Political and economic turmoil escalates in Lebanon

Jean Shaoul

Lebanon’s political and economic crisis has intensified as protests and strikes continue into their fifth week, encompassing wide layers of workers and poor farmers throughout the country, across the sectarian and national divide.

On Tuesday, the National Federation of Employees’ and Workers’ Trade Unions in Lebanon, called a general strike over the government’s economic mismanagement and its failure to implement the protesters’ demands, including the formation of a new government.

Demonstrators poured onto the street, setting up roadblocks and chanting “all of them means all of them”, the rallying call of the protest movement against all the political parties, to demand the end of the entire sectarian political system.

Universities and schools, after briefly reopening last week, are again closed until further notice as students protest against government corruption, the lack of jobs and essential public services and the soaring cost of living.

Workers at Alfa and Touch, the state-owned mobile network providers, have gone on strike, demanding salary guarantees.

Bank workers have remained on strike over fears for their safety following the imposition of controls on transfers abroad and dollar withdrawals, credit restrictions that have led to some private sector employers cutting salaries. The falling value of the Lebanon pound on the black market has caused the price of imported goods to rise, leading to the stockpiling of food.

Gas stations have started to ration fuel or have closed, saying they will run out of fuel within a week.

According to data from Lebanon’s central bank, cited in Al-Akhbar, consumer debt has risen to $21 billion, in addition to mortgage debt of $13 billion, meaning that householders are paying a massive $1.5 billion in interest. But these loans have in turn fueled an escalation in housing prices with the result that housing costs eat up a vast proportion of wages. Now, many of the borrowers are unable to keep up with their payments or repay their loans.

According to one World Bank scenario, any further devaluation would lead to up to half Lebanon’s six million population falling below the official poverty line. It says that the crisis may have already pushed Lebanon into recession.

The Syndicate of Private Hospitals announced that medical workers would go on strike from November 15 if no action was taken to remedy the government’s failure to make payments to hospitals. The banking crisis is also making it impossible to buy the dialysis filters, heart stents and other medical equipment that had to be paid for in dollars.

On Tuesday, President Michel Aoun’s remarks in a televised speech, characterized by insensitivity, only added to the anger. He said that Lebanon would descend into a “catastrophe” if protesters do not return home and allow Lebanon to work normally again. He added that if those demonstrating “see no decent people in this state, let them emigrate. They won’t get into power.”

Soon afterwards, protesters marched towards the Presidential Palace in Baabda, in a suburb outside Beirut, until they were blocked by soldiers with jeeps, barbed wire and riot police, three-men-deep, in full body armour. They daubed graffiti along the route. One slogan said, “How do you sleep at night, Mr. President?” Incensed by Aoun’s remarks, they called for the politicians and their cronies to leave the country. Elsewhere across Lebanon, demonstrators burned tyres, hurled stones at soldiers and blocked roads.

Alaa Abou Fakher, a member of the Druze Progressive Socialist Party, was killed after being shot in the head by a soldier in front of his wife and child while they were protesting in Khaldeh, south of Beirut. An army spokesman said that it was an accident, the result of a stray bullet amid firing to disperse protestors at a roadblock, and the soldier who fired the shot was under investigation. Fakher is the second person to be killed in protests that have generally been peaceful.

The protest movement had abated somewhat following the resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri, a Saudi puppet, on October 29. He remains the head of a caretaker government until Aoun secures parliament’s support for a new prime minister, which under the constitution must be a Sunni politician. He has refused to accept the premiership again unless he can form a “technocratic” or independent government. By this he means one with little or no members from Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, and the President’s Free Patriotic Movement, led by Aoun’s son-in-law and foreign minister Gebran Bassil.

Hariri’s resignation, while an apparent concession to the protesters, allows him and his cronies to bolster their positions by adopting some of the popular demands, such as a non-sectarian based government, as their own.

Hariri, who was summoned to Saudi Arabia in September shortly before the protests erupted, ostensibly to discuss Lebanon’s economic crisis and a possible loan, is under pressure from Riyadh to eliminate Hezbollah’s—and Iran’s —political influence in the country. This is an anathema to Aoun and his Free Patriotic Movement, the largest single party in the parliament, and Hezbollah itself, which—with its Shia ally Amal—has by far the largest coalition bloc, having won the largest share of the popular vote.

Hezbollah, Amal and Hariri’s Future Movement have nominated the 75-year-old Mohammad Safadi, a billionaire businessman from Tripoli, who made his fortune in Saudi Arabia, and a former finance minister, to become prime minister. If this is accepted, his government would be tasked with pushing through an economic “reform” package that would impose further austerity on Lebanon’s already impoverished working class in return for $11 billion in loans pledged at an international conference last year.

Safadi was involved in a controversial real estate development along the coast that sparked protests against the illegal privatisation of public property. Last month, he denied allegations that he had taken advantage of his government position to obtain the land at a bargain basement price. His wife, Violette, is a minister in Hariri’s caretaker cabinet.

That Lebanon’s political elite can even suggest such a man for the premiership testifies to the complete bankruptcy and isolation of the political elite. It flies in the face of the protests’ key demand of a clean sweep of the entire existing corrupt political setup. Indeed, the indications are that his name has been put forward to test the waters and provide some support for Hariri’s “technocratic” government. The announcement prompted protests in Safadi’s home city of Tripoli, a Sunni stronghold.

Hezbollah and its ally Amal, for their part, have sought to shore up the existing setup, put in place in 2016 with their support for Aoun’s presidency and Hariri’s premiership, which has brought them political power and influence. Their promises to root out corruption and economic mismanagement came to nothing.

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, warned his supporters that any change in government would only worsen the situation, since it could take a long time to form a new government and solve the crisis. Echoing his ally, Iran, he accused the United States and Israel of supporting the protests from behind the scenes, demonized the demonstrators, sent in Hezbollah operatives to clear roadblocks set up by protestors and attacked those opposing the government, provoking a number of violent incidents. But this provoked a backlash, with some journalists at the pro-Hezbollah daily Al-Akhbar reportedly resigning in protest against its blackguarding of the protestors.

More recently, Nasrallah has sought to adapt to the protesters’ demands, praising them and calling on the judiciary to be “brave” in its pursuit of corrupt officials and even urging judges to begin with those affiliated to his party. He said, “If there is a case related to any person in Hezbollah, go ahead. Start with us, start with us.”

The protest movement in Lebanon is made up of diverse social and political layers and lacks a clear political agenda. The various bourgeois, professional workers associations and petty-bourgeois ad-hoc groups within the movement, regardless of their opposition to the existing political setup, offer no way forward for the workers and poor in Lebanon.

