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Its a tale of two countries. In the 1970s, Venezuela was the flashy, OPEC petrostate of the Americas. Bolstered by money flowing from the largest oil reserves in the world, Venezuela flooded Miami and New York with shoppers and college students. At home, gasoline was cheaper than water. New highways carried fleets of gas guzzlers.

Then, in 1976, the oil industry was nationalized and foreign oil companies were converted into subsidiaries of a new state oil company, Petrleos de Venezuela S.A. In 1998, a charismatic, socialist army officer, Hugo Chavez Frias, was elected president. After his death, in 2013, his protg, Cuban-trained Nicols Maduro, took over.

The scorecard for 25 years of socialism is abysmal. Oil production has dwindled to 20 percent of 1988 levels. Economic collapse and political dictatorship prompted the largest refugee crisis in the history of the Americas. Almost 8 million people one third of Venezuelas 1998 population walked out. Four years ago, American Airlines ended its flights to Miami from Caracas. Today, no flights link Venezuela and America.

Despite travel obstacles, Venezuelans have become the fastest growing Hispanic nationality in America, hitting 700,000 today. In September, Venezuelans displaced Mexicans as the top nationality crossing the Rio Grande on Americas southern border. Ironically, in the two decades after World War II, capitalist Venezuela drew millions of immigrants from war torn Europe.

Meanwhile, Guyana, separated from Venezuela by a few hundred miles of jungle, languished as a joke country. After independence from Britain in 1966, the country was crippled by decades of Caribbean socialism. Most high school graduates and almost all college graduates emigrated. Today, Guyanas population of 800,000 is matched by a diaspora of the same size Guyanese living in Britain, Canada and America.

Now, in a turnaround, Guyanese fill flights from London, Toronto and New York to check out job opportunities at home. Last year, the Guyanese economy grew by 62 percent the highest growth rate in the world.

Driven by its booming oil sector, the economy is set to expand by 27.2 percent in 2023 and 34.2 percent next year consolidating the country as the worlds fastest-growing economy in 2024, S&P Global Market Intelligence said in a report last month.

Once suffering a level of poverty on a par with Haiti, Guyana now enjoys the fourth highest per capita income in the Americas, after America itself, Canada, and the Bahamas. Here is a clue to the source: On April 1, United Airlines inaugurates direct jet service between Georgetown, Guyanas capital, and Houston.

On this southern shore of the Caribbean, steel and glass buildings rise between colonial-era, gingerbread wooden houses. Whats the difference between the two countries? It is only a 90-minute flight between Caracas and Georgetown. Yet there are no flights between the two countries.

Two decades ago, Guyana, a multi-party democracy, took a free market, foreign investment turn. In 2011, ExxonMobil discovered a series of finds totaling 11 billion barrels off the shore of the Essequibo, a Guyanese region bordering eastern Venezuela.

In 2019, production started by a consortium of ExxonMobil, Hess, and China National Offshore Oil Corporation. This blocks reserves of sweet, light crude are so valuable that they are the primary reason for Chevrons offer this fall to buy Hess for $53 billion. Most of the crude ends up on the West Coast of America.

While $2 billion a year will be diverted this year into a rainy day sovereign wealth fund, Guyanas democratically elected president, Irfaan Ali, is plunging his nation into five years of catch up to make up for decades of socialist stagnation.

Oil money is building seven hotels, 12 hospitals, dozens of new schools, a $1.9 billion gas to electricity project, 48 new bridges, two main highways, and Guyanas first deep water port. From this port, a highway will run 350 miles south, into the Amazon, giving Northern Brazils companies and ranches direct access to Miami and the Caribbean.

No one worries that Guyanas checks will bounce. By 2026, Guyanas oil production is to hit 1 million barrels a day. At that level, South Americas ugly duckling will surpass Venezuela. Measured by barrels produced per capita, thinly populated Guyana is on track to become the Kuwait of the Americas.

To critics who say that oil production fosters global warming, Guyanese retort that the world will need oil for the next 30 years, and that oil should come from poor countries. In a reversal of fortune, 30,000 Venezuelans have emigrated to Guyana to work.

Watching from Caracas, Mr. Maduro is envious. Preparing for elections next year, he has banned leading opposition candidate Mara Corina Machado. In a national primary election two months ago, she won 92% of 2.4 million votes cast.

Seeking a patriotic campaign banner, Maduro set his eyes on Guyanas Essequibo. Almost the size of Florida, the Essequibo represents two thirds of Guyanas territory. Drawing on a 200-year-old dispute between the Spanish and British empires, Venezuela claims the Essequibo.

