Examining the Russian Revolution in anticipation of its 108th Anniversary

(This piece is based on a lecture delivered by Cliff Slaughter in the 1960s)

As we prepare to celebrate the 108th Anniversary of the October Revolution, the world stands on the brink of a situation more explosive than that which led to the eruption of World War I and eventually the Revolution itself. It is necessary to draw the lessons of the October Revolution as our class confronts the breakdown of the world capitalist system in the 21st century. 

The Revolution did not fall from the sky. Eight months prior to the October Revolution, Russia had experienced another revolution, the February Revolution. Tsarism, the most despised and brutal autocracy on Earth which had ruled for 300 years, was overthrown by a massive movement of workers, peasants and soldiers. The Russian workers, who had toiled in destitution and misery under the bloody rule of the Tsar, were surrounded by a mass of peasants living in almost medieval conditions. The February Revolution led to the establishment of a "democratic" provisional government and the creation of Workers' Councils (Soviets), and in the conditions then existing in Russia this gave the impression of massive victory and produced a significant wave of euphoria.

This sentiment overcame many Russian socialists, including Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd such as Stalin and Kamanev, who demanded critical support for the new bourgeois government and nearly provoked Lenin to resign from the Party. However, after eight months of “liberal” government lack of action and compromise in the face of an escalating threat of a counterrevolutionary coup, by October, the working population had overthrown the provisional government and the ruling class standing behind it and installed their own socialist workers' government! 

In April, Lenin had shocked the crowd that gathered to welcome the famous revolutionist when he exited the "sealed train" upon his return to Russia from exile in Switzerland. After the February Revolution, he didn't celebrate the beginning of a new era; instead, he started a new struggle: "Down with the Provisional government! All Power to the Soviets!" At that time, even many of his comrades believed that the presence of workers councils were a guarantee of a truly "democratic" development. But this situation was not sustainable. Given the power of the working class and its organizations, Lenin saw this "democratic" stage as a situation of "dual power" and a priceless window of opportunity for socialist revolution. The organized power of the working class and its allies could not co-exist with the state of the reactionary Russian capitalists and landlords - the former would either smash this machine or be trampled by the counter-revolution of the latter. 

The most important lessons in the history of the global workers' movement can be found in Lenin’s bold attempt to readjust consciousness to the objective situation. The uncompromising revolutionism of Lenin and Bolshevism led workers and peasants through the necessary experiences that proved to the masses that the seizure of state power was necessary. 

The global working class came to achieve its greatest victory during the 1917 Russian October Revolution and forever altered the course of world history. It was unequivocally demonstrated that the working class could rule and begin the creation of a new society while abolishing the capitalist class. Under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, the working class had gained and held political power for the first time in history over 1/6 of the world. The course of the Russian Revolution had vindicated the strategic approach initially developed by Leon Trotsky, the theory of permanent revolution, which had foreseen the outbreak of a socialist revolution in backwards Russia as a manifestation of the international working class’s struggles to take power and overturn over-ripe capitalism on a world scale.

Lenin

When Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks in the middle of 1917, Lenin remarked that "from that time there was no better Bolshevik." Together Lenin and Trotsky oversaw the alliance of workers with the masses of the peasantry and soldiers and ultimately victory in the Russian Civil War. As Lenin later said, “Could any one point out to me another man who could organize an almost model army in a year and even win the respect of military experts? We have such a man!”

Trotsky

The Bolshevik Party was, ultimately, not a party like other parties. It was an organization steeled in the struggle against all opportunism, and steeped in the theoretical traditions of Marxism. Following the start of World War I, the Marxist Internationalists, most significantly the Bolsheviks, fought against the Second International's betrayal of socialist internationalism and support for war. The rise of Bolshevism and the role it played in the turbulent events of 1917 were prepared by and vindicated the centrality of this fight.

The Bolshevik Party demonstrated through its struggle that socialist internationalism is the fundamental element of the real struggle for power. The fate of the Russian Revolution, which resulted from the systemic global contradictions of capitalism, was inseparably connected to the progression of the world socialist revolution.

The Bolshevik Party was different in other ways. The Bolsheviks were a Party based ultimately not on the "labor aristocracy" and the intelligentsia, but a dynamic movement connected to the young and most exploited sections of the working class. As Trotsky noted:

"Bolshevism when underground was always a party of young workers. The Mensheviks relied upon the more respectable skilled upper stratum of the working class, always prided themselves on it, and looked down upon the Bolsheviks. Subsequent events harshly showed them their mistake. At the decisive moment the youth carried with them the more mature stratum and even the old folks."

There was a meaningful and vibrant interplay of viewpoints between the various layers of the movement within and around the Bolsheviks. There were numerous disagreements within the party, befitting an organization that knew how to turn to the revolutionary masses. Lenin frequently found himself on the losing end of such disputes, which occasionally became public despite party discipline.

The essential element in the victory of the Revolution was ultimately the Marxist leadership of the most far-sighted and intransigent Bolsheviks. It is the approach of this leadership that the international working class must deepen our understanding of. However, it is not enough to imitate the Leninist "combat party" as an empty formalism. As Trotsky put it: 

"The moral qualities of every party flow, in the last analysis, from the historical interests that it represents. The moral qualities of Bolshevism - self-renunciation, disinterestedness, audacity and contempt for every kind of tinsel and falsehood - the highest qualities of human nature! - flow from revolutionary intransigence in the service of the oppressed. The Stalinist bureaucracy imitates in this domain the words and gestures of Bolshevism." [emphasis added]

Today Marxism and Internationalism must become wedded to the most militant and oppressed sections of the international working class, on the basis shown to us by Lenin and Trotsky: one that combines the utmost revolutionary intransigence against capitalism, against imperialism and against all sorts of nationalist and anti-Marxist revisionism, with the necessary degree of organizational flexibility and connection to the aspirations of the most revolutionary layers of the working class!

Study the lessons of the October Revolution! 

Forward to the world socialist revolution!

Repost - "Why Trump is NOT a fascist – and why it matters"

by Daniel Lazare
June 16, 2025

(Permanent Revolution: Why Trump is NOT a fascist – and why it matters)

Have you heard?  Donald Trump is a fascist.  Lots of people say so – Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Liz Cheney, gender theorist Judith Butler, even Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly (“he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators ... so he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist for sure”).