Indeed, the political vacuum poses enormous political dangers with the very real threat of an intervention by the regional powers or their local proxies. It is significant that Washington, Tel Aviv, Paris and Riyadh have said very little about the protests other than empty calls to “heed the protesters’ legitimate demands to end corruption and mismanagement” and “preserve democracy.” In reality, they are determined to use the political crisis to eradicate Hezbollah as a significant political force in both Lebanon and Syria and thereby roll back Iran’s influence in the region. Iran, for its part, is determined to prevent such an outcome, including by encouraging state repression.

Lebanon’s struggle takes place amid a growing wave of working class militancy throughout the Middle East and North Africa, exemplified by the strikes and demonstrations in Algeria, Sudan, Egypt and most recently, Iraq. It is to these forces and workers internationally that Lebanese workers must turn in a struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and the building of socialism.

The Trump impeachment and US policy in Ukraine

Patrick Martin

The first two days of televised hearings in the impeachment of Donald Trump have made clear the character of the conflict gripping Washington. While the Democrats frame their accusations against the president around accusations of “bribery” and “obstruction,” the testimony makes clear that they are using the instrument of impeachment to fight out differences over foreign policy.

The first three witnesses, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, Ambassador William Taylor, and Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, have all played major operational roles in the efforts by American imperialism, over the past 15 years, to install a pliant stooge regime in Ukraine, formerly the second-largest component, after Russia, of the Soviet Union.

Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch (right) and her attorney, Lawrence Robbins, arrive to testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington [Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh]

The initial US intervention in Ukraine took the form of the 2004 “Orange Revolution,” which led to the ouster of a pro-Russian regime headed by Viktor Yanukovych and his replacement by the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko. But Yushchenko and his corrupt Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, dubbed the “gas princess” for her role in stealing a fortune from that industry, soon lost the support of the population. In 2010, Yanukovych made a political comeback, won the presidential election, and reestablished closer ties with Moscow.

In 2013-2014, Washington tried again, this time with a campaign dubbed the “revolution of the Maidan,” named for the central square in Kiev occupied by anti-government protesters. A notorious leaked phone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt documented Washington’s direct role in directing the right-wing campaign that ultimately drove Yanukovych into exile. Nuland boasted that the United States had expended $5 billion in Ukraine to promote its interests.

Kent, Taylor and Yovanovitch, hailed as paragons of virtue and professionalism by the media and members of the House Intelligence Committee, Democratic and Republican alike, are the heirs and continuators of this longstanding criminal imperialist enterprise. It has two principal purposes: to open up Ukraine, a country of more than 40 million people with vast natural resources, to exploitation by US multinational corporations; and to undermine Russia strategically by creating a pro-American bastion on its southern flank, as part of the broader effort by Washington to confront Russia throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and cement a dominant American position on the Eurasian land mass.

This utterly reactionary, pro-imperialist role was demonstrated Friday in the tribute that Yovanovitch paid, in the course of her testimony, to Arsen Avakov, the Ukrainian interior minister (head of the domestic police) under both the current president Volodymyr Zelensky, and his predecessor Petro Poroshenko. Avakov is a principal sponsor of fascist militias like the Azov Battalion, which glorify the Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II against the Soviet Union. In other words, the State Department officials being celebrated in the media for defending American democracy are actually working with the fascists in Ukraine.

While Yovanovitch hailed Avakov, Kent cited as his heroes among immigrants who have rallied to the defense of the United States, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, two of the biggest war criminals of the second half of the twentieth century.

In the opinion of these front-line operatives for American imperialism, together with the intelligence agencies in whose interests the Democrats speak, Trump is endangering the already very shaky position of the United States in Ukraine. This applies not merely to his bullying shakedown of Zelensky to obtain political ammunition against Biden and the Democrats, but to Trump’s overall policy in the region. He has said that Putin should be invited to the next G7 summit (where the US is host), essentially reconstituting the G8 from which Russia was expelled in 2014, and suggested he might visit Moscow next May for the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Even more dangerous, in the eyes of the military-intelligence apparatus, was his praise for Russian cooperation in the US special operations assassination of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, immediately following Trump’s order for a US pullout from northeast Syria, allowing Turkey, Russia and the Assad regime to move into positions formerly occupied by American special operations troops.

At her press briefing Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi emphasized the foreign policy focus of the impeachment drive. She said that Trump’s actions were far worse than the Watergate scandal that forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon, effectively committing the Democrats to bring articles of impeachment to a vote in the House and force a Senate trial.

Pelosi repeated the phrase, “All roads lead to Putin,” meaning that Trump’s foreign policy decisions—including withholding military aid from Ukraine—have a common thread of being favorable to the Russian president. In other words, she was reviving, under a new guise, the anti-Russia campaign that was based on bogus claims of a massive intervention by Moscow in the 2016 presidential election.

The Democratic leadership is determined to exclude from the purview of the impeachment inquiry any of Trump’s real crimes, limiting it entirely to his conflict with the national-security establishment over foreign policy differences related to Russia, Ukraine and the Middle East. Pelosi herself has repeatedly declared that any differences with Trump over his persecution of immigrants, his attacks on democratic rights, his tax cuts for the wealthy, and his efforts to build up a racist and fascistic movement can wait until the 2020 election. Only his break with the anti-Russian foreign policy consensus in Washington requires the more drastic remedy of impeachment—whose purpose is not so much to remove Trump, as to force a change in policy on this critical issue.

The connection between the impeachment drive and differences on foreign policy was spelled out Friday on the front page of the New York Times, in an analysis by the newspaper’s senior foreign policy specialist, David Sanger, a frequent mouthpiece for the concerns of the CIA, State Department and Pentagon, under the headline, “For President, Case of Policy vs. Obsession”

Sanger contrasted the current impeachment drive to those carried out against Nixon and Bill Clinton, presenting it as involving far more serious issues, because neither Watergate nor the Clinton sex scandal “touched on America’s national interests in the weightiest geopolitical confrontations of their eras.”

This assessment is nonsense in relation to Nixon and Watergate, which arose directly out of the defeat of American imperialism in Vietnam, and Nixon’s frantic efforts to suppress antiwar sentiments, through massive political spying, the attempt to prevent publication of the Pentagon Papers, and finally the burglarizing of the offices of the Democratic National Committee.

But Sanger goes on to spell out, in remarkably blunt terms, the real foreign policy issues at stake in the Trump impeachment. He writes, “In an otherwise divided Washington, one of the few issues of bipartisan agreement for the past six years has been countering Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s broad plan of disruption. That effort starts in Ukraine, where there has been a hot war underway in the east for five years …”

Trump, according to Sanger, has betrayed the anti-Russia policy outlined by his own administration, in a Pentagon strategic assessment which declared that the “war on terror” had been superseded as the top US priority by “great-power competition,” particularly directed at China and Russia. He sacrificed this policy to his own personal, electoral interests, as expressed in the comment by the US ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, “President Trump cares more about the investigation of Biden” than about the military conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

There is not the slightest democratic content to the impeachment campaign against Trump. This is not an effort to overturn a single one of Trump’s reactionary attacks on working people and democratic rights. It is a conflict between two reactionary factions of the American ruling elite, the fascistic Trump and the CIA-backed Democrats, over the direction of imperialist foreign policy.

