Photograph Source: Oton Barros (DSR/OBT/INPE), Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra/INPE, http://www.dsr.inpe.br – CC BY-SA 2.0
Anyone perusing the business press in recent times will have surely noticed that the topic of electric vehicles features predominately on basically a daily basis. A recent report by the International Energy Agency states that EVs accounted for roughly one in every seven passenger cars brought globally in 2022. Norway remains the world leader with around 80 percent of new cars being EVs- thanks largely to a government buildout of charging stations. Iceland currently comes in second with around 60 percent. Both countries are blessed with huge amounts of renewable energy- hydroelectricity for Finland, geothermal for Iceland. In the U.S. EV sales almost doubled last year to about 6 percent. With the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act last year, which extended the $7500 EV tax credit for 10 years (with income and cost requirements and as long as a significant amount of the EV is manufactured in the U.S. and ), sales figure to receive another large increase this year.
The major car companies have announced billions of dollars in investments to catch up to Tesla and Chinese upstarts such as BYD. Toyota’s new CEO, Koji Sato, vows to correct his company’s slow start on EVs while Ford is apparently facing a host of challenges. Volkswagen recently released an EV model for the masses (to be priced at $25,000), something Tesla has been promising to do forever though it remains to be seen that the company will deliver the car by its stated 2025 target. Tesla’s stock price is itself a constant focus thanks to the company’s loudmouth owner.
If the pandemic revealed anything it is the importance of supply chains and logistics to modern life. This especially applies to EVs as there is a dirty secret to the green economy: it can be quite dirty. It is a certainty that globally mining will have to greatly increase to enable a significant decarbonization of the auto industry. An estimate by industry forecaster Benchmark Minerals projects that a six-fold increase in demand for lithium-ion batteries would mean up to 384 new mines worldwide. Regarding EVs, a widely-sited estimate by Zeke Hausfather of the Breakthrough Institute calculates that it takes about 16,000 miles for an EV to reach zero emissions considering the amount of energy that goes into building each car.
One prominent element used in lithium-ion batteries that make EVs run is nickel. Nickel lends a higher energy density and more storage capacity to batteries enabling EVs to get more miles out of a single charge. Indonesia is home to the largest nickel deposits in the world, around 22 percent of the global supply, particularly on the island of Sulawesi. Historically, nickel ore was exported from the area unprocessed however around a decade ago the Indonesia government banned its export in an effort to attract heavy industries. This led to the building of the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park, known as IMIP, a sprawling 3000-hectare complex equipped with steelworks, coal power plants, and manganese processors, along with its own airport and seaport. The project was a joint venture between Chinese and Indonesian industrial companies.
Between 2020 and 2022 nickel production more than doubled to 1.6 million tons, almost half of the world’s entire output. In April 2022, a consortium led by the world’s second-largest EV battery manufacturer, LG Energy Solution, signed a $9 billion contract with the Indonesia Battery Company and mining company Aneka Tamben. A few months later in August 2022, Tesla agreed to a $5 billion contract with two Chinese companies working at IMIP, CNGR Advanced and Zhejiang Huayou Colbalt. Chinese companies are largely dominant in EV supply chains at this point, ironically in part due to a lack of concern for environmental issues (This dominance includes Rare-Earth metals. They get their name not from a lack of abundance but from the difficulty in extracting them. At last count China controls 71 percent of the world’s extraction and 87 percent of processing capacity). In fact, during the past three years Indonesia has signed more than a dozen deals worth more than $15 billion for battery materials and EV production with global manufactures including Hyundai, LG, and Foxconn.
The number of workers at IMIP has grown from 28,000 in 2019 to 66,000 today transforming what was a fishing village a decade ago to bustling industrial jungle. ‘It’s like a city was dropped in the middle of paradise’ Iman Shofwan, head of research for the Indonesia nonprofit JATAM recently told Wired magazine. Local infrastructure has struggled to cope with the sudden growth, leaving workers living in hastily built shacks and local homes and businesses plagued by long blackouts. Last September, Brookings Institute reported on the environmental impact of the nickel sector, with particular focus on is reliance on coal. Coal provides about 60 percent of Indonesia’s total electricity capacity- with industrial parks accounting for 15 percent of coal output. Waste from the industry has decimated local fishing and deforestation has increased erosion and the risk of flash floods. Workers toil for low pay, some for less than the minimum wage, in dangerous conditions. Strikes have been met with the typical repression. Two protesting workers were killed at the PT Gunbuster Nickel Industry smelter in January.
Gruesome as things appear in Indonesia, it gets worse in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Another ingredient in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries is cobalt. Cobalt ensures cathodes inside batteries do not easily overheat or catch fire and it helps extend battery life. While cobalt touches just about every piece of tech we use, the biggest player is now the EV sector which now consumes 34 percent of global production, 64,000 tons, a number that figures only to substantially increase as EVs increase. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s cobalt is mined in DRC. As Siddharth Kara describes in his recent book Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, a good amount of this cobalt is dug up by ‘artisanal miners’, namely desperately poor people, including many children, for pennies a day. A report from the Cobalt Institute last May put the amount of cobalt in the global supply chain mined like this at 12 percent. Kara says the number could well exceed 30 percent. He estimates there are somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 tunnels dug by artisanal miners.