In an 1899 international mediation, the area was almost entirely allocated to what then was called British Guiana. Two weeks ago, Maduro conducted a national referendum on grabbing the Essequibo.

Although turnout was low, he declared the 95% yes vote is a mandate. Maduro declared the Essequibo Venezuelas 24th state, redrew official maps, and said all 125,000 inhabitants of the region are now Venezuelans.

He gave ExxonMobil, Hess, and the Chinese state oil company 90 days to re-register under Venezuelan law or to pull out. To further pressure Guyana, he dusted off decade-old seismic studies and invited international majors to bid on blocks in Plataforma Deltana, Venezuelas offshore reservoir closest to Guyanese waters. Called Plataforma Deltana, the reserve holds 7.3 trillion cubic feet, about 3 percent of Venezuelas massive gas reserves.

On Thursday, Messrs. Maduro and Ali met in a tense parley in a neutral spot Saint Vincent, the island nation north of Venezuela. Both agreed that their neighborhood should remain a zone of peace.

By mid-March, the two parties are to meet again, probably in Brazil, which borders both nations. Facing a popular verdict on 25 years of rule by his United Socialist Party, its hard to see Venezuelas dictator backing away next year from his claims on Guyanas Essequibo.

See the rest here:
A Tale of Two Countries: In Free Market Guyana, the Best of Times, and in Socialist Venezuela, the Worst of Times - The New York Sun

The following remarks were delivered by Socialist Equality Party (US) National Secretary Joseph Kishore to a meeting titled Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the 21st Century at New Town Hall in Colombo on Sunday, December 10 to mark the centenary of the founding of the Trotskyist movement. The meeting was organised by the Sri Lankan SEP and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality.

Kishore addressed another meeting organised by SEP/IYSSE on the same theme at the University of Peradeniya which was sponsored by the universitys Political Science Society on December 7.

I am very pleased to be able to travel to Sri Lanka and address this meeting in Colombo. It is a great honor to be able to address workers and youth in this country, and to meet with comrades who have played such a long and essential role in the history of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Leaders of the Sri Lankan section are justly revered throughout the international socialist movement for their principled struggle for Trotskyism in the face often of violent opposition from the ruling class, including Comrade Keerthi Balasuriya, who died 36 years ago this coming weekend, and Comrade Wije Dias, who passed away on July 27, 2022. It is with pride that all members of the SEP in the US point to the origins of our predecessor organization, the Workers League, in the demand for a discussion on the Great Betrayal in Sri Lanka, about which I will speak later.

This meeting is part of a series of meetings throughout the world marking the centenary of the Trotskyist movement, the socialism of the 20th and 21st centuries.

I will discuss the significance of this anniversary, but I want to begin with a review of the international political situation. It is a basic principle of Marxism that it is impossible to develop an orientation in any particular country based on the national peculiarities of that country. Or, rather, beginning from these peculiarities leads to opportunist and bankrupt conclusions. We live and fight within the framework of a global capitalist system, and workers and young people confront at every point global issues.

We are meeting today under conditions of an escalating series of intersecting global crises that have reached a critical mass. Two basic tendencies predominate, the tendency toward world war and political reaction, on the one hand, and the tendency toward socialist revolution on the other. Which of these will prevail will determine the fate of all of mankind.

For the past two months, the attention of the world has been focused on the events in Gaza, where a war crime of historic proportions has been carried out by the Israeli government. A population of 2.3 million people has been systematically bombed, murdered, starved, deprived of medical care and driven from their homes. Every day for the past two months, an average of more than 130 children have been killed, far more than in any war in modern history.

The death toll is now more than 17,000 people in Gaza since October, 70 percent of whom were women and children. More than 200 doctors and medics have been killed, along with 130 UN employees and 77 journalists. The latest atrocity is the targeted killing of Palestinian author and educator, Dr. Refaat al-Areer, who was murdered along with his entire family on December 6.

After a brief pause, during which the Israeli military refueled and reloaded, Israel has launched a ground invasion of the south, where the population has swelled massively over the past eight weeks due to the influx of war refugees from the north.

Not only is a genocide and war crime being carried out, butand this is crucial for workers in every country to understandit has the full support of the Biden administration in the United States and all the governments of the US-NATO axis. Every atrocity by Israel has been preceded and followed by statements of support from White House officials that there are no red lines, that Israel has the full support of the United States.