American workers cannot line up behind either of these factions but must advance their own alternative to the foreign policy of imperialist domination, subversion and plunder, based on the fight for the international unity of the working class on the basis of a socialist program.

Mass protests after police shoot and kill Aboriginal teenager in remote Australian town

Eric Ludlow

Angry demonstrations have erupted across Australia following the death of 19-year-old indigenous man Kumanjayi Walker, who was shot and killed by police on Saturday night in Yuendumu in the Northern Territory (NT). The poverty-stricken community of about 1,000 people is about 300 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs.

Part of the November 14 protest in Alice Springs

Walker was shot about 15 minutes after two police officers entered the home of the young man’s relative without a warrant at 7 p.m. over alleged breaches of a suspended sentence. They claim that Walker was “armed with a weapon” and “lunged” at an officer. This is disputed by witnesses and the young man’s family. Police fired three times at Walker, who died two hours later in the police station without receiving critical emergency care.

The police officers were wearing body cameras but authorities have yet to release any information about the alleged “weapon,” other than to say that it was “edged.” No other details about the incident, which has been officially declared a death in custody, have been made public.

According to reports, around 200 people—including Walker’s family—quickly gathered outside the police station after the shooting. Protestors asked for two family members to be allowed in the station. The police refused this request.

Community elder Eddie Robertson told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): “When we heard what happened, the police were already on their way to the police station and they locked themselves in there.… They wouldn’t come out, they just looked at us from the window.”

On Sunday, Kumanjayi Walker’s cousin, Samara Fernandez Brown, told the media that the family “went to sleep on Saturday night thinking that he might still be alive because that’s what they [the police] told us. They said he was getting medical assistance… The whole time he was dead, just sitting there at the police station.”

Walker was not given any emergency treatment because the seriously under-funded local health clinic was shut on Saturday night. Authorities claim that medical staff had been withdrawn from Yuendumu because of a “series of break-ins.”

The health workers, who were staying about an hours’ drive away, were not directed to return until 7:30 p.m., and only arrived at the Yuendumu police station at about 8:30. Initial plans to despatch the Royal Flying Doctor Service, at around 7:42 p.m., were abandoned at 9:00 p.m. because Walker had already died.

The police did not issue a press release confirming Walker’s death until 6:53 a.m. the next morning—after police reinforcements had arrived in Yuendumu and almost 10 hours after he died.

On Wednesday, 28-year-old Constable Zachary Rolfe, a former member of the Army who had served in Afghanistan, was charged with one count of murder, after protests and solidarity rallies across Australia during the past four days.

Up to 1,000 people held a protest march and rallied in Alice Springs yesterday, demanding justice for Walker and his family. It followed demonstrations earlier this week in Yuendumu, Lajamanu, Tennant Creek, Pukatja, Alice Springs and in Darwin, the NT capital. Solidarity rallies were also held in major Australian cities, including Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, and the national capital Canberra.

Rolfe, who is suspended on full pay, was granted bail in an out-of-session court hearing and will reappear in an Alice Springs court on December 19.

Along with a coroner’s inquest into Walker’s death, there will be an Independent Commission Against Corruption inquiry, an internal police investigation and a police professional standards investigation. Previous investigations into deaths in police custody have ended as whitewashes and done nothing to end the ongoing police harassment of Aboriginal communities, and young people in particular.

The Northern Territory Labor government and federal government officials have attempted to dissipate the mass anger over the murder. They have feigned concern and offered empty platitudes to the Walker family, whilst publicly backing the police.

NT Labor government Chief Minister Michael Gunner declared on Wednesday that the police “who serve us day in, night out, keeping us safe… will be hurting and will need our support.”

Ken Wyatt, the Morrison government’s federal minister for indigenous Australians, flew into Alice Springs yesterday and told the media that “now was not the time for blame.” He met with several Yuendumu residents and brushed aside their calls for police not to be armed in remote indigenous communities, declaring that policing methods were determined by the NT government.

Alice Springs councillor Jacinta Price, a member of the Country Liberal Party, which is part the federal government Liberal-National Coalition, defended the police and said that the Walker family would be “working” with them.

In a live video posted on social media, Price, who is indigenous, denounced non-indigenous protesters, claiming that they were “interfering,” “hijacking” and “causing division” in the community.

“You are kardiya [white], this is not your family, and you need to go away.… I’m sick of protesters in my community. Sick of protesters using Aboriginal people and our circumstances for their own political means,” she declared.

Several indigenous leaders have hailed the murder charge against police officer Rolfe and embraced the official attempts to quell the mounting anger. Others are attempting to present the killing as a purely racial question, ignoring the widespread police brutality against workers of all backgrounds, and fostering illusions in the official investigations.

Irrespective of the outcome of these investigations, or the police trial, nothing will change for the overwhelming majority of Aboriginal people, the most oppressed section of the Australian working class and the victims of decades of state repression and government neglect and vicious social spending cuts.

The endemic unemployment and lack of the most basic social facilities, including access to proper health, education and proper drinking water, which blights Yuendumu, are typical of remote indigenous communities across Australia.

Indigenous Australians are the most incarcerated people in the world, accounting for only 3.3 percent of Australia’s population, but 27 percent of the total number of prison inmates, 22 percent of deaths in prison and 19 percent of those killed in police custody.

The legal right of Northern Territory police to raid Walkers’ home without a warrant was established through the reviled Northern Territory Intervention. Under these draconian powers, officers can enter Aborigines’ homes without a warrant and arrest them if they believe they are drinking alcohol or have drugs or pornography in their property.

These repressive measures were first introduced by the Howard Liberal-National Coalition government in 2007, and rebadged as “Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory” by the Gillard Labor government in 2012. They have been maintained by subsequent governments.

While the Hawke Labor government’s 1987–91 “Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody” was supposed to end the killings, the fatalities continue. There have been over 420 recorded Aboriginal deaths in custody in the past 18 years. Not a single police officer has been successfully prosecuted over these deaths.

In 2002, senior constable Robert Whittington shot and killed Robert Jongmin in Wadeye, Northern Territory. Whittington was charged with murder but never found guilty or convicted of any criminal wrongdoing. He remains a sergeant in the NT police.

Less than eight weeks ago, on September 16, Joyce Clarke, a 29-year-old Yamatji woman, died after being shot at a home in Geraldton by Western Australian (WA) police. Local indigenous leaders attending her funeral, which was to be held today, told ABC media this morning that armed police were constantly patrolling the community and harassing youth.