On the neocon side, there are pundits like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, both of whom agree that Trump is worthy of the f-word.  On the left, there’s Maoist guru Bob Avakian, who heads up a group called “Refuse Fascism”; radical icon Naomi Klein who describes MAGA as “end times fascism,” and Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster, who recently published a 9,000-word article declaring that Trump must be a fascist because so many rightwing forces are lining up behind him, e.g. the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, an anti-democratic Silicon Valley pundit named Curtis Yarvin, etc.  The more bad guys on your side, the more fascist you become.  Right?

Not quite.  Although labeling Trump a fascist may sound militant, it’s not.  If rightwing warmongers like Cheney are reinventing themselves as anti-fascists, it’s not in order to solve the problem of Trumpism, but to disguise how it arose.  They are promoting a false diagnosis whose purpose is to conceal their own contribution – and certain disoriented leftwing forces are going along.

Contrary to such forces, fascism is not just authoritarianism, but a form of ultra-dictatorship that arose in specific historical circumstances, in this case the revolutionary upsurge that began in the final days of World War I.  The Russian Revolution is the most obvious example, but other countries also saw revolutionary eruptions around this time such as Hungary, Germany, Austria, Spain, and even the United States where a five-day general strike shut down the port of Seattle in February 1919.

Northern Italy was another a hot spot. The biennio rosso saw factory councils, or workers’ soviets, in Milan and Turin while the Po Valley, the northern Italian bread basket, came under the control of militant farmworkers and peasants.  The movement peaked in August-September 1920 when half a million workers occupied factories across the “industrial triangle” of northwestern Italy.

But then came the reaction.  As one historian said of Mussolini, the socialist turned rightwing adventurer:

During the winter of 1920-21, his Fascist movement gained enormous support as a result of the successful deployment of counter-revolutionary terror.  With the connivance of the government and the active backing of industrialists and landowners, Mussolini’s black-shirted squads raided the political headquarters of their opponents, destroyed trade union offices, burned down cooperative institutions, smashed left-wing presses, assaulted Socialists with knuckledusters and coshes, and forcibly fed Communists on castor oil.  Hundreds were killed and thousands injured.  By July 1921 Mussolini could proclaim, ‘Bolshevism is vanquished.’^[1]

What distinguished Mussolini’s movement from white terror elsewhere were politics and ideology.  After the suppression of Hungary’s short-lived soviet republic in 1919, the aristocrat Miklos Horthy was able to restore order by cracking down on the ultra-right while restoring the old Hungarian monarchy (but without a king, strangely enough).  Mussolini did the opposite.  He launched a “revolution of reaction” that declared war not just on Bolshevism but on stodgy old conservatism too.^[2]  The Freudian Marxist Wilhelm Reich emphasized the difference between the old-style right and the new: “A sharp distinction must be made between ordinary militarism and fascism.  Wilhelmian Germany was militaristic, but it was not fascistic.”^[3]

Trotsky also emphasized the difference.  “If the communist party is the party of revolutionary hope,” he wrote in 1930, “then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter-revolutionary despair” (emphasis in the original).  He added in 1940:

Both theoretical analysis as well as the rich historical experience of the last quarter of a century have demonstrated with equal force that fascism is each time the final link of a specific political cycle composed of the following: the gravest crisis of capitalist society; the growth of the radicalization of the working class; the growth of sympathy toward the working class, and a yearning for change on the part of the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie; the extreme confusion of the big bourgeoisie; its cowardly and treacherous maneuvers aimed at avoiding the revolutionary climax; the exhaustion of the proletariat; growing confusion and indifference; the aggravation of the social crisis; the despair of the petty bourgeoisie, its yearning for change; the collective neurosis of the petty bourgeoisie, its readiness to believe in miracles, its readiness for violent measures; the growth of hostility towards the proletariat, which has deceived its expectations. These are the premises for a swift formation of a fascist party and its victory.^[4]

 

In short, no revolutionary upsurge, no fascist reaction.  But “revolutionary” is the last word to describe the period that has given rise to Trump.  To the contrary, the story since the 1970s and 80s has been one of seemingly endless retreat.  Workers’ states have collapsed or have been bourgeoisified from within while working-class parties of all shapes and descriptions, from social democratic to Trotskyist, have gone into a long-term swoon.  In the United States, union membership has fallen from 20.1 percent in 1983 to 10 percent as of 2023, while man-hours on strike relative to total employment have fallen 50 percent over the same period.  The story is the same for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of advanced capitalist nations, as a whole.  From a peak of 38.1 percent in 1972, the OECD unionization rate plunged to 15.8 as of 2020, a decline of nearly 60 percent.

Trump, therefore, is different.  He is not a revolutionary.  Although liberals thunder that he “hates the Constitution,” it’s clear that his aim is not to overthrow America’s holy of holies so much as to use the “imperial presidency” that an antiquated constitutional order has given rise to in order to foster one-man rule.  It is a matter of using the authoritarian aspects of the Constitution to eliminate the few remaining democratic vestiges.

Trump differs in other ways too.  He has flirted with street violence and brawlers.  He told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during the 2020 campaign and incited a mob to invade Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021.  But like generations of conservative authoritarians before him, he otherwise relies on traditional organs of the state, e.g. the Marines, the National Guard, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the FBI, now under the control of Republican hitman Kash Patel.  The historian Richard J. Evans observes that the MAGA movement:

...bears no comparison to the hundreds of thousands of armed and uniformed Stormtroopers and squadristi that the Nazi and Fascist leaders deployed onto the streets daily in the 1920s and early 1930s to intimidate, beat up, arrest, imprison, and often kill political opponents.  Hitler and Mussolini sought to transform their countries into perma-war states: a combination of education and propaganda on the one hand and street-level violence and intimidation on the other aimed to forge a new kind of citizen, one that was aggressive, regimented, arrogant, decisive, organized, and obedient to the dictates of the state.^[5]

As for militarism, Trump has been all over the map.  Anti-NATO and China, he started out as an isolationist, attacking the neocon hawk Hilary Clinton in 2015-16 and declaring in 2021: “I am especially proud to be the first President in decades who has started no new wars."  But he began his second term by threatening to annex Canada, Greenland, and Panama, cheering on the Zionist war of eradication in Gaza, and launching a short-lived war of his own against Yemen’s Houthis.  He has gloated over Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran.  “Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen,” he wrote on Truth Social.  “They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse!”  Where once he warned against war with Iran, he now embraces it.

