet in the same talk, Zizek referred in his political-economic explanation of the crisis to the theories developed by the eminent Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis in his recent book The Global Minotaur.(1) In this work, Varoufakis analyzes the global monetary order as it has developed since WWII, identifying two stages: first, the Bretton-Woods stage, in which the United States sought to dominate and bring into its orbit all the other major countries of the world, but financing them so that they could serve as markets for its export products, and the second, neoliberal, stage in which the reverse is the case, and the United States is propped up by the flow of capital to the country because of its currency strength, allowing it to buy up the goods of the rest of the world on credit. Many similar works have been written, and the bookstores are full of leftist economic explanations of neoliberalism and its crisis in terms of the stagnating real wage, the assault on trade unionism, the increase in international inequality and the effects of the ‘Washington Consensus’, the need to compete with China and so forth.

These theories are true enough within their own domain, but they are inadequate, and the connection between their inadequacy and the inadequacy of anti-neoliberal movements must be made. From the Marxist perspective, the salient point here is to distinguish between arguments based on the distribution of value, and arguments based on the nature of the production of value. Varoufakis’ left-Keynesian explanation, and all similar arguments about neoliberalism (such as those of David Harvey(2)), ground the political movements against neoliberalism in arguments about the distribution of value. Whether it is at a global scale, concerning the call for a post-Washington Consensus economics of development, or at a local scale, when it is a call for regulation of the banks, taxation of the wealthy, the preservation of a welfare state, and so forth, these arguments are all founded in critiques of the national and global distribution of value. They are justified to that extent that a reorganization of such distribution along the lines proposed would raise the standard of living for the great majority, whether locally or globally, and would pose a considerable challenge to liberalism and conservatism as political bulwarks of the Party of Order. But the economic theories supporting them do not go far enough, and therefore the politics based on these ideas do not go far enough either.

Marxism is the only theory capable of explaining the inherent tendency to crisis that inheres in capitalism. It is therefore not, unlike the theories of Varoufakis or the critics of neoliberalism, a theory of this crisis, or even any particular crisis: it is a theory explaining all crises of capitalism, not in a proximate way, but in a fundamental causal way. Marxism does this because unlike all the other theories, it concerns itself not primarily with distribution (important as that is), but with production. Because of its significance for capitalism as a system, Marx described it as “the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face “No admittance except on business.” Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making.”(3) This is exactly then what Marxist economic theory does. Profit is the organizing category of capitalist competition, and thereby in the last instance guides all capitalist production of value, without which there is nothing to distribute in the first place. Marx demonstrated that because of the tendency towards labor-saving technology through competition, combined with the necessity of living labor for the creation of value, capitalism would display a secular tendency of the rate of profit to decline. Because the rate of profit is in the last instance the measure of the ability of capitalism to reproduce itself as a social relation, as a way of life one might say, this secular decline is a deep problem for the continued existence of the capitalist order. If therefore the rate of profit reaches a sufficiently low point across sectors that this reproduction becomes difficult, capitalism is thrown into crisis. The ancient Greek word ‘krisis’ means, among other things, ‘decision’, and this is exactly what it is for capitalism. Only Marxism can demonstrate that capitalism has this innate crisis tendency, and only Marxism understands that from the point of view of capitalism as a system, that is the collective interest of the capitalists, a crisis is not a problem but in fact the solution. It is the way in which the rate of profit is restored: the massive unemployment, the immiseration, the destruction of enormous amounts of value (just think of Lehman Brothers or AIG), all these devaluations cause the rate of profit on the remaining capital to rise, and the incentive for investment to be restored.