Kara’s description of the children being maimed and killed in collapsing mines in a country that was already the victim of perhaps the most ghastly example of Western imperialism and since independence has been plagued by dictatorship and war truly exposes the bottom of the global economy. Kara writes of the Tilwezembe mining site, home to the more child labor than any formal mine in Congo:
It is temptinja. The depravity and indifference unleashed on the children working at Tilwezembe is a direct consequence of a global economic order that preys on the poverty, vulnerability, and devalued humanity of the people who toil at the bottom of global supply chains.
EVs also use three times as much copper as gas powered cars along with loads of lithium. Some of the largest copper mines are found in Peru, the second largest copper producer in the world, where rural workers have recently been driven to revolt against a corrupt and unequal political system. Africa also has significant copper reserves and has seen production increase.
EVs are hardly the only pieces of cutting edge technology that exploit workers in the global south. The other development that has dominated the business press is the development of generative AI, such as Cseph GrossoohatGPT. Venture capital is pouring into AI startups, $3,6 billion into 239 AI deals from January to mid-March according to investment analysis for PitchBook, at a time the tech industry in general is seeing a mini-downturn due to higher interest rates choking off much of the cheap capital that flowed during the height of the pandemic. On March 17th, Morningstar reported 139,000 tech-sector employees have lost their jobs since the start of the year. One of the larger issues that looms over its development is the fear that AI, and related algorithms, will replicate racist, sexist, and generally violent impulses of the flawed society of its creators. In January, Time magazine reported that OpenAI has used workers in Kenya to make ChatGPT less toxic. Partnering with a company called Sama, a San Francisco based firm that employs workers in Kenya, Uganda, and India to label data for Silicon Valley clients. Data-labels sift through endless amount of gruesome internet content in order to label what is toxic to reinforce machine learning. For this effort, workers received a wage of between $1.32 and $2 per hour.
Facebook has also used Sama to employ workers in the brutal task of reviewing and removing banned content before it seen by users. Time describes workers struggling with PTSD conditions from constant exposure to very graphic content without consistent access to counseling that is supposed to be available. Again, efforts to organize for higher pay and better conditions run smack into hostility.
Such digital sweatshops have become more common in the Global South. Some years ago Jeff Bezos was perhaps the first to publicly use the term ‘microwork.’ Bezos proclaimed ‘Think of it as microwork, so for a penny you might pay for someone to tell you if there is a human in the photo.’ This was the introduction of Amazon Mechanical Turk. It has been emulated by competitors such as Clickworker, Appen, and Scale. Most tasks on these sites last barely a minute and earn pennies. For workers in the Global North these sites largely fall under the ‘gig economy’ with workers using them to boost hours and stagnant wages. However for many in the Global South, an estimated 20 million workers undertake microwork globally, it is a full time job which is understandable considering the large percentage of the global workforce that toils in the informal economy. A survey by the International Labor Organization found that 36 percent of such workers regularly put in seven days a week.
What is to be done? Consumers always have a part to play pressuring companies about labor and environmental standards. Yet multinational corporations already routinely claim that their subcontractors are thoroughly vetted and clean. Battery recycling can hopefully become an increasing factor but it will not negate the need for hundreds of new mines. Cities across the U.S. could be redesigned to include more public transportation and walkability to reduce the demand for cars. However this idea has become yet another pinned down in the endless American ‘culture’ wars.
Clearly much more is needed. Mining is a vital part of the modern world but if left unregulated it is brutal to workers and toxic to the environment. Mines need to be unionized and even worker controlled. However what global supply chains demonstrate is that we face planetary problems, from climate change to the crisis of antibiotic resistant bacteria, to the dangers of AI therefore solutions will have to be international. This will require global planning and cooperation and an increasing decoupling of technology from market forces. Such a solution will not only free the world’s working class, but may well save all humans in the long run. This always sounds utopian, yet a better solution has yet to be put forward.
The New International Economic Order (NIEO) was a set of reforms introduced in the 1970s by African, Asian, and Latin American nations seeking to dismantle the economic vestiges of imperialism. This was a diplomatic attempt to tackle the exploitive and unfair global financial regulations, structures, and trade relations that continued stunting postcolonial economies’ sustainable and independent development.
Championed by the Non-Aligned movement and initially passed through the ‘Declaration for the Establishment of a New International Economic Order’ adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on 1st May 1974, its promising radical vision for a fair and just postcolonial world was voted down by Western powers and has had its material implementation blocked on more than one occasion, most recently on 14th December 2022. This raises a question (among many) of worldwide concern: Why have Europe, North America, and their allies, who all see and describe themselves as the champions of civilisation, democracy, international law, equality, and human rights, stood so unashamedly against economic decolonisation and the global tide of progress? This article will explore the NIEO and analyse the drive behind the West’s awkward and nakedly hypocritical hindering of the NIEO before briefly evaluating the political consequences this has for an increasingly multipolar 21st-century world.