All of which makes him crude, erratic, unpredictable, and increasingly dangerous.  But it doesn’t make him a fascist.  What Trumpism most represents, rather, is a return to the “Big Stick” policies of Teddy Roosevelt, who blustered on about “the white man’s burden,” seized Panama, and established a US protectorate over Cuba as well.

Finally, the Trump personality cult is nothing like the führerprinzip of Nazi Germany, based on a mystical union of a charismatic leader and völk.  Blazing torches, firelight ceremonies, swastikas, mystic runes – all are absent.  Despite the flags and sappy country-and-western ballads about being “proud to be an American,” MAGA rallies do not come close.

So Trump is no more a fascist than Liz Cheney is a pacifist.  But if that’s the case, what is he?  The answer is that he’s an outgrowth not of revolutionary upsurge, but of liberal collapse.  In the process of sending the left into eclipse, neoliberalism set about creating a brave new world based on super-financialization, unprecedented levels of economic inequality, plus corruption, wage stagnation, and a rising tide of war.  The result was a top-heavy political structure that is now disintegrating.  So intolerable has it become for millions of American workers that they have opted to vote for a know-nothing reality-TV star in the hope that whatever he comes up with, it can’t be any worse.

Trump thus benefited from the collapse, but did not cause it.  He did not invent a poisonous “woke” ideology all but guaranteed to alienate working-class voters; that was something Democrats did entirely on their own.  The same goes for DEI, i.e. diversity, equity, and inclusion, a management program designed to intimidate and harass rank-and-file employees.  Democrats invented that one too.

Although liberals don’t want to talk about it, there is no doubt that liberals took DEI to extraordinary lengths.  Robin DiAngelo, “perhaps the country's most visible expert in anti-bias training” in the words of the New Yorker, proudly tells of driving a female worker to the verge of physical breakdown during a workplace training session:

A cogent example of white fragility occurred during workplace anti-racism training I co-facilitated with an inter-racial team.  One of the white participants left the session and went back to her desk, upset at receiving (what appeared to the training team as) sensitive and diplomatic feedback on how some of her statements had impacted several of the people of color in the room.  At break, several other white participants approached me and my fellow trainers and reported that they had to talked to the woman at her desk, and that she was very upset that her statements had been challenged.  (Of course, ‘challenged’ was not how she phrased her concern.   It was framed as her being ‘falsely accused’ of having a racist impact.)  Her friends wanted to alert us to the fact that she was in poor health and ‘might be having a heart-attack.’  Upon questioning from us, they clarified that they meant this literally.  These coworkers were sincere in their fear that the young woman might actually die as a result of the feedback.  Of course, when news of the women’s potentially fatal condition reached the rest of the participant group, all attention was immediately focused back onto her and away from engagement with the impact she had had on the people of color.  As professor of social work Rich Vodde states, ‘If privilege is defined as a legitimization of one’s entitlement to resources, it can also be defined as permission to escape or avoid any challenge to this entitlement.’^[6]

This is the “expert” whom the House Democratic Caucus invited to address it in June 2020 on “the importance of recognizing that white supremacy and racism are at the foundation of our country,” with a personal endorsement by Nancy Pelosi no less.  Needless to say, sadism like this is very the opposite of socialism, which doesn’t bring in management consultants to brutalize workers, but, rather, combats racism in order to mobilize workers against management in a united front.

For workers, the liberal kulturkampf was the crowning indignity after decades of economic regression.  The backsliding is quite real.  Since 1979, real hourly wages have risen just six percent for middle-income workers, while falling five percent for those in the low-income brackets.  Where a typical worker had to work for 2.3 years to buy a home in 1950, 2.6 years in 1960, and 2.4 in 1970,the numbers then began to rise – to 3.8 years in 1980, to 5.4 in 1990, and then to 7.0 in 2000.  Since 2019, the cost of a single-family home has surged another 58 percent, better than two and a half times the rate of inflation, while nearly half of tenants are now officially “cost-burdened,” meaning that they must spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent.

Adjusted for inflation, college tuition and fees meanwhile tripled on average between 1963 and 2022.  Where black workers saw real progress between 1950 and 1974, with average black income rising 50 percent compared with white incomes, relative growth has since leveled off to six percent or less.  At the same time, CEO compensation has risen from roughly 20 times that of an average worker in the 1970s to 351 times by the year 2020.

This is what made the Trump campaign slogan – “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” – so effective.  Ordinarily, liberal antics over genderless restrooms and the like might raise a few eyebrows.  But now they represented a growing offensive by a self-righteous liberal elite against workers whom Clinton had labeled a “basket of deplorables” back in 2016.  The more economic and social conditions deteriorated, the more extreme the liberal cultural offensive became – and the more Republicans launched a counter-offensive of their own based on “traditional values” such as religion, family, individualism, and opposition to abortion.^[7]  In the end, Democrats even lost ground among blacks and Hispanics, core constituencies that were now none too happy with self-satisfied liberalism as well.

Internationally, neoliberal decay has accelerated to the point where it is beginning to resemble the Soviet collapse of 1989-91.  NATO is in disarray, a growing debt crisis stalks the Third World, and far-right parties are surging from Portugal to Poland.  If Trump feels a certain sympathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin, it’s not because he’s a Russian puppet, as Democrats used to say during his first term.  Rather, it’s because he’s following a similar trajectory.  Putin used authoritarian means to patch together a society on the edge of the abyss thanks to a decade of misrule by the American puppet, Boris Yeltsin.  Once Putting took over, however, per-capita GDP rose more than seven-fold while oligarchs were forced to defer to a neo-czarist state.  Trump 2.0 is not likely to see anything remotely similar; indeed, thanks to tariffs, it is more likely to see the opposite.  Still, Trump sees himself in broadly similar terms as a strongman trying to make up for years of incompetence.

But if Democrats have stopped the Russian-puppet nonsense and are now calling Trump a fascist, the underlying message is the same: they still see him as un-American.  Needless to say, the only thing Democratic politicians know about the struggle against fascism is what they learned from “Saving Private Ryan,” which is that an all-American everyman played by Tom Hanks triumphed over Germany at Omaha Beach.  America is good, therefore, and anyone outside the fold – Nazis, Soviets, Trump, whatever – is bad.  Like MAGA, liberalism is a turn-back-the-clock ideology based on restoring to the high-growth economics of the 1950s and the feel-good civil-rights solidarity of the early 1960s, something that will come about the instant Democrats are returned to power.