As Israel was preparing to bomb the south this past week, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby defended the targeting of civilians, claiming that Israel has given Gazans a list, a mapits onlinea list of areas where they can go to be more safe. Theres not too many modern militaries, in advance of conducting operations, that would actually do that.

How thoughtful of Israel! They tell Palestinians where they will have to flee or risk being incinerated in bombs, provided that they can access the online list via a QR code, under conditions in which communication systems rarely work. In fact, Kirby is simply rationalizing mass murder, on the grounds that if Palestinians are in a place where they are bombed, then it must be because they refused to follow the (completely illegal) orders of Israel to evacuate.

Then, on Friday, the US vetoed a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire. The US is not only backing, but it is actively assisting, in an Israeli policy aimed at driving Palestinians out of Gaza, ethnically cleansing the whole region, and killing anyone who refuses to leave.

Something of a turning point has been reached. American imperialism is guilty of many crimes in its long record of war and counter-revolution, from the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the Vietnam War, to the destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan.

But what is striking now is the openness with which homicidal violence is carried out. They do not hide from their crimes; they hardly even try to lie about them.

The open support for genocidal actions can only be understood as part of the unfolding global war of the US-NATO axis, which is or will impact the population of the entire world.

For American imperialism, support for Israels actions is bound up with its striving for world hegemony. Most directly, the Biden administration has utilized Israels actions in Gaza as an opportunity to deploy massive military hardware to the Mediterranean, explicitly targeting Iran. A conflict with Iran is itself seen in relation to the US conflict with both Russia and China.

The war on Gaza and the US-NATO war in Ukraine against Russia are in fact two fronts in a rapidly escalating world war. The war over Ukraine is now nearly two years old. At the time of the Russian invasion in February 2022, the Biden administration in the US, governments throughout Europe and beyond, along with their associated media outlets asserted that the war was unprovoked, that the response of the US and the NATO powers was directed by concern over the national sovereignty of Ukraine, that the US and NATO powers were defending democracy against dictatorship.

Who can believe any of this? If the alliance of US and NATO imperialism with fascists in Ukraine did not dispel these lies, then their support for Israels genocide in Gaza should mark the end for all time of any claim that American imperialism is motivated by concerns over human rights. The war was instigated by the US and NATO powers through the relentless expansion of NATO eastwards, the 2014 coup in Ukraine, and other actions directed at Russia. As for the Ukrainians, US imperialism sees them as nothing more than cannon fodder.

There is no part of the world that is not ensnared in this expanding conflict. In particular, South Asia and the entire Indian Ocean region, including Sri Lanka, is being dragged into the US campaign to encircle China, which is seen by the American ruling class as its principal global rival.

In their support for genocide in Gaza, the US and NATO imperialist powers are declaring that nothing is off the table, including the use of nuclear weapons. Perhaps even more importantly, the homicidal violence is a warning to the working class: such methods will be used to suppress all opposition to the dictates of the ruling elite in every country.

The war is itself part of a broader series of intersecting crises. For nearly four years, the entire world has experienced a global pandemic that has killed more than 20 million people due to the refusal of world governments to adopt the necessary measures to save lives, because these measures get in the way of the accumulation of personal wealth and corporate profit. The level of social inequality is greater than at any point in modern history. The environment is being destroyed due the subordination of human need to private profit.

The institutions of bourgeois democracy are rotten through and through. This coming year will be an election year in the United States. We are now just three years since the attempted fascistic coup led by Donald Trump, which had as its aim the overturning of the Constitution and the establishment of a dictatorship. The principal author of that attempted coup not only remains free, but he is the leading contender for the nomination of the Republican Party in the upcoming presidential elections. Far-right and fascistic individuals are on the rise internationally, from Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, to Javier Milei in Argentina, to Modi in India and Meloni in Italy.

But the promotion of these forces is part of a universal movement to the right of the entire political establishment, which is everywhere impervious to the interests of the vast majority of the population. In the US, it is the Biden administration that is organizing support for the genocide in Gaza and is spearheading the global eruption of imperialist violence.

The most significant factor in the present situation is the resurgence of working class struggle. The mass demonstrations against Israels genocide are part of this. But they come in the context of a period that has seen mass demonstrations and strike activity throughout the world, from the largest strike wave in Britain in 40 years, to the mass protests of millions in France against pension cuts, to the protests here in Sri Lanka against IMF-backed austerity.