The 1974 NIEO declaration was the result of a collective reformist project and effort on behalf of most of the world’s nations. It calls for cooperation, solidarity, equality, sovereignty, and, critically, a material commitment to principles protected and enshrined by international law. The very need for such a declaration came from the observation that rather than stabilising and regulating the global economy, the ‘international rules-based order’ and the Bretton Woods system actually destabilised and disadvantaged developing postcolonial economies. The Western-built financial order structurally maintained US global hegemony at the expense of African, Asian, and Latin American lands, labour, and livelihoods. In other words, the post-Second World War planet that was politically and economically reshaped by Western powers, founding today’s global institutions such as the UN, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), had dishonest and unjust colonial rules at its foundation – regulations that continue to benefit Western nations today. After all, such institutions were created while a majority of the world’s population remained smothered under the chains of formal colonialism. The British, French, Belgian, Spanish, and Portuguese empires were still alive, although on the decline and becoming effectively subordinate to the interests of the budding United States (US) empire.
Completing the decolonisation process and tackling the institutionalised uneven advantage for developed Western nations meant the world would need to revisit such rules and structures, radically reforming them to truly serve the principles of the Charter of the United Nations – that is, to promote the economic advancement and social progressof all peoples. It should be noted that the US was the first nation to sign and ratify the UN charter and, therefore, should be among the strongest defenders of the very principles that its political class took a prominent role in drafting. However, controversies such as President Nixon’s New Economic Policy, which saw a rash hiking of import tariffs and the suspension of the US dollar’s convertibility into gold to benefit the US economy at the expense of others, evidenced concerns that the ‘rules-based order’ failed to prevent “worrisome unilateralism” on behalf of the interests of American finance. Another evidenced concern was over resource control. Many postcolonial nations had achieved political independence (though Western-backed coup d’états in Iran, Ghana, Chile, and elsewhere would suggest even this political independence was purely nominal). However, they found their national resources and mineral wealth were still in the hands of Western nations, typically through corporate possessions whose origins could be directly traced to the colonial intervention. One such example would be the French-headquartered TotalEnergies, a $320 billion-dollar Fortune 500 corporation with interests in petroleum, natural gas, and oil refining. The company’s colonial-era predecessor had secured exploration rights in French-occupied Algeria and broadly throughout France’s other African colonies, exploiting imperial lands and labour whose generation and expropriation of raw materials would join the slave trade as an extremely profitable economic venture that facilitated French development at the brutal cost of African underdevelopment.
Royal Dutch Shell, Unilever, and James Finlay & Co. join a host of other western-headquartered (and therefore, Western-taxed!) corporate entities whose fortunes can also be directly traced to the granting of imperial ‘resource exploration’ charters and/or agro-colonialism such as plantations in occupied India where coerced, underpaid, and underage labour was not uncommon. Another significant point to be made on this specific matter is that colonial economies were directed towards the monocultural cultivation of raw materials, as dictated by such companies or demanded by the evolving needs of the Western European and North American metropoles. Many postcolonial economies, particularly on the African continent, failed to change this precarious focus and dependency on exporting one or a few commodities, leaving their national prosperity to the mercy of unstable and volatile global markets. This came alongside an inherited economically-suicidal reliance on importing western-manufactured commodities as basic and straightforward as matchsticks! A final vestige of the colonial intervention was the lack of (or if existent, very weak) labour legislation to guard against the proliferation of child workers and work conditions that we would designate today as ‘modern slavery’. Forced labour, including the coercion of children, was an extremely profitable norm under Western European colonial rule.
The fault and responsibility for this dire economic outlook lay equally at the feet of both postcolonial leadership – who were either violently removed from power if they challenged this status quo, or happily declined to make any changes so long as their own neocolonial and compradorial class interests remained secure – and the western corporate interests who were often the external sources of corruption and the instigators and benefactors of regime change, evidenced by the case of the United Fruit Company (UFC) and their role in the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) illegal and violent overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz. The democratically-elected President Árbenz had committed the unthinkable crime of introducing a national minimum wage, overseeing land reforms for the impoverished peasantry, and leading efforts to end the exploitive and ecologically-devastating labour practices of companies like the UFC, who in turn lobbied the US government for regime change. The failure of the ‘rules-based order’ to prevent and address this blatant disregard for the principles of the UN charter was noted by concerned governments around the world, especially those driven by a concern for developing their national economies and adhering to the UN principle of ‘promoting the economic advancement and social progress of all peoples’, which had to begin with their own.
Addressing such concerns and seeking to combat the vestiges, the legacies, the afterlives of such exploitive imperial endeavours, non-interference and sovereignty – critically over national resources – were among the main principles of the NIEO as debated and set out through the diplomacy and the collective efforts of nations we would today group as the ‘Global South’:
1. The sovereign equality of all States, with non-interference in their internal affairs, their effective participation in solving world problems and the right to adopt their own economic and social systems;
2. Full sovereignty of each State over its natural resources and other economic activities necessary for development, as well as regulation of transnational corporations;
3. Just and equitable relationship between the price of raw materials and other goods exported by developing countries, and the prices of raw materials and other goods exported by the developed countries;
4. Strengthening bilateral and multilateral international assistance to promote industrialisation in developing countries through, in particular, the provision of sufficient financial resources and opportunities to transfer appropriate techniques and technologies.