But it’s not going to happen.  It’s a dream world that is gone for good.  Democrats know it, and Trump knows it too.  So do workers whose interest is not in turning back the clock, but in going forward.  Instead of exchanging one pack of self-serving “Repocratic” demagogues for another, they need a clean sweep .  They need to do away with a pre-modern constitution that makes a mockery of one person-one vote by allowing profoundly inequitable bodies like the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College to reign unchallenged.  They need to abolish an imperial presidency that was increasingly authoritarian long before Trump took office.  They need to do away with super-rich Wall Street speculators manipulating the economy for their own short-term benefit, and they need decent jobs at decent pay so they can rebuild America’s broken infrastructure from the ground up.  Instead of the know-nothing denialism of Republicans and the do-nothing policies of the Democrats, they need a solution to the climate crisis that is global, comprehensive, and effective.

Most of all, they need to do away with the sort of phony anti-fascism whose only purpose is to return a discredited liberal elite to power.  Instead of the pseudo-resistance of the Democratic Party, they need the real resistance of a united working class.

 

---

[1] Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (New York: Random House, 2002), 25.

[2] Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “What Is Fascism?” in Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, ed., Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America (New York: WW Norton, 2024), 138-39.

[3] Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), xiv.s

[4] Leon Trotsky, “Fascism: What it is and how to fight it,” available at https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/trotsky/fascism-how-to-fight-it/fascism-what-it-is-trotsky.pdf.

[5] Richard J. Evans, “Why Trump Isn’t a Fascist,” in Steinmetz-Jenkins, Did It Happen Here?, 192.

[6] Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston: Beacon, 2018), 111-12.

[7] Alex Steiner, The American political landscape in 2016: A Marxist interpretation,             http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2016/07/the-american-political-landscape-in_13.html

The "Sexual Revolution:" An Unwitting Instrument of Capitalist Counterrevolution's Devastating Public Health Legacy

Edits: 9/24, 9/28 fixed typos, increased clarity, etc

The so-called "sexual revolution" that began in the 1960s and 1970s, hailed by bourgeois liberals and postmodern academics as a triumph of individual liberation and progressive reform, also became bound up with deeply reactionary phenomenon. From advancing the cause of human emancipation, it became a critical component of the broader social counterrevolution orchestrated by the ruling classes to undermine the potential of the working class. This pseudo-liberation, rooted to a notable extent in the decay of capitalist society, has contributed directly to profound negative impacts on public health, including the explosive proliferation of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), mental health crises, and the commodification of human relationships under the guise of "freedom."

To understand the sexual revolution's contradictory character, one must situate it within the historical context of postwar capitalism's crisis. The post-World War II economic boom in the United States and Western Europe masked deepening contradictions: imperial decline, stagflation, and intensifying class antagonisms. The 1960s saw mass upheavals - student protests, explosions of workers unrest, civil rights struggles, and anti-war movements - that threatened to coalesce into a unified challenge to the capitalist order. In response, sections of the ruling elite learned to promote a series of ideological diversions, channeling discontent away from class-based politics toward individualistic and identity-focused "revolutions."

The sexual revolution, which was rooted "in-itself" in progressive developments in healthcare, was also epitomized by the rise of pornography as a multibillion-dollar industry and the cultural normalization of casual sex and became chief among these diversions. Figures like Hugh Hefner became the unwitting mouthpieces of this development. Far from liberating women or sexual minorities, as liberal historiography claims, these developments reinforced the subordination of personal life to the imperatives of profit.

Marxist analysis reveals much of the sexual revolution as an extension of bourgeois ideology, promoting atomized individualism over collective struggle. As Leon Trotsky noted in his writings on the family under capitalism, the bourgeois nuclear family, while oppressive, served as a stabilizing force for the working class in the absence of other relations. Trotsky wrote, in the context of the USSR, about "the great social crisis in the course of which the old family continues to dissolve far faster than the new institutions are capable of replacing it." The sexual revolution helped to dismantle even this fragile remnant of collectivism, promoting individualism over collectivism and fostering a more fluid, unstable workforce better suited to the demands of late capitalism. By "abolition of the family" Marx had envisioned the free development of human relations, unobstructed by the pressures of the capitalist market. Instead, the pressures of the capitalist market only deepen on workers, while human relationships become more and more atomized/commodified. The "free love" ethos of the hippies and counterculture - often romanticized in the Woodstock mythos - dovetailed perfectly with the emerging neoliberal order, where personal fulfillment was redefined as consumer choice in the marketplace of desires.

This reactionary element is evident in the movement's alignment with identity politics, which the ruling class has weaponized to divide the working class along lines of race, gender, and sexuality. The sexual revolution paved the way for today's obsession with "sexual identity" as a substitute for class consciousness. The result? A society where sex is commodified - through apps like Tinder, pornography platforms like Pornhub, and the "gig economy" of sex work such as OnlyFans and the blind eye of authorities towards the proliferation of the "paid rape" of prostitution, while workers are left more isolated and vulnerable than ever.

The public health consequences are staggering and undeniable. The proliferation of STIs stands as a grim indictment of the sexual revolution's promises within the capitalist system. According to data from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, global STI rates have skyrocketed since the 1970s. Chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis infections have reached epidemic levels in many countries, with the US alone reporting over 2.5 million cases annually in recent years. The HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, which claimed millions of lives, was exacerbated by the cultural shift toward promiscuity without corresponding social infrastructure - a direct outgrowth of the revolution's emphasis on individual "choice" over collective responsibility.

Syphilis cases have skyrocketed

These health crises are not mere accidents but inevitable outcomes of capitalism's decay. The pharmaceutical industry profits immensely from treatments for STIs, with companies like Pfizer and Gilead raking in billions from antiretroviral drugs and antibiotics, while preventive measures like comprehensive sex education and universal healthcare are systematically underfunded. Mental health impacts are equally severe: studies link the hookup culture fostered by the sexual revolution to rising rates of depression, anxiety, and relational instability, particularly among youth. In a society where relationships are transient and exploitative, the human cost is borne disproportionately by the working class and oppressed layers, who lack access to quality healthcare and social stability.

Adjusted odds ratios for mental health status according number of sexual partners

The promotion of the sexual revolution also came to serve geopolitical ends. During the Cold War, the US imperialists contrasted their "free" society - with its permissive attitudes toward sex - against the supposed puritanism of the Soviet bureaucracy. This propaganda obscured the Stalinist betrayal of genuine socialism, which under Lenin and Trotsky had advanced progressive policies on women's rights, abortion, and family reform as part of the broader fight for workers' power.