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It is particularly important for workers and young people everywhere to have a sense of the depth of the social crisis and the level of social anger within the United States. American imperialism strides the globe and asserts its interests in every country, but at home it confronts a restive working class that can and will upend all the plans and designs of the ruling elite.

Through the media and in popular culture, the United States is presented as the land of unlimited opportunity. In reality, it is the most socially unequal advanced capitalist country in the world. One in 12 Americans dont have enough to eat. Half the population reports living paycheck to paycheck. The number of people in poverty increased by 60 percent last year, from 25.6 million to 40.1 million.Trillions of dollars are allocated to war, while the most basic social programs are cut to the bone.

More than 600,000 workers in the US have participated in strikes this year, three times the level in 2022 and more than four times the level in 2021. The number of workdays lost to strikes is higher this year than at any point in several decades. This included strikes by over 60,000 film and television actors and writers as well the strike by autoworkers. So far this year, there have been 27 separate strikes by health care workers against intolerable conditions.

There is an enormous and pent-up anger in the working class, which is striving to break free from the control of a trade union apparatus that is doing everything it can to contain and suppress the class struggle.

Everywhere, workers and youth are confronted with a situation that raises the necessity for revolutionary solutions, on a global scale. We face not one or another problem in one or another country, this or that political figure. It is a universal experiencepolitical personalities change, but the problems remain. One person is ousted, but his successor maintains the previous policy, even escalates it.

Masses of people are beginning to realize that what is at issue is the nature of the social system itself, of capitalism as a world economic system. However, this raises fundamental political questions. What is socialism and how is it to be accomplished? How are the forces necessary for the realization of this colossal task to be assembled and organized? Is the overthrow of capitalism even possible?

The answers to these questions require an understanding of the lessons and experiences of the 20th century, and the struggles that took place between political tendencies over fundamental issues of program and perspective, struggles that had a colossal impact on the course of events.

We are marking this year the 100th anniversary of the Trotskyist movement, first in the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union, initiated in 1923, and then in the Fourth International, founded 15 years later, in 1938. The founding of the Left Opposition by Leon Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution, marked the beginning of the most consequential political battle of the 20th century.

While the initial battles with the Stalinist apparatus in the Soviet Union took place in the final months of 1923, it was in the course of 1924 that the fundamental political issue came to the fore. This was the conflict between Trotskys Theory of Permanent Revolution, the theory of world socialist revolution that animated the Russian Revolution itself, on the one hand, and the bureaucratic nationalist counter-revolution of the Stalinist apparatus, on the other.

Internationalism and nationalism, this was a fundamental issue that would reverberate throughout the 20th century. The usurpation by the Stalinist bureaucracy was connected fundamentally to an attack on the perspective of world socialist revolution in favor of socialism in one country, a repudiation of basic Marxist theory advanced first by Bukharin and then by Stalin in 1924.

The impossibility of building socialism in one country had been an unquestioned premise of Marxism going back to the writings of Marx himself. Capitalism is a global system, and its replacement with a higher form of social organization can only take place on a world scale. In its nationalist perspective, the Stalinist apparatus was defending the privileges of a bureaucratic caste that sought to make peace with imperialism by strangling the global movement of workers for socialism.

The central strategic principle that guided the struggle against Stalinism was formulated by Trotsky in his 1928 Critique of the Draft Program of the Communist International. In our epoch, which is the epoch of imperialism, i.e., of world economy and world politics under the hegemony of finance capital, Trotsky wrote, not a single communist party can establish its program by proceeding solely or mainly from conditions and tendencies of developments in its own country The revolutionary party of the proletariat can base itself only upon an international program corresponding to the character of the present epoch, the epoch of the highest development and collapse of capitalism.

In this same document, Trotsky reviewed the central role of American imperialism. In words that speak with even greater power to the present situation, Trotsky declared: In the period of crisis the hegemony of the United States will operate more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than in the period of boom. The United States will seek to overcome and extricate herself from her difficulties and maladies primarily at the expense of Europe, regardless of whether this occurs in Asia, Canada, South America, Australia, or Europe itself, or whether this takes place peacefully or through war.

One might only add the caveat that a peaceful method for resolving the difficulties of American imperialism no longer exists.

The Stalinist bureaucracy, in its counter-revolutionary war against genuine socialism, waged a campaign of mass murder, including the murder of more than 800,000 socialist workers and intellectuals in the Great Terror of 193639. As Trotsky observed in 1937, this campaign drew between Bolshevism and Stalinism not simply a bloody line but a whole river of blood. Trotsky himself was assassinated by an agent of the GPU on August 20, 1940, and he died the next day.