This was the battle braved and championed unsuccessfully in the 1970s and again in the 21st century by the underdeveloped postcolonial economies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America; this is what has been consistently rejected by the overdeveloped imperial economies of Western Europe, North America, and their allies in Australia and Israel. A few exceptions exist, such as Cameroon and Chad, two African nations I would describe as neocolonial satellite states that remain strictly adherent to French business interests, acting within the confines of Françafrique. Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and Palau also joined the underdeveloped economies that voted against the NIEO. Like their Francophone counterparts, these nations are firmly under the economic and political orbit and influence of the US; reflecting this, all three countries officially use the United States dollar as their currency.
The figure below shows the full outcome of the UN General Assembly vote:
So, three months after the West’s most recent rejection of the NIEO, what does this mean for an increasingly multipolar world?
The hypocrisy of such a naked contradiction of the Western-led global financial order has resulted in a predictable and justified response from the rest – Russia, China, India, Brazil, Iran, and other industrial(ising) nations have in recent months agreed to drop the dollar and adopt alternative currencies like the Russian Rouble or the Chinese Renminbi, for “payments between Russia and countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America”. This means the ability of the US to mobilise the dishonest advantages baked into the rules and structures of the global financial order it constructed now faces a direct challenge. As China increases its proportion of global trade and the West becomes increasingly displaced as the centre of global commerce, unipolar moves such as Nixon’s New Economic Policy would be rendered less effective, if not ineffective, in the future. This is perhaps the dawn of a truly multipolar world where the ‘rules-based order’ actually works for all nations – sovereign and equal nations according to the NIEO, though the Russian invasion of Ukraine calls into question whether this sovereignty will truly be respected – and not the exclusive advantage of Western powers. Western sanctions, currently levied against the national governments and/or prominent individuals of Cuba, North Korea, Zimbabwe, China, Russia, Belarus, Syria, Venezuela, Iran, and Myanmar, will also lose their potency as sanctioned governments and/or individuals can increasingly trade and operate without the US dollar and beyond the reach of the Bretton Woods system.
Guarding against sanctions was one implication of the NIEO that the world would’ve benefited from had its policies not been blocked in implementation by the West. Such recent events indicate that some NIEO reforms are set to take place with or without the West’s consent; an economically decolonised world is inevitable! A primary concern here, however, is that these changes were spurred on by and a consequence of the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine – will it take more wars, more needless shedding of working-class blood and inter-imperialist rivalry, for multipolarity to gain traction and for Western powers to end their rejection of diplomatic efforts resisting Western supremacy and hegemonic control of the world economy and global institutions? Sadly, the US and its allies approach the question of global economic reform as a zero-sum game, thus seeing a fair and just evening of the playing field, as embodied by the NIEO, as nothing but their loss – even if it’s the world’s gain. This perhaps illustrates part of the drive behind their consistent resistance against such reforms.
Approaching this discussion from a Revolutionary Humanist and Marxist standpoint, we observe an important summarising consideration that provides a significant insight into the position of the West. The national bourgeois classes of Western European and North American nations have always used and abused humanist, democratic, egalitarian ideals according to their needs. For example, let’s examine two seminal documents for the Western European humanist and liberal traditions; the first is the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, guided by the principle of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” – the national motto of the French Republic and the war-cry of the French (bourgeois) revolution. The second is the UN Human Rights Charter, which established the foundation of human rights legislation for nations across the globe. The first document was celebrated as a breakthrough for mankind, while direct slavery was still practised towards African labourers. The second was signed and ratified by literal empires… violent, genocidal, continent-occupying, forced labour-exploiting cartels, drafting and affirming a charter on ‘Human Rights’. We can look at a third example to hammer in this point; “All men are created equal” – another essential pillar stone of the humanist tradition and a famous part of the US Declaration of Independence – was enshrined in the US constitution by the slave-owning Founding Fathers.
The lesson is clear. Any document, writing, speech, principle, or idea championed by national bourgeois actors cannot be trusted to put people before profit. Bourgeois interests are restricted to profit and profit alone, hypocritically and unashamedly using and abusing whatever ideology or tradition they can get their hands on to advance their material interests. As Walter Rodney declared in The Groundings With My Brothers, “It took Africans some time to realise that Europeans worshipped strange gods called money and profit”. The corrupt and shameless pursuit of money and profit drives and sustains the hypocrisy of the Western rejection of the NIEO. What Rodney correctly recognised in the European colonial powers, Marx saw in the bourgeoisie:
“[The Bourgeoisie] compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
The world, indeed, has been created after its image; national bourgeois powers dominate every continent on Earth. Therefore, while celebrating the game-changing recent multipolar victories won by the likes of Russia, we must guard against the fact that it, too, is a nation governed and oppressed by a bourgeois regime. The Russian national bourgeoisie has already shown that they are also willing to hypocritically use and abuse whatever they can get their hands on to justify the violent pursuit of their (nationalist) class and material interests – in this case, anticolonial discourses are being appropriated by Putin for the sake of what is undoubtedly an imperial war of expansion.