Today, as capitalism hurtles toward catastrophe - marked by endless wars, economic inequality, and ecological collapse - the mythos of the sexual revolution must be shattered. True liberation cannot come from bourgeois individualism but only through the international unity of the working class in the struggle for socialism. The fight against STIs and other public health scourges requires not more bourgeois ideological filth or market-driven solutions, but the expropriation of the capitalist institutions which benefit from the suffering of the working class, the establishment of free, high quality universal healthcare, and the creation of a society where human relationships are based on equality and cooperation, not exploitation and individualism.

Workers and youth must reject these reactionary elements and turn to the program of social revolution, which will provide a basis for the expansion of human freedom promised by the "sexual revolution" free from the defects of capitalist society. The workers present their own independent standpoint against the arch-reactionaries and religious figures who denounce, eg, the availability of contraceptives or reproductive healthcare. It is left to the us to salvage the kernel of progressive development and fight reaction. Only through the building of a revolutionary leadership in every country can humanity achieve genuine progress, free from the chains of capitalist reaction.

Repost - "Supreme confusion"

Why Ketanji Brown Jackson is no better than Amy Coney Barrett

by Daniel Lazare
Jul 02, 2025

(Daniel's Substack)

Ketanji Brown Jackson: judicial supremacy will save the day!

America is the sort of dysfunctional place in which liberals are sometimes more conservative than conservatives. There’s no better example of this than last week’s Supreme Court decision in Trump v. Casa in which the court’s 6-3 rightwing majority tossed out one of the federal judiciary’s most powerful tools for keeping the executive branch in line.

The instrument is known as a nationwide injunction, or universal injunction as the court seems to prefer. Basically, it allows federal judges to stop the executive branch in its tracks whenever they think it’s going constitutionally astray. This may seem right and proper given what we all learned in high-school civics, which is that we’re all under the law, presidents included, and that we must all pay the price when we violate it. And since the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, the principle goes double as far as America’s foundational legal document is concerned. And who is better suited to checking a runaway presidency than the federal judiciary?

So liberals cheered when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson offered a ringing defense of such measures on the grounds that the Trump’s attempt “to vanquish so-called ‘universal injunctions’ is, at bottom, a request for this Court’s permission to engage in unlawful behavior.” And it’s why they hung their head when Amy Coney Barrett, speaking for the majority, accused judges of going too far. How can judges go too far when something as sacred as the Constitution is at stake? Who does Barrett think she is?

So it’s all quite simple: rule of law good, judges good, runaway executive bad.

Except that it’s not simple at all. In reality, Brown was advancing a doctrine of judicial supremacy best described as High Tory while Barrett was defending, at least formally, the elementary democratic proposition that the elected branches should not be endlessly at the mercy of lifetime appointees. Barrett, of course, was playing games since she was really providing cover for an administration that is verging on outright dictatorship, if it hasn’t crossed the line already. But it’s impossible to describe Brown’s position as democratic either since the judicial supremacy she espouses goes against any meaningful concept of popular self-government. It’s a case of both wings of mainstream political opinion flapping their way simultaneously toward authoritarianism.

Let’s start with the injunctions. Once all but unheard of, they’ve grown more and more frequent in recent decades. Courts issued an average of one universal injunction every eight months against specific actions by the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton administrations in the 1980s and 90s. But then they issued 12 against Bush II, 19 against Obama, and 64 against Trump during his first term alone. By the end of the Biden administration, things had reached the point “where almost every major presidential act is immediately frozen by a federal district court,” according to the Harvard Law Review. For anyone interested in popular democracy, this raises an important question. What’s the point of electing presidents if an unelected judiciary can stop them in their tracks, not once or twice but repeatedly? Who rules – “we the people” or some 677 federal district court judges?

Brown’s answer is the latter. As she declared it in her dissent:

“Stated simply, what it means to have a system of government that is bounded by law is that everyone is constrained by the law, no exceptions. And for that to actually happen, courts must have the power to order everyone (including the Executive) to follow the law – full stop.”

She then went on to quote Felix Frankfurter, the FDR-appointee who famously declared in a 1958 case called Aaron v. Cooper that the US system is “a government of laws and not of men.” So the answer to an out-of-control executive is apparently unchallenged authority on the part of judges answerable to no one but themselves. Tyranny, to paraphrase James Madison, must be made to counteract tyranny. Or as Barrett noted: “Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

Rule of law, the operative principle here, is one of the great clichés of the age, a phrase that rolls off every lip even though people rarely pause to consider what it means.

The reason they don’t is simple. The phrase is utterly vacuous. It means nothing. In a democracy, law is what happens when “we the people” issue an edict to the effect that individuals who engage in certain proscribed activities will incur certain penalties. If you rob, steal, or kill, you’ll go to jail - or so the people declare. Law is an instrument, in other words, a tool of popular rule.

But there’s a problem: tools can’t rule. Rule of law is no more coherent that rule of any other tool, i.e. shovels, hammers, or kitchen implements. None of them can rule because they’re inanimate. Who can rule are those who wield such instruments, which is to say the people as a whole. Democracy is not government of, by, and for the law. Rather, it’s government of, by, and for the people.

Brown dug herself in deeper the more she went on:

“It is axiomatic that the Constitution of the United States and the statutes that the People’s representatives have enacted govern in our system of government. Thus, everyone, from the President on down, is bound by law. By duty and nature, federal courts say what the law is (if there is a genuine dispute), and require those who are subject to the law to conform their behavior to what the law requires. This is the essence of the rule of law.”

There are at least three things wrong with this statement. One is far it is from axiomatic that the Constitution and the people’s representatives govern the system because no one governs it – the system is falling apart. Another is that the federal courts may claim to say what the law is, but no one really knows since the Constitution has suffered from what might be called a coherency deficit from the moment it was promulgated - which, in a nutshell, is why confusion grows the more schools of constitutional interpretation the legal academy creates.

A third problem is that it’s unclear why should “those who are subject to the law” – which is to say the people, should “conform their behavior to what the law requires” if the law goes increasingly against their interests and there’s nothing they can do about it. The Constitution is a product not of the age of democracy, but of the period preceding it. It is rife with features that we today regard as radically inequitable and unjust. These include:

• A Senate based on equal state representation despite population differentials of as much as 70 to one.

• A gerrymandered House that makes a mockery of one person-one vote.

• An Electoral College that triples the clout of lily-white rural states like Wyoming and Vermont.

• And a lifetime Supreme Court with zero public accountability.