Clarkes’ death was the third fatal police shooting in WA in the past 12 months. In September 2018 two Aboriginal teenage boys drowned following a police pursuit in Perth.

The violent police attacks are not confined to the Aboriginal population. All sections of the working class, irrespective of their ethnic backgrounds or mental health, are being targeted by police. The police killing of 40-year-old schizophrenic Todd McKenzie in August, despite desperate pleas from his family, is just one recent example of the escalating brutal police assaults on working-class communities.

The German government’s “basic pension” bluff

Marianne Arens

The German government has patted itself on the back. According to Christian Democratic Party (CDU) leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the basic pension model agreed upon by the CDU, Christian Social Union (CSU), and Social Democratic Party (SPD) party leaders on Sunday will “make an important contribution in the fight against poverty among the elderly.” Finance Minister and Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) added that it was “social and fair.”

Really? In truth, the measure is far from providing a real basic pension deserving the name. The grand coalition is trying to have its cake and eat it too, since the social project must not cost anything.

As provisional SPD chairman Malu Dreyer calculated, up to 1.5 million people could receive the new “basic pension” beginning January 1, 2021. The government calculates additional costs of 1 to 1.5 billion euros will be required from tax revenues. Mathematically, this amounts to around one thousand euros per person per year. As a monthly figure, it is just 80 euros more—the proverbial drop in the ocean.

While the supposed “project of the century” of the basic pension might cost 1.5 billion euros in tax funds, the government wants to increase expenditures substantially for the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) with a focus on upgrading their armaments. The annual military budget will increase first to 50 billion euros and then shortly to an astounding 73 billion euros, or two per cent of gross domestic product.

Furthermore, business-friendly measures were adopted at the same time as the basic pension. The government wants to provide 10 billion euros for employers who invest in “future technology” in the field of digitisation and air conditioning.

Who will benefit from the basic pension?

The condition for receiving it is that a person has worked for at least 35 years and contributed into the pension fund. Disastrously, Labour Minister Heil's concept is oriented towards “lifetime contributions” and not towards the needs of the recipients. From the outset, this would exclude those employed in low-paid jobs throughout their working lives who have therefore paid too little or no contributions. Those who are poor in old age, but have less than 35 years of contributions, cannot benefit from the basic pension.

The “up to 1.5 million people” who, according to Malu Dreyer, could benefit from the basic pension are only a fraction of poor senior citizens, who in fact number at least three to four million. In Germany, pensioners are officially the third largest group affected by poverty, after the unemployed and single parents.

This is the result of decades of austerity by governments of all political persuasions carried out on the back of the working class. Pension levels have been falling steadily since the late 1970s, a process that has accelerated rapidly since the SPD-Green Party coalition under Schröder and Fischer (1999-2005). With its policies of liberalization, privatization and the Hartz laws introducing labour and benefit “reforms,” this government opened the floodgates to low-wage labour and insecure, precarious working conditions, which contributed significantly to the destruction of pension levels.

As a result, pensions in Germany today amount to only half of net income (50.5 percent), well below the OECD average (70.6 percent). The Deutsche Rentenversicherung Bund (German Pension Insurance Association, DR) assumes even lower values: According to DR, pensioners today only have 45.0 percent of their previous earnings to live on. In absolute figures, almost 35 percent of all men in West Germany receive 900 euros or less in monthly pensions according to DR. In the case of women, the figure is almost 77 percent, i.e. more than three quarters of all women pensioners have to rely on 900 euros or less in retirement.

While governments have abolished wealth tax and are constantly lowering taxes for the super-rich, they are increasingly taxing pensioners. All these measures have made Germany one of the most unequal countries in the world, especially in the area of poverty among the elderly. And the trend continues. Due to various recent “reforms,” the level of benefits provided by statutory pension insurance will fall by a further 20 percent by 2030.

The current basic pension project of the grand coalition will not change this scandalous inequality.

In fact, the government is pursuing quite different goals with this project. It is intended to ensure its survival and enable the grand coalition to achieve the goals it really cares about. First and foremost, this includes the return to a policy of great power politics, which will be accompanied by war missions of the Bundeswehr, as Bundestag (parliament) President Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) and Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer have formulated in recent programmatic speeches.

Two days after the agreement on the basic pension was reached, public swearing in ceremonies for army recruits took place in front of the Reichstag in Berlin and in six other cities. The oath taken was intended to “anchor the Bundeswehr in the heart of society,” i.e. to accustom society to the omnipresence of soldiers.

The government is rapidly moving to the right in response to the growing opposition to its anti-social and militaristic policies. Recently, the governing parties—the CDU/CSU and SPD—have scarcely received forty percent of the votes in the polls.

In its refugee policy and stepping up of state powers, the grand coalition has largely adopted the policies of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and is preparing a further shift to the right at the upcoming CDU and SPD party congresses.

Right-wing CDU politicians, business associations, and representatives of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the AfD are raising a hue and cry about the latest basic pension model because it does not provide for strict means testing. Income is examined, so that a well earning spouse means there is no entitlement to the basic pension, but not property, as for instance a dwelling used by oneself.

The federal chairman of the conservative youth association Junge Union, Tilman Kuban, disparaged the basic pension on November 7 on the Maybrit Illner show as a ticker-tape parade. The FDP parliamentary deputy Johannes Vogel complained, “They want to disperse money with a watering can!” Carsten Linnemann, chairman of the CDU’s organisation for small- and medium-sized business, insisted on the implementation of a complete means test. Otherwise, he warned, “a breach in the dam for other social payments” threatened.

These representatives of the rich, who like to spend 80 euros on a bottle of wine when they enjoy a good meal, insist that every pensioner undergo the humiliation of bearing themselves financially in order to obtain the same sum in an additional monthly pension. Their great power politics can only be financed through imposing new austerity measures on workers and the elderly. That is the reason why they promote the AfD and rely on authoritarian forms of rule.

Growth continues to slow in major economies

Nick Beams

Data from the world’s major economies, released over the past few days, show that the “synchronised” global slowdown pointed to by the International Monetary Fund is worsening.

In its report on the latest figures from China, the world’s second largest economy, Bloomberg said the “engines of China’s economy are spluttering with exports falling, factory output slowing, investment at a record low and consumption coming off the boil.”

The National Bureau of Statistics reported that value-added industrial output in October rose by 4.7 percent from a year earlier, down from a 5.8 percent increase in September and below the forecast of a 5.2 percent increase.

Electronics factory in Zhuhai, China [Credit: http://www.flickr.com-people-76224602atN00]

Retail sales rose by 7.2 percent, down from a rise of 7.8 percent in September and below the 7.8 percent forecast.

The most significant figure was the fall in fixed investment growth. It slowed to 5.2 percent for the first ten months of the year, the lowest level in comparable data going back to 1998.