Ultimately, a unipolar or a multipolar world led by either (or both!) of the rival (imperialist) national bourgeois forces is not one where ordinary people are free from economic exploitation, free from national domination, and free from class oppression. With that said, a multipolar world is, regardless, a step in the right direction – especially in contrast to the unipolar neoliberal hangover following the fall of the Soviet Union. The West’s rejection of the NIEO remains as telling as it is unfortunate. Still, the steps taken towards multipolarity, despite the fact, indicate a world in which the concentration of political and economic power in Western Europe and North America is soon to be a thing of the past.
For years, a relentless campaign has been waged internationally against opponents of Zionism and the establishment of Israel through the expulsion of the Palestinians and their ongoing persecution, denouncing them as “left-anti-Semites”.
This witch-hunt has targeted anyone making an analogy or drawing any comparison between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and Hitlerite fascism, or identifying Israel with apartheid rule in South Africa. It rested on the assertion that Zionism represented the collective interests of Jews the world over and that Israel was the embodiment of that collective self-identity.
A section of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of anti-Semitism [Photo: screenshot from web site of International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance]
The centrepiece of this campaign was the insistence on the adoption of the “working definition” of anti-Semitism agreed in 2016 by the intergovernmental body, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The IHRA definition included definitions and examples of anti-Semitism that effectively outlaw criticism of the Israeli government:
Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour.
Applying double standards by requiring of it behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Not one of these proscriptions on free speech, defining what is supposedly illegitimate criticism, stands up when measured against the reality of the explosive conflicts that have now erupted in Israel. The political lie of the unchallenged universal legitimacy of the state of Israel has suffered a devastating exposure with the mass protest movement of Jewish Israelis against the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Tens of thousands Israelis protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial overhaul plan outside the parliament in Jerusalem, Monday, March 27, 2023. [AP Photo/AP]
Since the election of Netanyahu’s government last November, resting on far-right and ultra-religious parties, it has set about consolidating the power of the government over the judiciary. This is designed to facilitate the suppression of social and political dissent and to pave the way for the permanent annexation of much of the occupied West Bank and bloody military interventions, not only against the Palestinians but also Iran and its allies.
The coalition also has plans for legislation disqualifying Palestinian Knesset members from serving in the Israeli parliament and banning their parties from standing in elections, permanently disenfranchising 20 percent of Israeli citizens.
This builds on Israel’s 2018 Basic Law, popularly known as the Nation-State Law, enshrining Jewish supremacy as the legal foundation of the state. This new Basic Law declares, “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people”, proclaims Jerusalem “complete and united” as Israel’s capital, declares that the development of Jewish settlement in the Occupied Territories is “a national value” to be encouraged by the state, and removes Arabic as an official state language. This has led groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem to denounce it as a new form of apartheid rule.
Netanyahu’s planned political coup has provoked the biggest mass protest movement in Israeli history. And though its leaders still proclaim their Zionism and loyalty to Israel, events speak for themselves regarding the assertion of “national unity” on which Zionism rests.
Hundreds of thousands have marched and demonstrated week after week to denounce the lurch towards dictatorship led by a government including self-avowed fascists such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. The extent of the opposition testifies to the broader social and economic concerns animating a protest movement that has involved at least one in five of the population. The Zionist Histadrut trade union federation was forced to call strikes to try and control spontaneous walkouts by Israeli workers.
Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu (left) far-right Israeli lawmaker Bezalel Smotrich (right) and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid (centre) and leaders of all Israel's political parties pose for a group photo after the swearing-in ceremony for lawmakers at the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in Jerusalem, Tuesday, November 15, 2022. [AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov]
In response, the police have fired tear gas and used water cannon to break up demonstrations, carrying out mass arrests. Almog Cohen of Jewish Power and others have called for the arrest of opposition leaders for treason, including former Defence Minister Benny Gantz, former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, and former Major General Yair Golan, amid warnings on both sides that Israel faces a descent into civil war.
Millions of Israelis and some of its most prominent political representatives now routinely denounce the country’s descent into fascist rule in a manner that would be proscribed in the UK and much of Europe and provoke accusations of anti-Semitism, intimidation and victimisation.
The “left anti-Semitism” witch-hunt in the UK
The “left anti-Semitism” witch-hunt in the UK was led by an alliance of the Blairite right-wing of the Labour Party, Zionists and Conservatives, all with intimate connections to the security services of Britain, the US and Israel. Focusing on Jeremy Corbyn once he became Labour leader in 2015, the witch-hunters claimed his supporters had transformed the party into an anti-Semitic threat to British Jews, who would be forced to flee the UK if he ever became prime minister.
Jeremy Corbyn speaking at a rally in London, October 1, 2022 [Photo: WSWS]
The aim of the Blairites in driving out Labour’s left-leaning rank-and-file was to make sure that the party remained a reliable instrument of the most reactionary elements within the British state apparatus. Thousands were suspended, expelled or driven out, including many of Corbyn’s closest allies, while he prostrated himself before his critics and handed leadership of the party over to Sir Keir Starmer.