A lop-sided Senate is why Republicans now enjoy a 53-seat majority despite receiving 1.4 percent fewer votes. A lop-sided Electoral College is why Dubya captured the presidency in 2000 despite losing by an estimated 450,000 popular votes and why Trump did the same in 2016 despite losing by 2.9 million. As for “the Supremes,” lifetime appointments, as stipulated in Article II, section one, are why the current 6-3 ultra-conservative lineup will likely persist well into the 2030s, if not longer.

Rather than a government the people want, need, and deserve, the Constitution gives them the opposite. But the absolutely worst feature is the one that Americans think about least, i.e. the amending clause in Article V. As Americans may also remember from their high-school days, this is a 140-word run-on sentence that essentially declares that two-thirds of each house plus three-fourths of the states must consent before changing so much as a comma. Thirteen states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the population thus have unqualified veto power not for a year or decade but for ever and ever. Since no one will have any trouble drawing up a list of 13 mini-states guaranteed to just say no to any effort to deprive them of their constitutional privileges, it means that structure change is effectively impossible. Mussolini’s reign lasted 21 years. Hitler’s lasted 12. Yet America’s constitutional dictatorship has gone on for centuries and may well persist for centuries more – if, that is, it doesn’t self-destruct beforehand.

So when Brown calls for the Constitution über alles, what’s she’s really calling for is for “we the people” to sink lower and lower in the political firmament. Given that institutions like the Senate and Electoral College are growing more inequitable as state population differentials continue to widen, it’s an example of how it’s not just Trump who is propelling society to the ultra-right, but the country’s very political structure.

Notes:

The Harvard Law Review article on universal injunctions can be found at https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-137/proper-parties-proper-relief/.

Repost - "Terminal Stupidity"

By Daniel Lazare
04.09.2025

(Permanent Revolution: Terminal Stupidity)

“It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder.”  If ever Talleyrand’s famous aphorism applied to anyone, it’s to Hamas. 

Aftermath of an Israeli strike on the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City on April 13, 2025. Omar al-Qattaa/AFP/Getty Images.

The so-called Islamic Resistance’s misdeeds are legion.  Crushing “We want to live” labor demonstrations against poverty and unemployment that erupted in Gaza in March 2019 was one of them, and responding with equal brutality to similar protests that broke out in July-August 2023 was another.  Slaughtering 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, most of them innocent civilians, was a third, while executing six Palestinians for taking part in anti-Hamas protests that began on Mar. 25 is a fourth. 

Vicious as such acts are, they are exceeded by the sheer blind stupidity behind them.  Hamas blunders would take even a Talleyrand aback.  Members were reportedly surprised by the Zionist response to “Al Aqsa Flood” even though a child could have told them that it would be furious and overwhelming.  The group expected Oct. 7 to ignite a region-wide holy war even though it was obvious that the Arab masses were too exhausted and demoralized after decades of war, poverty, and corruption to engage in any such misadventure. 

Then there was Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad, who, in an Oct. 24, 2023, interview on Beirut TV, taunted Zionists by declaring that “Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight.”  What was the purpose of such language other than to goad Israel into ramping up the onslaught even more?  “We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Yahya Sinwar added in June 2024, which was equally perplexing since it was in fact the Israelis who had him cornered.  (Sinwar would die three months later in an IDF firefight.) 

Finally, there was Hamas’s belief that some 250 hostages would serve as an insurance policy against Israeli retaliation.  But with fewer than 25 hostages left alive after a year and a half of captivity, the strategy has backfired.  If Hamas gives the remaining hostages up, Israel will have less reason than ever to hold back.  If it doesn’t release them, it will follow up with an even greater offensive culminating in mass ethnic cleansing.  Either way, Hamas will be destroyed, and more than two million Palestinians could wind up in exile. 

Hamas has thus painted itself into a corner thanks to absurd policies that are without parallel in modern politics.  But it’s not only the “resistance” that has blundered – vast sections of the international left have too.  There’s the Socialist Workers Party, the largest self-proclaimed Marxist organization in the UK, whose newspaper welcomed Al Aqsa Flood with the words, “Rejoice as Palestinian resistance humiliates racist Israel.”  There’s Cosmonaut.org, the pseudo-Marxist website, which, a week after Al Aqsa Flood, responded with a ludicrous chest-thumping editorial “affirm[ing] our unconditional support of the movement for Palestinian liberation, no matter the form their struggle may take.  We’ll keep the red flag flying here.”  

There are also individuals such as Norman Finkelstein, perhaps Hamas’s best-known western apologist, who wrote on Oct. 7 that the offensive “warms every fiber of my soul”; Columbia professor Joseph Massad who, a day later, hailed “the stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance” and predicted that the flight of Israeli kibbutz residents “may prove to be a permanent exodus”; and Jodi Dean, who teaches politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York and who wrote on a New Left Review website that “images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating.”  

Dean, a self-described Stalinist, went on: 

The struggle for Palestinian liberation today is led by the Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas.  Hamas is supported by the entirety of the organized Palestinian left.  One might have expected that the left in the imperial core would follow the leadership of the Palestinian left in supporting Hamas.  More often than not, though, left intellectuals echo the condemnations that imperialist states make the condition for speaking about Palestine.  In so doing, they take a side against the Palestinian revolution, giving a progressive face to the repression of the Palestinian political project, and betraying the anti-imperialist aspirations of a previous generation. 

We must support Hamas or else the good professor will denounce us as counter-revolutionaries.  But what is Dean’s message for the starving and brutalized people of Gaza who are at last rising up against Hamas – that they’re counter-revolutionaries too?  

Finally, there’s the World Socialist Web Site, which hailed the Oct. 7 offensive within hours as “an uprising of the Palestinian people,” comparing it to the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising and suggesting that murderous gunmen should be “hailed as heroes.”  As if that wasn’t bad enough, the site recently followed up with an article disparaging recent anti-Hamas protests as “small [and] politically heterogeneous” and blasting Jacobin magazine for not only reporting them but for describing the Zionist assault on Gaza as “Israel’s vengeance for October 7.”  

Why is this bad?  Because, the WSWS hotly replies, it means that

had there been no armed resistance to the illegal Israeli occupation on October 7, there would be no Israeli war in Gaza.  In making this statement, Jacobin is echoing the official position of the Netanyahu government, the Biden administration and the Trump administration, all of whom have claimed that Israel’s current war is a ‘response’ to October 7. 