Speaking to reporters yesterday, Liu Aihua, a spokesperson for the statistics bureau, said: “There are many external uncertainties. Domestic cyclical issues have coincided with structural issues. Downward pressure on the economy has increased continuously. Risks and challenges we are facing cannot be underestimated.”

Julia Wang, an economist at HSBC, told Bloomberg the “momentum for slowdown” was not over and because it was “so sharp” it could impact on the labour market at some point next year.

Growth in Japan, the world’s third largest economy, slowed sharply in the third quarter as the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe considers the size of a stimulus package. Abe ordered the package last week but the size is yet to be decided.

Gross domestic product expanded at an annualized rate of just 0.2 percent in the September quarter, compared to a rate of 1.8 percent in the three months to June and below the expected increase of 0.9 percent. The Japanese economy has been adversely impacted by the US-China trade conflict, tensions with South Korea, sparked by a conflict over reparations to victims of forced labour during World War 2, and a recent typhoon.

Figures released yesterday show that Germany, the world’s fourth largest economy, and the driving force of the eurozone economy, only narrowly escaped a technical recession—defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth.

The economy expanded by just 0.1 percent in the third quarter while the contraction for the second was revised down from minus 0.1 percent to minus 0.2 percent.

A research note by Claus Vistesen, the chief eurozone economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, cited by the US business channel CNBC, said there was “no recession, but most definitely a very weak economy.”

He said in some sense this was the worst of both worlds. “Today’s data confirm that the German economy has now stalled, but the headlines are probably not dire enough to prompt an immediate and aggressive fiscal response from Berlin.”

German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said while the figures showed Germany had avoided a technical recession in the third quarter, economic development in the region was fragile.

Speaking to CNBC, Daniela Schwarzer, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, said there was “only a minor difference” between growth of 0.1 percent and a contraction of minus 0.1 percent.

“The truth of the matter is that Germany doesn’t have a robust growth perspective at the moment,” she said, pointing out that its export-dependent economy was being hit by the shift in international trade relations—a reference to the US-China trade war and the aggressive orientation of Washington towards the European Union.

Looking beyond the immediate situation, she continued: “The whole question is what will be the sources of future growth be for Germany and the challenge to actually structurally change the German economy is huge … There needs to be strong investment in education, research and innovation, and Germany needs infrastructure investment as well.”

One of the starkest expressions of the worsening situation in the global economy and its impact on the working class is contained in the latest economic data from the UK, the world’s fifth largest economy.

According to figures from the Office for National Statistics released on Monday, the UK economy grew by just 0.3 percent in the third quarter. While this was a recovery from the 0.2 percent contraction for the second quarter, growth over the year to September was just 1 percent—the lowest level since 2010.

A report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed to the underlying worsening of the economic situation. It said that over the past 11 years productivity, as measured by output per hour worked, had grown “by just 2.9 percent. That is about as much as it grew on average every 15 months in the preceding 40 years.”

One of the consequences is lower wages, which are no higher in real terms than they were 11 years ago. According to a study by the Resolution Trust, “the past decade has been the worst for earnings growth since the Napoleonic Wars.”

The study punctured claims that the growth of employment numbers indicated economic health. It noted that a “deep recession in which wages fell dramatically followed by an unprecedentedly sluggish earnings recovery” meant household incomes dropped and more people sought employment.

Employment, it said, had increased particularly rapidly for women in their early 60s and those in the lowest income deciles. This was evidence that the increase in the pension age, combined with welfare cuts, had contributed to what it called the “labour supply shift” as working households tried to counter the wage squeeze and nonworking ones experienced an “income shock.”

In the United States, the world’s largest economy, where, in the midst of the rise of stock markets to record highs, President Trump claims to have “launched an economic boom the like of which we have never seen before,” economic growth was down to 1.9 percent for the third quarter and investment in the real economy is at its lowest level since 2015.

Data released yesterday showed that applications to collect unemployment benefits increased by 14,000 to 225,000 in the week to November 9, higher than all forecasts.

The economic slowdown, and in some cases outrights contraction, is extending beyond the major economies. The economies of Singapore and Hong Kong, heavily impacted by the trade war, are in recession.

The South Korean economy grew by 2 percent for the year to September, but this was the lowest rate for a decade. The manufacturing sector, the mainstay of the Korean economy, lost 81,000 jobs last month, with the country’s finance minister, Hong Nam-ki, telling reporters that government stimulus efforts were having little effect.

“We have expected fiscal spending to play the supporting role in adding vitality to the private sector,” he said. “However it is not working well, with limited spillover effects, making us worried.”

In Australia, where the central bank has cut its base interest rate three times this year, setting it at a record low of 0.75 percent in a bid to boost the economy, the Bureau of Statistics reported yesterday that total employment fell by 19,000 in October, the biggest decline since August 2016.

The Morrison Liberal government claimed that its tax cuts introduced in July, following its narrow re-election in May, would lift household incomes and boost spending at local businesses. Nothing of the sort has happened.

With private sector wages rising by just 0.5 percent in the September quarter, retailers are expecting a dismal Christmas period, according to a report by the accounting and finance firm Deloitte.

It noted that retailers began the year with high expectations but this optimism had faded “with a combination of weak consumer spending, higher input prices and a subdued economy resulting in some of the toughest trading conditions in recent history.”

Popular resistance mounts against Bolivian coup

Andrea Lobo

Tens of thousands of workers marched on Thursday from the predominantly working class and indigenous city of El Alto to the capital of La Paz—a distance of 15 miles—demanding the ouster of the coup regime that has assumed power in Latin America’s poorest country. The protesters continued to confront military repression into the night.

Jeanine Áñez, the right-wing vice president of Bolivia’s Senate, proclaimed herself president and named a far-right cabinet and new military leadership to organize repression of the growing resistance to the US-backed coup that overthrew the government of President Evo Morales on Sunday.

Workers and peasants march in La Paz, Bolivia [Credit: AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko]

Expressing widespread sentiments among those protesting, an indigenous worker in El Alto told a reporter, “We are here fighting because we will never again humiliate ourselves and kneel down to these transnationals that have always controlled and humiliated us until today.”

After asking Morales to resign last Sunday, the Bolivian Workers Central (COB), the main trade union confederation, threatened on Tuesday to call an indefinite general strike if the Áñez regime doesn’t “re-establish the constitutional order in 24 hours.” However, no further announcement has been made.

The timid response by Morales, the formerly ruling MAS and its aligned institutions like the COB has exposed their fears that an upheaval against the coup will turn into a political movement to overthrow the capitalist order that they have defended for 14 years.

Morales, who was whisked out of Bolivia by the Mexican Air Force, escaping an arrest warrant and threats by far-right groups, has now called for “talks with the four parties in Congress,” including those that carried out the coup. He has offered to return to Bolivia to help “pacify the country” and has called for the intervention of the Pope.