Today, Corbyn has been removed from the Parliamentary Labour Party and told he will never stand again as an Labour MP because he dared to suggest that his political opponents had exaggerated the threat of anti-Semitism in the party.
The witch-hunting went much wider than the British Labour Party, however, as the IHRA definition was used as a political cudgel to silence the voice of Palestinians and their supporters on campuses and to ruin the lives and besmirch the integrity of academics and artists as varied as Günter Grass and Roger Waters all over the world.
The broader aim of this offensive was to justify the global enforcement of the policies of British and US imperialism in the Middle East using the dishonest and illegitimate identification of anti-Semitism with principled opposition to the policies of the Israeli state—especially its military-police role against the Palestinians, Syria, Lebanon and Iran.
The ultimate target of this McCarthyite orgy is the working class, facing censorship, political victimisation and even criminal prosecutions for opposing imperialism’s crimes internationally and at home.
Moreover, accepting that Israel embodies the interests of all Jews leaves Jewish workers under the control of the Zionist state and politicians, and Arab workers prey to the claims of bourgeois Islamist groups, Sunni and Shia, including the Iranian-dominated Axis of Resistance, to represent the anti-imperialist strivings of the region’s workers and oppressed masses.
The political restrictions being demanded in the name of combating “left anti-Semitism” would make it impossible to wage a struggle against imperialist warmongering and to fight for the unification of the working class in the Middle East. This made the attempt to denigrate and discredit socialism, and any identification of the independent and universal interests of the region’s workers, Jewish and Arab, the essential political aim of the witch-hunters.
New York Times columnist Roger Cohen giving a talk at the Temple De Hirsch Sinai, Seattle, Washington sponsored by J Street. [Photo by Joe Mabel / CC BY-SA 4.0]
Responding to a column by Roger Cohen of the New York Times titled “Anti-Semitic Anti-Zionism,” the WSWS explained:
Its broader purpose, however, is made clear in the very first line: ‘The hard left meeting the hard right is an old political story, as Hitler understood in calling his party the National Socialists.’
Cohen’s ‘old political story’ is an old political lie. Nazism was developed not primarily as an anti-Semitic, but as an anti-communist movement. Anti-Marxism and opposition to the international unification of the working class was Hitler’s driving obsession, to which he counterposed ethnic German nationalism. His hatred of the Jews was based upon their association with the socialist movement.
He stated in Mein Kampf that his aim was to destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism.’ He wrote of his ‘conviction’ that ‘the question of the future of the German nation is the question of the destruction of Marxism... In Russian Bolshevism we must see the attempt undertaken by the Jews in the twentieth century to achieve world domination.’
The service provided to German imperialism by ‘National Socialism,’ i.e., fascism, was to mobilise the ruined petty-bourgeoisie and the declassed lumpen-proletariat as a shock force against the organised workers’ movement. Its essential political aim was to eradicate Marxian socialism and destroy the labour movement as a precondition for the unleashing of militarism and war, which were necessary to secure the markets and territory required by German imperialism, as expressed in Hitler’s goal of ‘Lebensraum.’
In contrast, the socialist movement, that is the Marxist movement, attracted so many Jewish workers and intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries precisely because it stood resolutely for internationalism, for equality and unity, and an end to all forms of ethnic or religious discrimination, especially the anti-Semitism espoused by all of Europe’s bourgeois governments.
These latest attacks on socialism, under the guise of defending against “left-anti-Semitism”, occur under conditions where the far-right is once again re-emerging as a significant political force, both in Europe and internationally, including the fascist Alternative for Germany and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France. Today it will become clear to ever broader layers of the more thoughtful workers and intellectuals in Israel itself that it is impossible to combat a similar descent into far-right reaction without making a political accounting of the Zionist project and challenging its underlying political assumptions.
The dead end of Zionism
What is unfolding in Israel is the product of deep-rooted contradictions, political and ideological, within the Zionist state. It is fueled by the growing divisions between the working class and the ruling elite in one of the most unequal countries in the world, making paramount the need to identify the class interests represented on both sides of the conflict over Netanyahu’s coup and to delineate an independent axis of struggle for the working class.
This can only be done by taking an historical approach that penetrates beneath the political mythology of Zionism.
Israel’s foundation was rooted in the catastrophe that overtook European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in the extermination of six million European Jews in the Nazi holocaust following the defeat of the European working class by fascism.
The entrance to the main camp of Auschwitz. [Photo by Bettmann Archive / CC BY-SA 1.0]
The conditions for this defeat were created by the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Communist International, and the Soviet bureaucracy’s betrayal of the struggle for world socialism, which prevented the working class from putting an end to the crisis-ridden capitalist system. It was the disastrous policy pursued by the German Communist Party under the direction of the Comintern that allowed Hitler to come to power without the working class being mobilised to prevent this, paving the way to World War II and all its horrors and crimes.