What is the WSWS suggesting – that Israel would have sent thousands of troops to level Gaza even if there had been no Oct. 7 massacre?  This is like saying that FDR would have declared war on Japan even if there had been no Pearl Harbor, a proposition that no serious historian would entertain for a minute.  The sole purpose of such nonsense is to get Hamas off the hook by declaring that its actions on Oct. 7 are irrelevant because Israel was intent on war regardless – and to get the WSWS off the hook for supporting an outfit as rancid as Hamas. 

More than a blunder, the result is a debacle that has spelled disaster for the Palestinians while shattering what little remains of middle-class radicalism.  So why did Hamas foul up so badly and why did broad sectors of the left insist on following it over a cliff? 

Hamas’s failure 

The first question is easy.  While one can argue over whether or not Hamas fits the definition of fascist, there is no doubt as to its profoundly reactionary politics.  The slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s parent organization, says it all:

Allah is our objective, the prophet is our leader, the Qur’an is our law, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. 

Political science thus stopped in the seventh century, warfare is the answer to all problems, and martyrdom is ennobling.  As a top Hamas leader named Ismail Haniyeh told a mass rally in Gaza in 2014: “We are a people who value death, just like our enemies value life.”[1]  Or as Ghazi Hamad insisted in his notorious Beirut interview: “We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”  Added Yahya Sinwar six months later: Palestinian deaths “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.” 

Life is death, and defeat is victory.  According to such upside-down logic, Gaza should be brimming with vitality thanks to the bloodshed Hamas helped unleash.  But it’s not.  Rather, it’s a dead zone filled with misery and destruction. 

Tareq Baconi, the Palestinian-American author of Hamas Contained (2018), an essential guide to what such logic leads to, notes that “success was thought to be predestined” by Hamas because it believes that God is on its side.  The upshot was decades of faith-based arguments in which every new military setback had to be hailed as proof that jihad was working.  When Israel called off military intervention in southern Lebanon in May 2000 in the face of unexpected Hezbollah resistance, Hamas seized on the “‘Lebanese model’ as proof that resistance was the only way to liberate Palestine,” according to Baconi, and that suicide bombings were therefore the way to go.  When Israel responded to Hamas rocket barrages with weaponry that was far deadlier and more sophisticated, the organization concluded that jihad was more effective than ever because Hamas was “achieving liberation step by step ... through the accumulation of accomplishments and the draining of the enemy’s security, economy, and morale.”[2]  

And when sending suicide bombers onto crowded buses triggered worldwide horror and revulsion, Hamas concluded that it must be on the right track because Israel was trapped between the “jaws of resistance.”[3]  All it would take was a few more mangled bodies for the Jewish state to crack. 

But it was Gaza that started to crack instead as the economy sank under the impact of a deepening Israeli blockade and complaints about Hamas corruption began to multiply.  Baconi notes that Hamas’s religious fundamentalism “restricted any ideological maneuverability for the movement’s leaders” by making “concessions appear blasphemous.”  Hamas was trapped by its own jihadist rhetoric.  Baconi added: 

Hamas’s reliance on jihad has had devastating implications for the Palestinian people.  Aside from the moral bankruptcy and the corrosive effect of targeting and killing civilians, dedication to armed resistance against a superb foe like Israel has led to the disintegration of the Palestinian struggle.  Strategically, this approach has not only failed; it has also threatened to erode the very social fabric of the Palestinian community under occupation.[4] 

But jihad is good because the Muslim Brotherhood says so, and that’s all Hamas needed to know.  Al Aqsa Flood can be seen as the culmination of years of mindless escalation in which fighters concluded that a failed policy would finally succeed if members believed in its strongly enough and implemented it on a grand enough scale.  Yet the only result was failure of unprecedented proportions. 

A general who allows his army to be destroyed through sheer incompetence should be court-martialed.  A government that allows its people to be destroyed for the same reason should be turned out of office.  This is what protesters in Gaza are demanding as they chant “barra, barra” (“out, out”).  The silence from the ranks of supposedly pro-Palestinian protesters means that they effectively side with the Palestinians’ oppressors. 

Protest against Hamas in Northern Gaza 

A hollowed-out left 

Which leads to the second question: why have vast sectors of the international left gone along with such madness? 

The answer has to do with deep decay caused by decades of isolation, confusion, and retreat.  Not only have leftwing numbers collapsed in terms of union members or votes racked up by social democrats, communists, and other working-class parties, but ideology has collapsed too.  Class politics have disintegrated as middle-class radicalism has risen to take their place.  Everyone knows the horrors that ensued as bourgeois liberalism drifted to the right: identity politics, cancel culture, “lean-in” corporate feminism, etc.  It’s a sickening brew, but the results are especially unfortunate when it comes to the Middle East.  Legitimately outraged by the war that the Jewish state is waging against the Palestinian people, protesters followed a seemingly simple chain of logic.  Since Israel is bad, Hamas must be good, or at least less bad than Zionist propaganda maintains.  Civilian deaths on Oct. 7 therefore had to be written off as collateral damage, the result of a Zionist false-flag operation, or perhaps legitimate payback for the crime of living in an oppressor state.  “A propaganda deluge has inundated the mainstream US media sphere with pornographic descriptions of horrendous actions allegedly carried out by Hamas, the leading organization of Gazan armed resistance,” complained Cosmonaut on Oct. 15, 2023.  Allegedly?  Rather than “pornographic,” the violence carried out on Oct. 7 was as real as the violence carried out on 9/11, which Al Aqsa Flood all too closely resembles. 

This is how petty-bourgeois radicalism works.  Flighty, unstable, a middle force forever vacillating between left and right, the working class and the bourgeoisie, it is incapable of confronting reality head on and must instead tailor the facts to fit its own needs.  Protesters turned a blind eye to Hamas’s reactionary politics – its sectarianism, know-nothing fundamentalism, jihadism, and deep anti-Semitism – because they don't fit their blinkered worldview.  Since Hamas is a “resistance” organization, the atrocities of Oct. 7 must be Israeli propaganda or an outright lie.  The problem of Hamas’s pre-modern politics was thus wished away. 

None of which is to say that pro-Palestinian protests were wrong.  To the contrary, they performed a vital service by demonstrating that a growing portion of the public is finally saying no to Zionist brutality.  But the failure to say no to Hamas brutality was a crippling flaw.  Even if Trump had not launched his crackdown, protesters would still have found themselves isolated due to their inability to acknowledge the massacre that set the latest violence off in the first place.  Professional activists tried to cover up such crimes in order to promote a stereotypical view of Palestinians as helpless victims of Zionist terror.  But the effort strikes others as evasive and dishonest.  As we have seen, it does nothing to benefit Palestinians themselves. 