Right-wing thugs and police on Wednesday blocked members of the Bolivian Senate, including its MAS president Angela Salvatierra, from entering the legislature. Under pressure from the military, Salvatierra had announced her resignation, following the example set by Morales and his vice president, clearing the way for Áñez to proclaim herself president, without any confirmation by the national legislature, in which the MAS holds the majority of seats.

Early on Thursday, MAS legislators met and elected Sergio Choque as president of the lower chamber. Choque is a deputy for El Alto with a background in the Federation of Neighborhood Councils (FEJUVE) in the city that has largely led the anti-coup protests. He first called on “all mobilized sectors to calm down,” and then promoted a bill ordering the military to return to their barracks—an attempt to feed illusions that the military will obey the forces it just overthrew.

In recounting his escape to El País, Morales stated that “the United States called the foreign relations minister to tell me that they could take me anywhere. That was strange to me.” He opted for asylum offered by Mexico, which failed to convince Perú to allow Morales to use its airspace to fly there. Ultimately, the right-wing governments in Paraguay and Brazil agreed to facilitate Morales’ escape.

The coup regime has deployed bombers to fly over mass rallies, tanks and Humvees to patrol city centers and riot police and helicopters that have fired live rounds and tear gas into protests. Military and police caravans have terrorized working class neighborhoods. Local news outlets have reported on social media that many more have been killed in the towns surrounding La Paz, and that several national and local radio and tv stations have been taken off the air.

The Prosecutor’s Office has recognized that three protesters have been killed since Monday. In total, ten people have died and at least 400 have been injured since the October 20 presidential elections, which showed Morales winning with the lead needed to avoid a runoff.

Congress, where the MAS holds majorities, did not ratify the resignations of Morales, his vice president and the president of the Senate. Áñez was “confirmed,” without any legislative quorum, by about 20 opposition senators, surrounded by members of the military and the fascistic right-wing opposition. Despite this, the Constitutional Court ruled in favor of Áñez as the country’s legitimate president.

Washington, which denounced Morales for “stealing” the election on October 22, was the main instigator of the coup and the first to recognize Áñez as “interim president.”

However, eager to get on with the business of plundering the vast gas and mineral resources in the country, numerous other capitalist governments have recognized Áñez, including Brazil, the European Union and Russia, which has extensive contracts in Bolivia. Sergey Ryabkov, the Russian undersecretary of foreign relations, declared that “We view everything that preceded the power shift as actions that equal a coup… but it’s clear that she will be perceived as the leader of Bolivia until the issue of electing a new president is settled.”

Among those replaced by Áñez was the commander of the Bolivian armed forces, Williams Kaliman, who had “suggested” to Morales to step down on Sunday and placed the presidential sash on Áñez on Tuesday. The Argentine daily Infobae reported from “military sources” that there were demands for the army “to act on the streets against the protesters, but some commanders under Kaliman resisted,” leading the Áñez to assign a new leadership.

The new Interior Minister, Arturo Murillo, immediately announced, “I spoke with the new Defense Minister [Luis Fernando López Julio], a very interesting person to work in partnership with. We’ll have the military and police on the streets giving people security… All those in sedition will go to jail; we’ll pursue you.” The new minister of Communication, Roxana Lizárraga, announced that “the rule of law will be used against those journalists or pseudo-journalists involved in sedition.”

Meanwhile, the new minister of the Presidency, Jerjes Justiniano, is the lawyer of Luis Fernando Camacho, a fascistic businessman from Santa Cruz who became the face of the anti-Morales demonstrations since the elections. Far-right groups led by Camacho and presidential runner-up Carlos Mesa partnered with the Organization of American States (OAS) to exploit a one-day halt in the announcement of vote totals to allege an electoral fraud, without presenting any evidence.

The US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) published a report last week stating that the final result was not in contradiction to the trend before the broadcasts stopped, arguing that there is “no statistical or evidentiary basis to dispute the vote count.”

As far-right flying squads were seen attacking indigenous protesters and passers-by in several cities, Camacho used “anti-establishment” demagogy to tap into growing social anger among sectors of the middle class and some politically disoriented layers of workers.

Highlighting the dangers presented by the fascistic layers being elevated by US imperialism, both Camacho and Áñez have long expressed the racist outlook of the landed oligarchy of the lowlands, which has historically oppressed the country’s indigenous majority and sought to divide the oppressed layers of the population.

“I dream of a Bolivia liberated of the indigenous satanic rituals; the city is not for Indians; they should leave to the highlands or Chaco,” Áñez declared in a 2013 tweet that has recently been scrubbed. In his rallies, Camacho continues to call for freeing Bolivia from “Satan” and “witchcraft.”

The Spanish election crisis and the treachery of Podemos

Alex Lantier

In Sunday’s Spanish general elections, a dangerous pattern seen time and again in Europe is repeating itself. As with the National Front in France, the Freedom Party in Austria, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, and the Alternative for Germany, extreme-right parties are emerging as the main beneficiary of the disintegration of discredited social-democratic parties.

In Spain the fascistic Vox party, which had less than 1 percent of the vote and no parliamentarians last year, has risen to 15 percent and doubled its number of legislators, to 52, since the last elections in April. Its officials openly hail the 1936 coup and the resulting civil war and mass murder carried out by fascist dictator Francisco Franco, whose regime held power from 1939 to 1978. Despite broad opposition in the working class to Francoism, however, it is surging. How is this to be explained?

The major factor in the growth of the extreme right in Europe, as in the United States, is the growth of malignant levels of social inequality. In Spain, after the 2008 Wall Street crash, unemployment surged to a quarter of the workforce and half the youth, even as Spain’s 26 billionaires amassed vast wealth. Growing anger at social inequality is the basic motive force driving mass protests in dozens of countries, including mass protests at police state repression of the Catalan independence referendum. Masses of workers and youth are striving to find a socialist alternative to capitalism.

Even amid growing popular opposition to capitalism and support for socialism, however, parties claiming to be “left” do not oppose capitalism. The empty and demagogic promises these pseudo-left organizations make disillusion and anger working people. There can be no clearer illustration of this than the response of Spain’s “left populist” Podemos (“We can”) party to the recent election.

Less than 48 hours after the election, Podemos leapt into a “pre-accord” with the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) to form a coalition government. The PSOE and Podemos are seeking further coalition partners among Catalan or Basque nationalist parties, to form a parliamentary majority for what various media outlets call a “progressive” or even a “far left” government. However, the PSOE-Podemos “pre-accord” commits them to European Union (EU) austerity and continuing the PSOE’s military spending increases and its police crackdown to impose “social peace” in Catalonia.