This battle was to have profound consequences in every country, generally in the form of revolutionary movements that were betrayed and defeated due to the reaction politics of the Stalinist Communist Parties, along with the Maoists, Castroists and bourgeois nationalists.

Here in Sri Lanka, the fight for Trotskyism emerged about a decade after the formation of the Left Opposition, first within the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), which turned to Trotskyism in the late 1930s, and then in the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, Ceylon and Burma (BLPI), formed in 1942 through a fusion of the LSSP with several organizations in India.

The BLPI intervened powerfully in the anti-imperialist movement, on the basis of a perspective for an all-India revolutionary struggle, uniting workers and oppressed masses of all languages, religions and ethnicities. It won a mass audience among workers, which was a major factor in compelling the British to move quickly to reach agreement with the bourgeois national organizations on nominal independence and partition.

The BLPI opposed the communal Partition of India and the constitution of Sri Lanka in 1948, which was quickly followed by the passage of laws stripping the vast majority of Tamil-speaking plantation workers of their basic rights as citizens.The Stalinists and bourgeois nationalistsincluding the Congress Partycollaborated in the partition of South Asia, which led to a fratricidal slaughter and the death of more than one million people.

At issue was the fight for the international unity of the working class against the promotion of national, linguistic and ethnic divisions. In a speech in August 1948, BLPI leader Colvin R. de Silva attacked moves to disenfranchise Tamil workers, which were based on the assumption that the state must be coeval with the nation and the nation with the race as an outmoded idea and an exploded philosophy. He continued: It is precisely under Fascism that the nation was to be made coeval with the race, and race the governing factor in the composition of the state

This powerful denunciation of a racial definition of the state was significant not only in relation to Sri Lanka. De Silva made these remarks only three months after the founding of Israel, in May 1948. The Zionist perspective that underlay the foundation of Israel was both hostile to the working class and the broad support among Jews for socialism, and oriented to imperialism. De Silvas warnings in relation to Sri Lanka are now being realized by Israel in the fascistic genocide against the Palestinian people.

Another important anniversary is marked this year, seventy years since the Open Letter, published by American Trotskyist James P. Cannon, which established the programmatic basis for the International Committee of the Fourth International, which is the leadership of the socialist movement today.

The Open Letter was written in the years following the Second World War. After the imperialist slaughter of the two world wars, including the Nazi Holocaust that killed six million Jews, American capitalism was, with the help of the Stalinist, able to organize a temporary restabilization of world capitalism.

This restabilization created the conditions for various forms of national reformism, Stalinism and bourgeois nationalism to dominate and contain the struggles of workers and oppressed masses. It also found expression within the Fourth International in the form of a revisionist tendency, led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, which goes by the name of Pabloism.

Pabloism repudiated every fundamental programmatic principle of Trotskyism. It rejected Trotskys insistence, stated in the opening sentence of the founding document of the Fourth International, that The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat. From this flowed an orientation to the Stalinist bureaucracy and its satellite regimes and parties throughout the world. Attributing to the state and party bureaucracies a revolutionary potential, the Pabloites sought the liquidation of the Fourth International as an independent political force.

Cannons Open Letter, to which I will return, was written in opposition to this perspective, and in defense of the basic principles, as well as the organizational existence, of the Trotskyist movement.

If the stand taken by the Trotskyists in the BLPI in 1948 represented a significant milestone, their political retreat (in what was fused and renamed the LSSP) set the stage for a catastrophic defeat for the working class of Sri Lanka. The LSSP rejected Cannons Open Letter and over the course of the next decade put Pablos perspective of integrating into the so-called mass movement in practice.

This culminatedin the Great Betrayal of 1964, when amidst a massive working class offensive for sweeping social reforms, the LSSP entered a coalition government under Sri Lankan Freedom Party Prime Minister Bandaranaike. This was followed, in the early 1970s, by support for further attacks on the democratic rights of Tamil workers. The same individuals who had denounced the establishment of states based on race now lent their political authority to the promotion of Sinhala chauvinism.

Comrade Keerthi Balasuriya, in the last statement he wrote before his untimely death in December 1987, remarked, There would never have been the fracturing of the national struggle of the Tamils and the class struggle of the Sri Lankan proletariat had it not been for the unspeakable betrayals carried out by the LSSP, sanctioned by the Pabloite revisionists, over the last quarter century.