The significance of this is not to be underestimated. Firstly, the important point is that capitalism’s crises are not failures of the system, they are not caused by lack of regulation, by excessive greed, by too much debt or too much financialization: in the most proximate sense, they may be, but the underlying logic of capitalist crisis is always the decline in the rate of profit, whatever may be the sectors in which the crisis first manifests itself and whatever may be the mode of appearance of the crisis. Secondly, as Andrew Kliman has shown in his excellent work The Failure of Capitalist Production(4), the United States has shown just such a secular decline in the rate of profit since the crisis of the 1970s. Thirdly, because of the deeply socially destructive impact of the Great Depression and then again the (lesser) crisis of the 1970s, the governments of the capitalist countries, mindful of the possibility of a political challenge against their rule and the system as a whole, are ever more loath to allow capitalism to ‘do its work’. Instead of permitting a deflationary crisis to fully live itself out, they seek ways of dampening the crisis tendency, to paper it over – and they do so by ever increasing state and personal debt, and by attempting to find means within the credit system of countervailing this tendency. These are the underlying economic theory meanings of the most evident surface phenomena of the neoliberal period and in particular its defining crisis, the one we are living in today.

The inability to understand the primacy of the relationship between profit and production under capitalism, and the inherent nature of this crisis tendency, lead the distributionist theorists to some dangerous arguments. Varoufakis, for example, spends a considerable time in his work analyzing the impact Wal-Mart had on American consumers.(5) He suggests, essentially, that Wal-Mart’s ‘ideology of cheapness’ caused American workers to be subject to deflationary tendencies in prices and wages, and at the same time to promise them higher living standards, leading them to increasingly rely on debt rather than saving. Just like his general distributionist analysis, this is not untrue, but it misses the point in political terms. These stories of the neoliberal drive towards lowering wages and reducing unionism, to use labor competition from abroad more effectively, etc. are not false, but they are too limited. They create a political picture in which leftist resistance movements believe that the flows of value, that is its distribution, is the primary locus of the problem, and that there they should push for a solution. But this will not do. Leaving production and profit untouched means leaving the causes of the crisis untouched, in favor of attacking the chimera of neoliberal financialization and ‘greed’, which are simply products of the normal functioning of capitalism unleashed. It also encourages left-wing nostalgia, the belief that we should aim for a return to the order of the 1950s-1970s, capitalism’s Golden Age. Not only is this impossible, once the genie is out of the bottle; but even if it were possible, it would simply develop in the same way again, and in due time there would be another crisis destroying the capitalist confidence in the welfare state compromise, and another neoliberalism, and another neoliberal crisis. Such solutions are not really solutions, but reactionary attempts on the part of Western (especially European) workers to reclaim the privileges they had at the expense of workers elsewhere, and to try and forget the nature of the beast called capitalism.

All this is not to say that to resist austerity or to resist the lowering of living standards, to fight for employment, and so forth, are bad things. By no means. After all, no economic theory is any good if it does not give people the means to fight for the interests of the great majority and their standard of life and culture in an effective manner. But it is incumbent on Marxists to point out the inadequacy of purely distributionist critiques. Failure to understand the nature of crisis, as opposed to just its surface phenomena and its proximate causes, means a failure to take steps that would prevent future crisis. It also means failing to understand that the only way for capitalism to move forward from this crisis is through the destruction of value that it needs, in other words, the wholesale deflationary lowering of living standards familiar of the Great Depression – a time when capitalism was allowed to ‘do its thing’. Only by understanding this can leftists rebut the criticisms of the promoters of austerity, the logic of the creditors, and the liberal economists. Because when these say that capitalism requires economic growth, and that this growth requires a free credit system, and that such a system requires the confidence of creditors in the repayment of debtors, and that regulations, minimum wage laws, and so forth only impede the ability of the system to recover from the crisis, this is from the point of view of capital true! But it is of course also true that this entails mass unemployment, immiseration, destruction of entire economies, loss of independence, and a lost generation. Only by acknowledging that both these things are true can leftists make the argument that a system which requires such crises to reproduce itself in the long term is a system we are better off without.

1) Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, The True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy (London 2011)
2) See: David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford 2007)
3) Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Ch. 6: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm
4) Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession (London 2011)
5) E.g., http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2012/02/14/the-global-minotaur-interviewed-by-naked-capitalism/

The arguments in favor of war are quickly disposed of. First, it is not clear at all whether Iran is in fact pursuing nuclear weapons. It has consistently denied doing so, and although recent reports are more ambiguous, so far the International Atomic Energy Agency has seen no definite proof to the contrary. Of course, any empire is all too happy to claim “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, as the American government did in claiming ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as a casus belli against Iraq. But after having blown up the better part of that already ravaged country, no such weapons were ever found – a small oversight now quickly forgotten by the goldfish-like political memory of the ruling classes on both sides of the Atlantic. Where necessary, evidence can even be entirely fabricated and a casus belli manufactured, if one wants the war badly enough – there are many historical examples of this, from the German invasion of Poland in 1939 to the Tonkin incident leading to the Vietnam War, as well as the plans for fabricating a Cuban act of war (Operation Northwoods). All this notwithstanding, objective observers have no reason yet to assume that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, only that it is pursuing a full nuclear cycle, which under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it has a full right to do. In fact, Iran is heavily dependent on its oil exports, which are both its strength and its weakness, and being aware of this is trying to diversify its energy sources. Since the same is being done by essentially all Western governments, one can hardly fault the Iranian government for doing so. Whether nuclear energy is really a longer-term solution to our energy needs is a technical-empirical question, and the Iranians may well be wrong, but the principle behind diversification is fully legitimate and shows nothing but foresight.

Secondly, even if Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon, the political significance of this is not so clear. For all the brouhaha about it, one would easily forget that its greatest enemies, the United States and Israel, are both armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons (and chemical and biological ones, too, at that). No nation can reasonably be expected not to plan for its survival, and the more it is threatened, the more appealing a nuclear deterrent will be. One need not have any sympathy for the Iranian government as such to recognize that given it has been surrounded by two major American-led occupations, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and given the constant threatening language and behavior from the Western countries and Israel towards it, the prospect of a definitive counter-argument will be an appealing one. Nuclear weapons are an awful invention, and their proliferation the very height of human folly and a sign of the long-term destructive nature of nationalism and national rivalries. Nuclear weapons serve no human purpose, only the ability of larger powers to threaten each other and divide the world between them. They are the very arms of empire. Neither Iran nor any other country should be permitted to have any. But that said, what is good for the goose is good for the gander: a small number of nuclear arms in the hands of Iran, a country which has not attacked any other nation in living memory, does not outweigh the greater crime of a very large number of nuclear arms in the hands of nations with a history of constant warfare and even use of such weapons, like the United States and Israel. The Iranian people must not accept an Iranian nuclear bomb; but nobody in the world can accept the American or Israeli arsenals.

The casus belli itself is also exceedingly weak. In fact, the real casus belli, by any common understanding of the concept, is the other way round. It is a public secret that Israel, and possibly also the United States, has been sponsoring various Islamist and terrorist factions within and without Iran in an attempt to take down its government, including the MEK – an outfit wholly sponsored by Saddam Hussein when he was still America’s best friend and a visionary leader – and Jundullah, an organization of Sunni fanatics operating out of Baluchistan. These operations show a tremendous and breath-taking cynicism given the now familiar history of Western support for the reactionary and obscurantist forces of the Mujahideen in rural Afghanistan; a support intended ‘merely’ to destroy Communism and its prospects of modernity in Afghanistan, but one which promptly backfired on themselves and the entire region.

What’s more, Israel has also been undertaking a campaign of assassinations of nuclear scientists and military staff involved in Iran’s nuclear programme, presumably in an attempt to slow down its operations. Whether or not the Iranian nuclear programme is as peaceful as presented, surely one can hardly claim that if Iran were to undertake assassinations of Mossad officials in Tel Aviv and of members of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the respective countries would not take this as an outright declaration of war. It is then all the more ironic that the United States has attempted to further add insult to injury by conniving with Saudi Arabia to fabricate a story of Iran attempting to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the US, an action which would be as pointless as it is unrealistic! Of course, the Iranian government is not taking all this lying down – it has openly threatened to blockade the Persian Gulf in case of further steps towards war. The United States in turn has declared it is willing to use military means of guaranteeing the so-called ‘freedom of the seas’ – the same freedom that in the 19th century afforded Britain the free trade that benefited it on the high seas, but which equally enabled it to twice punitively invade China when it wanted to run international trade according to its own lights. Similarly, the United States is now apparently fully permitted to enforce with war its freedom to trade in the Persian Gulf (thousands of miles from the nearest American coast), but at the same time it is equally legitimate for the US and the European Union states to blockade Iran’s oil exports, which are one of its main sources of income. Only little Greece, bankrupt and dependent on Iranian oil for its mercantile fleet, has raised a little voice in opposition.