Self-induced amnesia 

When WSWS describes Oct. 7 as “an uprising of the Palestinian people,” it advances the dangerous proposition that Hamas and the Palestinian masses are one and the same, which is precisely the rationale that Israel uses to justify its mass bombings in the face of 50,000-plus civilian deaths.  When it compares Al Aqsa Flood to the Warsaw ghetto uprising, it slanders World War II partisans who did not have the slightest intention of engaging in mass reprisals and instead hoped that Polish civilians would join in the anti-Nazi revolt.  Headlines expressing glee over Israel’s humiliation were a betrayal because they failed to warn Palestinians of mass reprisals that were already on the way.  

What makes the International Committee for the Fourth International and the Socialist Equality Party, the parent organizations that puts out the WSWS, even more bizarre is that it was not long ago that they were saying the opposite.  In July 2002, while Hamas was sending out suicide bombers to target buses and discos, a top WSWS writer named Jean Shaoul published a three-part series describing the attacks as 

...desperate and horrific acts by young people influenced by political tendencies that have no progressive perspective upon which to base their opposition to Israeli oppression.  Designed to slaughter innocent civilians, they do not advance the interests and aspirations of the Palestinian people one iota.

“Nothing illustrates more clearly its utterly repugnant and ultimately bankrupt perspective,” she said of Hamas, “than the dispatch of its youth cadre, with bombs strapped to their bodies, to blow up their targets and themselves as martyrs for their cause.  With reputed payments to their families of $US30,000 for their martyrdom, these young men were worth more dead than alive.” Shaoul added that Hamas “…blended nationalism with religion and naked anti-Semitism” and that its founding charter, published in 1988, 

...called for an exclusively Islamic Palestinian state, repudiating the PLO’s formulation of a democratic secular state as anti-Islamic, and made territorial nationalism, previously a form of idolatry, into a religious mission or jihad.  It called for the destruction of the state of Israel and falsely equated political Zionism with the Jewish people, both within Israel and beyond.  The Jews were denounced as the secret architects of both the French Revolution and the Communist revolution, of two World Wars, of creating the League of Nations and the United Nations as secret organs of world domination and, above all, of being the destroyers of the Islamic Caliphate. 

All of which is entirely accurate, as anyone who has perused Hamas’s 1988 covenant will agree.  The only thing Shaoul got wrong, in fact, was her prediction that Hamas would not “advance the interests and aspirations of the Palestinian people one iota.”  Today, the organization’s misbegotten policies are sending them sharply into reverse.

So why say one thing in 2002 and another in 2025?  Even though the ICFI has been politically disoriented for decades it was still capable of writing about Hamas in a way that was honest and smart.  Two decades later, any such capacity is gone – vanished, kaput.  Instead, the heirs of Healy’s legacy are indistinguishable from thousands of other mixed-up radicals eager to whitewash Hamas’ crimes in the belief that it will somehow bring about Palestinian liberation.  But it won’t. 

A socialist response 

In addition to mass destruction, Palestinians now face the horrifying prospect of mass expulsion.  Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz is warning that the next phase of warfare will be “significantly worse” and that the goal will be to “seize large areas” of Gaza and annex them to the Jewish state.  “We will implement the Trump Plan, the voluntary migration plan,” Netanyahu informed his cabinet on Mar. 30. 

If so, the effect will be to raise the Palestinian nightmare to near-impossible levels.  If Israel drives millions of people into the Sinai, who will feed them – the United States?  Rather than overthrowing the Hamas dictatorship, herding millions of Palestinians into miserable desert refugee camps will provide it with an effective monopoly.  The Egyptian military regime will impose a cordon sanitaire to prevent Muslim Brotherhood influence from spreading to the nation at large while Israel will send in F-16s to periodically bomb and strafe Hamas strongholds.  But it will only strengthen it vis-à-vis the captive Palestinian masses.

And what about the West Bank, which is also under siege?  Will Israel expel millions there too?  If so, what will it mean for the Jordanian monarchy?  Amman is so unstable that King Hussein has placed his own son under arrest because he represents a threat to the throne.  Yet an influx of three million refugees will destabilize it all the more.

If Israel succeeds in stamping out the flames in the Occupied Territories, it will thus be at the cost of spreading them abroad.  The Jewish state will be surrounded by a no-man’s-land of hopelessness and destruction.  This is good news for Netanyahu and Trump since both are forever on the lookout for new ways of grinding the Muslim masses into dust.  But it is bad news for the Israeli working class, Jewish or Arab, which will find itself increasingly a prisoner of a fascist garrison state.

On Mar. 25, the same day that anti-Hamas protests broke out in Gaza, Israel saw an intensification of mass protests against plans for a crackdown on the Israeli judiciary.  The protests are entirely justified since the prospects of Trump-style authoritarianism inside Israel itself are quite real.  As Netanyahu tweeted on Elon Musk’s X: 

In America and in Israel, when a strong rightwing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people's will.  They won't win in either place!  We stand strong together.

Not that the Israeli protests are beyond criticism – they’re not, and neither, for that matter, are anti-Hamas protests in Gaza.  But the symmetry is striking.  While nationalists on both sides tell us that the differences between Israeli and Palestinian workers are irreconcilable, the demonstrations suggest something different – that not only are Palestinians and Israelis “interpenetrated peoples” grappling for the same slice of territory, but that their politics are interpenetrated too.  While one group battles authoritarianism that is already in place, another battles dictatorship that is just beginning to crystallize.  Both are locked in combat with theocratic oppression – with Hamas on one hand and with followers of the American-Israeli rabbi Meir Kahane whose goals and ideology are virtually identical to those of Hamas and whose influence is spreading throughout Israeli politics.

For all their enmity, Hamas and Netanyahu stand for essentially the same thing – intercommunal slaughter, ethnic cleansing, and a growing lurch toward fascism.  Israel-Palestine is ground zero for Mideast socialist revolution because it is where national conflict is most incendiary and where workers must battle most fiercely in order to overcome ethno-religious hatred and division.  This – not slaughtering neighbors in their bed – is the only way forward.

 

---

[1] Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2018), xix.

[2] Ibid., 28, 35. 51.

[3] Ibid., 117.

[4] Ibid., 228, 243.