This morning, Podemos General Secretary Pablo Iglesias published an open letter, ostensibly addressed to the Podemos membership, announcing that Podemos will implement right-wing policies. He wrote, “The right-wing parties and media representatives of corporate power will hit us very hard, each step we take. We will be a minority in a government with the PSOE in which we will face many limits and contradictions, and we will have to give up on many things.”

Podemos is thus creating conditions for Vox to continue to grow, by posturing as the only opposition to the anti-worker policies of the political establishment.

Podemos, like its first cousin the Syriza (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) government in Greece, is based on fraudulent theories of “left populism” that reject the working class, class struggle, socialism, and revolutionary policies. Chantal Mouffe, the postmodernist writer and associate of leading members of the Syriza and Podemos parties, has laid these arguments out quite explicitly.

In her pamphlet For a Left Populism published last year, Mouffe declares: “What is urgently needed is a left populist strategy aimed at the construction of a ‘people,’ combining the variety of democratic resistances against post-democracy in order to establish a more democratic hegemonic formation. … I contend that it does not require a ‘revolutionary’ break with the liberal democratic regime.”

Even as Mouffe’s book appeared, her political charlatanry had been exposed by the Syriza government’s record. While Syriza promised voters to end EU austerity, it rejected revolutionary measures and an appeal to European workers for support against the EU; its “more democratic hegemonic formation,” was a government coalition formed in 2015 with the far-right Independent Greeks. In the end, Syriza utterly betrayed its election promises, imposing tens of billions in EU social cuts and imprisoning tens of thousands of refugees in detention camps in the Greek islands.

After the Syriza disaster, it is the turn of Podemos to help the PSOE assemble a “more democratic hegemonic formation.” Such a coalition would prove as hostile to workers in Spain as in Greece. Since it negotiated with the fascist Francoite regime a Transition to parliamentary rule in 1978, the PSOE has been the bourgeoisie’s principal instrument to impose EU austerity and wage imperialist wars, from Afghanistan to Libya. Podemos is now endorsing the reactionary policies the PSOE will pursue.

It would be worse than useless to appeal to the affluent university professors, state officials, army officers and union bureaucracy making up Podemos to pursue a less regressive policy. Podemos is opposed to any initiative by the working class that would in any way impinge on the wealth, property and material interests of its affluent middle class base.. Mouffe’s fraudulent theory of “left populism” seeks to provide theoretical legitimacy to the reactionary anti-socialist and pro-capitalist program of organizations like Podemos and Syriza.

Mouffe’s “left-populism” reeks of intellectual charlatanry and political cynicism. She writes, “It is to be expected that this left populist strategy will be denounced by the sectors of the left who keep reducing politics to the contradiction of capital/labor and attribute an ontological privilege to the working class, presented as the vehicle for socialist revolution. They will of course see this as a capitulation to ‘bourgeois ideology.’ There is no point answering these criticisms, that proceed from the very conception of politics against which I have been arguing.”

The fascist resurgence has exposed the bankruptcy of the pseudo-left. Its defense of capitalism and rejection of any policy that impinges the prerogatives of bourgeois property and wealth precludes any appeal to the working class. The role being played by Podemos essentially duplicates the treacherous role played by Stalinists and social democrats in the Spain of the 1930s. Their alliance with a section of the Spanish bourgeoisie in what was called a Popular Front ruled out revolutionary policies in the fight against General Franco and his fascist allies. The result was the crushing of the socialist revolution and Franco’s victory.

The lessons of the 1930s must be learned. The fight against fascism today requires an assault by the working class on capitalist property, aimed at the expropriation of the financial aristocracy.

US court rules routine border search and seizure of electronic devices unconstitutional

Kevin Reed

A US court ruled on Tuesday that searches and seizure of electronic devices of international travelers without suspicion by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at US airports and other ports of entry are unconstitutional and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In the ruling, Judge Denise Casper of the US District Court of Massachusetts halted the routine practice by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of searching without “reasonable suspicion” the personal computers, tablets and smartphones of travelers.

The decision was in response to a 2017 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of 11 international travelers whose electronic devices were searched, and in some cases seized, by US authorities upon entry into the US. Ten of the plaintiffs are US citizens and one is a lawful permanent resident.

The 48-page ruling states, “the Court declares that the CBP and ICE policies for ‘basic’ and ‘advanced’ searches, as presently defined, violate the Fourth Amendment to the extent that the policies do not require reasonable suspicion that the devices contain contraband for both such classes of non-cursory searches and/or seizure of electronic devices.”

As of January 2018, the Department of Homeland Security defines a basic search as a manual review of the contents of a device by a security officer and an advanced search as “any search in which an officer connects external equipment, through a wired or wireless connection, to an electronic device, not merely to gain access to the device, but to review, copy and/or analyze its contents.”

It should be pointed out that Judge Casper, by adopting the standard of “reasonable suspicion,” stopped short of ruling in favor of the plaintiff’s challenge to “warrantless” searches of electronic devices at the border. Under the standard of “probable cause,” law enforcement authorities are required to obtain a court ordered warrant for the search and seizure of evidence that a crime has been committed.

Although the Fourth Amendment specifically states that “no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause” for searches and seizures and “particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons and things to be seized,” the District Court based its determination on exceptions to these requirements. In this case, the precedent of the border exception, “grounded in the recognized right of the sovereign to control, subject to substantive limitations imposed by the Constitution, who and what may enter the country.”

The ruling details several episodes of the abusive behavior by US border agents toward the traveling public at US ports of entry. In one such case, the ruling states, “Nadia Alasaad has twice had her iPhones searched at the border over her religious objections to having CBP officers, especially male officers, view photos of her and her daughters without their headscarves as required in public by their religious beliefs.”

The description goes on, “During the second search, which was of her daughter’s phone, Alasaad alleges, and Defendants have not disputed, that a CBP officer mentioned a photograph that had been on Alasaad’s phone during her earlier search but was not present in the second search.”

In another incident, the judgment says, “As to one such Plaintiff, Wright, a computer programmer, CBP also extracted and retained data, including attempting to image his laptop with MacQuisition software and extracting data from the SIM cards in his phone and camera, from his electronic devices, and retained it for a period of fifty-six days, even if the parties agree that this data has now been returned to him.”

Another case, although not part of the lawsuit, was widely reported last summer when a 17-year-old incoming Harvard freshman from Palestine, Ismail B. Ajjawi, was stopped at Boston’s Logan International Airport and, after his phone and computer were searched, was deported. DHS officials cancelled Ajjawi’s visa and denied him entry into the US due to anti-US government posts found on his social media account that were made by his friends and not by him.

The ruling also establishes “substantial risk of future harm” from the routine searches because, once a traveler’s device has been examined, the record of this is maintained by DHS in their various security databases such as the Automated Targeting System (ATS) and the Investigative Case Management (ICM). In the case of ATS, a copy of any data obtained in any “prior border encounters” that included an advanced search is available to homeland security agents.