It is clear from all this maneouvering that Washington is trying to make the war inevitable. Israel’s own secret services have stated it is not at all clear whether Iran is actually going to produce nuclear weapons, and there is no reason to believe they would use them if they did – all the ranting and raving about the so-called ‘irrationality’ of the Iranian theocracy is a mere fig-leaf. Every war in history has been preceded by the participants depicting each other of being irrational, dangerous, and less than human. The North Korean government has been accused of dangerous insanity for decades now, and has yet not invaded a single country or fired more than a few warning shots at its neighbours; more than one can say of the United States itself, which invades another country roughly every 4-5 years. But this war is not inevitable, if it can be made clear to the public what is really going on. The Iranian government, mind, is no beacon of freedom and light. It has oppressed its national minorities, such as Kurds and Baluch, for many years now. It hangs homosexuals and its trade unionists languish in its jails. It brutally represses any rebellion, upholds theocratic and obscurantist laws and restrictions, and arrogates great power into the hands of a military-clerical establishment. It is no friend of progressive-minded people.

But this does not mean a foreign invasion by the United States and its vassals is a cure to this disease. Such an invasion will wreck untold havock on the region at large, as it will further inflame the sectarian divisions between the ethnicities and religions of the region. It will cause the entire greater Middle East, from Israel to Pakistan, to be one large war-zone: a frightening and destructive prospect, the impact of which will be felt for decades to come. The continuous wars and occupations in the region pre-empt the development of a healthy political process within Iran and other nations that allows the domestic opposition to play its revolutionary role, as we have seen in Tunisia and Egypt. Instead, such wars only cause the population to band together against the foreign invader, create the prospect of civil war with minorities seen as inherently suspect in wartime, and further encourage the wasteful and oppressive militarism that characterizes virtually every government in the region, as well as the governments of our own Western countries.

The real beneficiaries of such a war are not the local people, who will die in their hundreds of thousands, whether through boycott – as the approximated 500.000 deaths caused by the boycott of Iraq in the 1990s – or by outright war. It will not ‘liberate’ them, as nobody supports the ideas of a foreign occupier, no matter how right they may be in their own eyes, and democratic revolution must be made by the people of the nations themselves. It is no way to help them in this process, it only makes it more difficult for the democratic and progressive forces to free themselves of the accusation of collaboration with foreign enemies. As the example of Iraq showed, it also gives no benefit to the working people of the Western countries, who do not here reap any benefit from their governments’ imperial enterprises. The war against Iraq, insofar as it was intended to secure a cheap oil supply for the United States, has singularly failed to do so. It has cost not only the locals, but also the American and British peoples (and many others) hundreds and thousands of lives and vast sums wasted, which could have been fruitfully invested in their own economies now buckling under capitalist crisis, for example by providing their people with better healthcare and affordable education.

The only people in the region who will benefit are the ruling cliques in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf emirates; among the most repressive, tyrannical, and militaristic regimes as one will find in the world, and purveyors of religious obscurantism, fascism, and lawlessness abroad as much as they support inequality and sectarianism in their own countries. A war which only benefits them can be no war to liberate any people, no matter the oppressiveness of the Iranian government itself. The Iranian people have already shown they can resist and rebel against their rulers when push comes to shove – they deserve our support, not our bombs. The minorities in Iran – Jews, Kurds, Baluchi, and so forth – too deserve their equal participation if they wish, and self-determination where possible, not the repression of the ayatollahs and the ‘Revolutionary Guards’. But their causes will not be helped by replacing their oppression with a new, American conquest, and it is highly unlikely that anyone in the West can solve these questions in a manner more satisfactory than their own peoples can.

In short, a war with Iran is unjust, costly, has unforseeable consequences, and serves no legitimate purpose but the strengthening of oppressive powers and imperial leaders. We must not accept it as inevitable, and let the millions who marched against war with Iraq be presented with a fait accompli again. Hands off the people of Iran!