Zionism politically exploited the widespread disillusionment created by this defeat among Jews—often with deep connections to the socialist movement—and the desperate situation they faced, to urge the creation of a separate Jewish state. Emigration to British-controlled Palestine was encouraged throughout the 1930s by Jews seeking to escape Nazi persecution.
On 21 March 1933, Potsdam Day, President Paul von Hindenburg (right) accepts the appointment of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler as German chancellor. [Photo by Theo Eisenhart/Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S38324 / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0]
Israel was finally established in 1948 following a United Nations vote in 1947 for the partition of Palestine. Its foundation, justified by references to the Jews having been expelled from their homeland 2,000 years ago, was advanced as securing “A land without people for a people without land”. It would supposedly be a just and democratic haven for a people who had faced discrimination and oppression for centuries—a state defined by religion, open to all who could claim Jewish ancestry/descent.
The reality behind such rhetoric is the forcible and brutal expulsion of almost a million Palestinians, most of the population, the seizure of their land and the assertion of the ethnic and religious interests of Jews over those of Arab Muslims and Christians.
From the very day of its inception, Israel was organically incapable of developing a genuinely democratic society due to the denial of democratic rights to and repression of the Palestinians. Plunged immediately into war with its Arab neighbours, it grew into a militarised state, with the army serving as its central pillar, supported by US imperialism as its heavily funded garrison in the region.
The Arab-Israeli war of 1967 ended with Israel’s occupation of lands belonging to Jordan, Syria and Egypt, the West Bank of the Jordan River, the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip. It gave rise to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) under the leadership of Yasser Arafat that called for the struggle against Israel to be carried out under the banner of Palestinian nationalism, and the beginnings of Jewish colonial-style settlement and renewed ethnic cleansing. This turn to a “Greater Israel” policy was then consolidated by the decisive victory against Egypt, Syria and other Arab powers in October 1973.
Israeli tanks advancing on the Golan Heights, June 1967 [Photo by Government Press Office (Israel) / CC BY-SA 4.0]
A naked policy of military expansionism destroyed the good will Israel had enjoyed internationally since its foundation. It was a turning point in the political development of opposition to Zionism on the left, against which Israel’s rulers were to develop over many years the campaign to denounce “left-anti-Semitism”.
The escalation of militarism and war, including the military repression of the Palestinian national movement, the cultivation of a settler population, together with ultra-orthodox groups encouraged by the propagation of pseudo-biblical justifications for Israeli expansion, were all funded by the US. It was accompanied by free market policies and the abandonment of limited social welfare measures.
As social inequality in Israel grew to one of the highest levels in the world, a ruling class with less and less to offer workers increasingly based itself on the support of settler and ultra-religious groups. This created the basis for the emergence of the fascist tendencies within the political and military establishment. These are the forces that now dictate government policy and threaten not only the Palestinians but most Israelis with brutal repression.
It has left Israel today under a government intent on imposing the dictates of Jewish religious law, with religious discrimination enshrined in its constitution, and a society riven with explosive social and political divisions.
None of the major parties, whether in government or opposition, represent the interests of the “Jewish people” either within Israel or the diaspora. They are the contending spokesmen for Israel’s financial elite, courting Washington’s support—be it the Democratic Party or the Republican Party—for alternative perspectives for the preservation of Israel as a bastion of US economic and military domination in the region.
It is the protest leaders’ intransigent advocacy of Zionism and the social interests of the Israeli bourgeoisie that sets them against Netanyahu’s assault on the Supreme Court. They fear that “Bibi” and his fascist backers are undermining the bogus “democratic” veneer the Israeli state employs to legitimise its every military aggression—not only against the Palestinians, but against Iran.
Destabilising Israeli society by handing the initiative to Jewish supremacist and religious reactionaries, they know, wrecks the state’s ability to draw the population behind its warmongering agenda—and also risks an explosion of social struggles against economic policies of austerity to pay for war while enriching Israel’s oligarchs.
In the person of war criminals such as opposition leader Benny Gantz and Netanyahu’s rebellious Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, the Israeli bourgeoisie is acutely aware of the social and political threat it faces from the working class. In contrast these political realities find no expression among the petty-bourgeois opponents of Zionism and advocates for the Palestinians.
Understanding these historical and social processes raises the central question of how the working class must respond to the emerging crisis of rule in Israel.
Class unity, not ethno-nationalism
Those accused of “left anti-Semitism”, Palestinian groups and their supporters in such organisations as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and Palestine Solidarity Campaign, are being slandered. But that does not mean they offer any basis for a genuine struggle against Zionism.
These groups and various liberal commentators have almost invariably taken the position that what is unfolding in Israel is purely a conflict between warring Zionist camps. Noting the reactionary character of the self-proclaimed leadership of the opposition protests, they not only insist that the same concerns animate the hundreds of thousands directly mobilised and the millions more who back them, but also that it is impossible to either challenge or change this situation.
This “plague on both your houses” position de facto accepts the Zionists’ own claim to be the legitimate representative of the entire “Jewish people.” It objectively throws a lifeline to the Israeli bourgeoisie at its hour of greatest need by reinforcing the myth of national unity and perpetuating the division between Jewish and Arab workers.