According the CPB itself, the agency conducted more than 33,000 searches of electronic devices at US ports of entry in 2018. This is approximately four times the number of searches compared to just three years ago.

In the original lawsuit, the plaintiffs wrote, “Border searches of electronic devices intrude deeply on the private lives of all travelers and raise unique concerns for the journalists, lawyers, doctors, and others who carry particularly sensitive information about their news sources, clients, and patients,” adding that the warrantless searches “turn the border into a digital dragnet.”

In response to the ruling, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Sophia Copp said, “This is a great day for travelers who now can cross the international border without fear that the government will, in the absence of any suspicion, ransack the extraordinarily sensitive information we all carry in our electronic devices.”

While Judge Casper’s decision stipulates that border officers must now demonstrate “individualized suspicion” of illegal contraband before they can search a traveler’s device, the specifics of how this procedure will be implemented are not spelled out. That such enormous loop-holes are left in a ruling that purports to protect the international traveling public against “unreasonable searches and seizures” demonstrates that no confidence can be placed in the courts to defend democratic rights.

The blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment by federal, state and local law enforcement, including homeland security officials, is taking place across the country and at the US borders each day in multiple forms. These practices have been on the rise since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which has been used by the political establishment, judicial system and law enforcement to dispense with constitutional and democratic norms for nearly two decades.

The launching of illegal wars of aggression abroad and attacks on democratic rights at home are two prongs of the response by the ruling elite to the decline of American capitalism as an economic and political power in world affairs. The target of all of these measures is ultimately the working class, the only social force capable of fighting for and defending democratic rights and stopping the descent into an authoritarian and military dictatorship.

India-China and the Sometime Pickle of Civilisational Connects

Vijay Shankar

The Peloponnesian War (431- 404 BCE), was a significant event of the ancients as it reshaped the Hellenic world. A hegemonistic Athens and its trading vassals was challenged by Sparta backed by the xenophobic Peloponnesian League. In the end, the Spartan side came on top. But the central question that emerged was, what made like peoples (civilisationally) fight a long and debilitating war? Explanations rarely go beyond Graham Allison’s "What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta," and yet what remains unexplored is the invidiousness of civilisational 'hook ups'.

Through history, as many wars have been fought as there have been civilisationally connected peoples. The Mauryan campaigns of the 4th century BC began with war and conquest of the Nanda Empire; interestingly the protagonists shared a common progenitor. The Crusades (1096-1291 AD) began with Pope Urban II’s call for a war to recover the holy land from Muslim rule. It degenerated to a riot of pillage ending in the fall of Jerusalem and victory for the Muslims. The war ironically was fought between peoples of the ‘Word’. The interminable wars in Europe waged between 12th and 17th centuries AD were largely fought over family rivalries, prestige, and succession. The Colonial Wars that found roots in piracy before expanding into a world-wide feuding network of discriminatory trade practices was a confrontation between practitioners of 'western civilisation' that culminated in the World Wars of the 20th century, fought for domination and imperial glory.

The farther back we look, the more we note that despite there being civilisational ties, nations went to bloody wars, rather than find alternatives. Was it because they knew each other too well? Or were causes due to the nature of nation-states involved – their creation, development, and quest for self-sufficiency? What is clear is that no modern nation can leanon a unique history that is in itself self-explanatory. Because a civilisation in its life span is faced by a succession of challenges that often fragment the whole, resulting in each element providing solutions as best as they may. It brings about self-sustaining divisions that live, work, and fight to the dictates of traditions common to them to the exclusion and oftenin conflict with the other elements. Against this backdrop, how relevant and to what effect is the current government in India backing its civilisational ties with China to build a mutually beneficial relationship?

Colonial exhaustion and defeat of imperial powers in the 20th century gave rise to Communism in China and its evolution to a "centrally controlled market economy that tolerated political activity only by the Party;" it is the antithesis of the development of parliamentary democracy in India. Ironically, history attributes the entry of Mahayana Buddhism in 3 BCE from its home in India for the part it played in developing Chinese civilisation and its implanting amongst the Sinic people. These civilisational bonds over the millennia grew as human interaction and trade flourished, first over land and then by sea.

Imperial competition in the 18th and 19th centuries spurred by search for resources, increasing demand, and lure of easy wealth marked the advent of colonial empires and the breakdown of traditional linkages. Awkwardly, trade networks now were routed through the parent colonist. An unintended fallout of this disruption was nationalistic fervour that neither had the experience of managing affairs of the state nor could they see beyond the coloniser and their reviled formula of trade-settlement-conquest. The artificially stretched geography had effectively fragmented civilisational bonds and replaced it by concepts that came unstuck rather than coalescing.

In this milieu, it must come as no surprise that China and India opted for self-government so profoundly different and with such a varied interpretation of what and who was the 'self' to be governed. While the former claimed exclusive authority of people freed of feudal and capitalistic exploitation and holding membership of the Chinese Communist Party, the latter derived its authority from a more abstract interpretation of what represented the will of the nation under one constitution. There are inconvenient anomalies to both concepts. That being as it may, the reality is that China and India share borders that extends over 3,500 km ridden by 'cartographic incongruities'. Concurrently, historical events such as the invasion of Tibet, flight of the Dalai Lama to India, stoking of Maoist insurgencies in India, the lack of a consensual basis for boundary resolution be it the Johnson, MacDonald, or McMahon lines, a border war, and the underlying looming strategic competition, have all served to stress relations.

Even the approach taken by the two countries to development and growth cannot be at greater odds. China, since the mid-seventies, has become the manufacturing hub of the world; while India since the mid-nineties has become the favoured destination for outsourcing of a range of services from software development and call centres to 'back-room' services and sophisticated research reports for analysts and decision-makers. India’s primary aim is of being a dominant knowledge power. But tensions remain, not just caused by legacy.

For China it is the inability to reconcile a free market economy with a repressive authoritarian regime. It has chosen to distract its people through whipping up nationalistic passions and implementing aggressive revisionist policies. For India, it is its population and the nature of its polity that tends to hold it back. Both have a common quest, to achieve and sustain great power status. China’s striving for dominance in the political arena is backed by first-rate military capability. Challenged by the international system, it has turned a competitive face to relations with other powers.While India would appear to have chosen a cooperative slant, its exertion of power is through international bodies, its success at the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and to win support at the UN on its stand on climate change, renewable energy, and terrorism are issues that have not gone unnoticed.

Given this state of play, and the harsh fact that the principle of nationalism is almost always intimately linked to the idea of war, it will take an act of great statesmanship between the two diverse Asian giants to bury their differences and build upon their hoary civilisational bonds. But even if this were to be so, the question that begs to be answered is: to whose benefit, and to what end?