Socialism Today Issue 249 June 2021

The latest devastating outbreak in an ongoing cycle of conflict is further proof of the inability of capitalism to meet the national aspirations of Palestinian and Jewish people in Israel-Palestine, argues JUDY BEISHON. But new features also point to how a way forward can be found.

When a ceasefire took hold after eleven days of war on Gaza by the Israeli military, Gaza’s traumatised population re-emerged onto the streets to survey scenes of terrible devastation. This was the fourth war since 2008 on Hamas-led Gaza by the Israeli regime. The Israeli military declared it had hit 1,500 targets during the onslaught, which it had named ‘Operation Guardian of the Walls’.

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CWI International Secretariat member ROBERT BECHERT looks at the repercussions across North Africa and the Middle East of the latest Israeli assault.

There can be no doubt that May’s round of death and destruction in Israel-Palestine will have serious repercussions in the whole Middle East. All the questions relating to the conflict in Israel-Palestine have been thrust into the limelight again with the new element of the consequences of the most serious clashes inside Israel between Israelis and Palestinians since those of October 2000.

Alongside the many deaths and injuries, the demolition of thousands of homes and, in Gaza, basic infrastructure, it has also blown a hole in the nine months’ old ‘Abraham Accords’, the agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain. Later similar agreements with Sudan and Morocco followed as the then US president Donald Trump offered each country ‘sweeteners’ to clinch their signatures. However these transactional deals pushed by the Trump administration did not even touch upon the roots of the divisions, clashes and wars between Israelis and Arabs.

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How can we open a road to begin to solve seemingly age-old intractable national conflicts? Reprinted below are extracts from an article in issue No.181 of Socialism Today (September 2014), written by PETER TAAFFE following the summer 2014 Israeli invasion of Gaza and the bloody conflict then unfolding in Ukraine.

Events in the last few months have graphically underlined that the different capitalist powers are totally unwilling and incapable of providing a democratic and just solution to the situation in Ukraine. The sheer hypocrisy of US imperialism and European capitalism on the one side and Russia’s oligarchic Putin regime on the other, in seeking the mantle of defenders of ‘oppressed nations and minorities’, will fool few thinking workers. It is a naked cash calculation allied to their strategic political and military vital interests that are at stake. ‘The right of self-determination’ is a hollow phrase, so much small change, to be quickly discarded if it stands in their way.

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PETER TAAFFE reviews an impressive analysis of the role of commodity traders in ‘modern’ capitalism.

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

By Javier Blas and Jack Farchy

Published by Random House Business, 2021, £20

The World for Sale is an impressive, illuminating analysis of the corrosive rottenness and the corruption of ‘modern’ world capitalism. It couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time for Britain, where the Johnson Tory government is engulfed in allegations of gross influence-peddling, ‘chumocracy’ and outright bribery.

Written by two former journalists from the Financial Times, Javier Blas and Jack Farchy, with expert and inside knowledge of the workings of the system, it reveals the corruption of world capitalism – on an absolutely gargantuan scale! The book describes in nauseating detail how a handful of ‘commodity traders’ facilitated the theft of the world’s resources, further impoverishing the masses in the collapsing ex-Stalinist states and in the neo-colonial world. Their work allows us to understand how these gangsters gained through the colossal theft of previously nationalised industries and economies in the ex-Stalinist states. At the same time, there were opportunities resulting from a new imperialist scramble for Africa, Asia, Latin America and indeed the whole world. This was facilitated by these traders. This new stratum of the international capitalist class exploited the lucrative niches in finance capitalism, stacked up riches for themselves and, in the process, has in effect carried out a new re-colonisation of the world.

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As tensions between China and the US continue to rise, HANNAH SELL reviews a recent book by former Bloomberg economist Thomas Orlik, looking at the character of China and perspectives for its economy.

China: The Bubble That Never Pops

By Thomas Orlik

Published by Oxford University Press, 2020, £23

Unlike many other aspects of US foreign policy, Biden’s election has not led to a fundamental change in direction when it comes to China. However, instead of Trump’s quixotic and inconsistent unilateral ramping up of tensions, Biden is attempting to build a coalition of global powers behind US imperialism, with the aim of putting up a firewall against the further rise of China.

Is that possible? What are the limits to the continued rise of China? One of the most useful recent books on the Chinese economy is Thomas Orlik’s China: The Bubble That Never Pops. Previously based in China for eleven years as Chief Asia Economist for Bloomberg, his book – while not written from a socialist point of view but that of Western capitalism – still provides a useful picture of the contradictory character of China, and how it relates to China’s economic growth in the past and, to some extent, the future.

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The Scottish Greens are not the first European Green party to hold a pivotal position in their national parliament. But will they break the trend and offer a route to the fundamental system change needed to defeat climate change? In our Global Warning column this month OISIN DUNCAN of Socialist Party Scotland asks, just how radical are the Scottish Greens?

Many young people and workers voted for the Green Party in the Scottish Parliament election on May 6, concerned as they are about the environmental crisis being wrought on the planet by the capitalist system. The Scottish Greens put on 70,000 votes for the regional list seats compared to 2016, taking their share up to 8.1%. With eight Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) they now hold a pivotal position at Holyrood.

But do the leadership of the Scottish Greens offer a fighting alternative to capitalism and cuts? After five years as the unofficial junior partners to the Scottish National Party (SNP) led Scottish government, what have the Greens actually delivered for workers and youth? And, looking to the future, do their policies go far enough to address the multi-faceted global crisis caused by capitalism? 

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Helgoland

By Carlo Rovelli

Published by Allen Lane, 2021, £20

Reviewed by Pete Mason

Helgoland, by best-selling physicist Carlo Rovelli, is named after the barren “windswept island in the North Sea” where, in the summer of 1925, Werner Heisenberg, escaping from an incapacitating bout of hay fever, gasping for breath, unable to sleep, created quantum mechanics.

Written with much poetic gusto, it nevertheless fails both as a book of philosophy and a book of science. It falls between two stools. There is too little science to convince the reader of the truth of Rovelli’s main argument, and too much philosophy, too much poetical prose and verse, which gives the ultimately false impression that Rovelli’s ideas derive from philosophical speculation as opposed to experimentation. In philosophical terms, this would be called ‘idealism’ (not to be mistaken with the non-philosophical, common meaning of the term, a pursuit of perfection). This impression is enhanced by his embrace of Buddhism.

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