Their basic position, nationalist and pro-capitalist in essence, is that class distinctions count for nothing as the Jewish working class benefits from the oppression of the Palestinians and of Arab Israelis in their relatively privileged position as the social base of a “settler colonial state.”
This is only an extreme variant of the argument employed by pseudo-left tendencies internationally who not only write off any possibility of working-class unity and socialist struggle in any country beset by ethnic or religious conflicts such as Northern Ireland, Spain, and Belgium, but who also declare that the working class of the imperialist nations, above all in the United States, is similarly hopelessly corrupted by supposedly sharing in the “spoils of oppression.”
The political conclusion is an embrace of national and separatist movements as the supposedly “legitimate” representatives of the nationally oppressed peoples concerned. The working class, to the extent that it is even spoken of, is tasked only with supporting “national liberation” through military struggle led by various bourgeois tendencies and states.
The division of the world into ever smaller, “ethnically pure” states and statelets which flows from such a perspective has proved time and again, in Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe and throughout the Middle East and Africa, to be a recipe for fratricidal warfare ending in the creation of anti-democratic and dictatorial regimes that remain the playthings of the major imperialist powers.
For a revolutionary perspective
The conditions exist to fight for a revolutionary socialist alternative in Israel and throughout the Middle East. The Israeli bourgeoisie and its state face an existential crisis—a fact now widely recognised. And under such conditions to reject a priori a successful struggle to break Jewish workers from Zionism is both profoundly sceptical and politically reactionary.
This is not the first time that divisions within the ruling elite, invariably of a reactionary and tactical character, have opened the road to an emerging revolutionary movement of the working class. One need only recall how the April 25, 1974 military coup in Portugal unleashed a mass socialist movement that ended the Salazar dictatorship and the colonial wars in Mozambique, Guinea and Angola. If anything, Israel is more socially polarised than Portugal was then between the working class and the ruling families.
Vladimir Lenin in his office in the Kremlin, Moscow, around 1919. (AP Photo) [AP Photo]
In 1914, in The Collapse of the Second International, Lenin outlined what he termed the “three symptoms” of a revolutionary situation:
(1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the ‘upper classes’, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for ‘the lower classes not to want’ to live in the old way; it is also necessary that ‘the upper classes should be unable’ to rule in the old way;
(2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual;
(3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in ‘peace time’, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the ‘upper classes’ themselves into independent historical action.
The basic issue that must be given conscious political expression is the growing political chasm between the opposition movement’s bourgeois leadership and the sections of workers now moving into struggle. Instead of dismissing Israeli workers as homogenous defenders of colonial occupation, the task of socialists is to make a class appeal for the unity of Jewish and Arab workers against their common oppressors and in this way bring an end to the divisions so carefully fostered by the bourgeoisie.
This is the essential lesson to be drawn from Israel’s troubled and tragic history. Responding to the partition of Palestine in 1947 by the United Nations that led to the creation of Israel, the Fourth International, insisted in a statement titled “Against the Stream”:
The Fourth International rejects as utopian and reactionary the ‘Zionist solution’ of the Jewish question. It declares that total renunciation of Zionism is the sine qua non condition for the merging of Jewish workers’ struggles with the social, national and liberationist struggles of the Arab toilers.
It warned:
By partition a wedge is driven between the Arab and Jewish worker. The Zionist state with its provocative lines of demarcation will bring about the blossoming forth of irredentist (revenge) movements on either side. There will be fighting for an ‘Arab Palestine’ and for a ‘Jewish state’ within the historic frontiers of Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel). As a result, the chauvinistic atmosphere thus created will poison the Arab world in the Middle East and throttle the anti-imperialist fight of the masses, while Zionists and Arab feudalists will vie for imperialist favours.
This prognosis has been vindicated by history and Jews and Arabs alike have paid a bitter price.
Mourners chant slogans and carry the body of Montaser Shawwa, 16, through an alley, during his funeral in the West Bank refugee camp of Balata, Nablus, Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023. Shawwa succumbed to his wounds that were sustained during an Israeli army operation in the occupied West Bank on February 8. [AP Photo/Nasser Nasser]
The reactionary Zionist utopia of a national state in which the Jews of the world could find sanctuary, unity and equality has led instead to the creation of a capitalist state acting as a garrison for US imperialism, built through the dispossession of the Palestinians, maintained through the constant eruption of war, wracked by immense social and political contradictions, and built on the denial of basic democratic rights to its Palestinian citizens. Far from being the “only democracy in the Middle East”, Israel is undergoing a headlong descent into police state forms of rule, the emergence of fascism and the eruption of civil war.
There is nothing unique in this catastrophe relating to Zionism or the State of Israel. The dead-end of Zionism is only one manifestation of the failure of all national movements and the states they have created to resolve any of the fundamental questions confronting the mass of working people. The same issues are posed to all the peoples of the region, where the working class is subject to brutally repressive forms of bourgeois rule amid grotesque levels of social inequality.
Nor is there anything unique in the eruption of opposition. Israel is a significant expression of the far-reaching political consequences of a global upsurge of the working class, from Sri Lanka to France.