The LSSPs betrayal set the stage for an explosion of Sinhalese chauvinism while also creating confusion for many Tamil workers, who had looked to the socialist-led working-class movement to defend their democratic rights. It set in train events that led to the three-decade long civil war, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, and was used to justify the wholesale gutting of the social and democratic rights of the working class, Sinhalese and Tamil alike.

The RCL [Revolutionary Communist League], predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party in Sri Lanka, was founded based on a struggle, led by the International Committee of the Fourth International [ICFI], to draw the real lessons of the Pabloite LSSPs betrayal of the program of socialist internationalism.

In the United States, the Socialist Workers Party was in the process of repudiating its previous struggle against Pabloism, of which the Open Letter was a high point. Part of this involved a cover-up of the political crimes of the LSSP. In 1964, supporters of the IC [International Committee] within the SWP were expelled after they issued an open letter demanding a discussion on the relationship between the Great Betrayal and Pabloism. Two years later, they founded the Workers League, predecessor of the SEP in the US.

Returning to the content of the Open Letter, written in 1953, Cannon concisely summarized the basic principles of the Trotskyist movement. The letter not only speaks to the situation confronting the working class at that time, but of our own time as well.

The death agony of the capitalist system threatens the destruction of civilization through worsening depressions, world wars and barbaric manifestations like fascism, Cannon wrote. The development of atomic weapons today underlines the danger in the gravest possible way. The descent into the abyss can be avoided only by replacing capitalism with the planned economy of socialism on a world scale and thus resuming the spiral of progress opened up by capitalism in its early days.

What is the situation that workers and youth throughout the world confront today? The US-NATO war against Russia has brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any point since the height of the Cold War. The genocide in Gaza is imperialisms descent into the abyss. The revival of fascistic movements is the spearhead of a universal shift to the right of the entire political establishment and the turn to dictatorial and authoritarian methods of rule.

The alternative to capitalist barbarism is international socialism, the reorganization of economic life on a world scale, as Cannon wrote, reiterating the basic perspective of Trotskyism and Marxism. The problems confronting workers and youth in every country are world problems, and they require international solutions.

The pandemic has certainly demonstrated that there are no national solutions to the basic problems we confront. Opposition to the policies of the ruling elite is not possible within the framework of one country. Here in Sri Lanka, the events of the past two years have shown that regardless of the composition of the government, it is the International Monetary Fund that dictates policies.

Cannon continued by stating that socialism can be accomplished only under the leadership of the working class as the only truly revolutionary class in society. But the working class itself faces a crisis of leadership although the world relationship of social forces was never so favorable as today for the workers to take the road to power.

In the 70 years since the writing of the Open Letter, the international working class has grown enormously. Vast sections of the world that had previously been predominantly peasant-based have been proletarianized. For the first time in history, the majority of the worlds population lives in urban areas, including gigantic mega-cities with populations of 10 million or more people.

The globalization of capitalist production has integrated the working class of the entire world to an extent previously unimaginable, and advances in communication have made it possible for workers in every country to coordinate their actions on a global scale. Global internet usage has increased from only 3 percent in 1996, to more than 65 percent today.

The eruption of the mass, international protests against the genocide in Gaza has confirmed the prognosis of the ICFI that the class struggle would develop as an international struggle, not only in content but also in form. The capitalist ruling elites have concentrated in their hands enormous, unprecedented wealth. They control governments and the media. But the international working class is the most powerful force on the planet, the producers of everything.

The objective conditions create the basis for the development of a global movement of the working class for socialism. At the same time, however, as Cannon explained, workers confront a crisis of revolutionary leadership. He wrote:

The main obstacle to this is Stalinism, which attracts workers through exploiting the prestige of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia, only later, as it betrays their confidence, to hurl them either into the arms of the Social Democracy, into apathy, or back into illusions in capitalism

Comrade David North in a recent lecture in this series in London noted that the one major change between the present and the time of Cannons Open Letter is that the Soviet Union and the mass Stalinist parties no longer exists. But absolutely nothing remains of the false and politically disorienting identification of Stalinism with the heritage and program of the October Revolution, he noted.

Where outside of the Fourth International is there a program and perspective to lead the working class in the struggle for socialism? The Maoists, the Castroites, the various petit-bourgeois national movements have been swept from the scene or have been comprehensively exposed by developments. Their nationalist program did not correspond to the objective characteristics of the epoch.

The crisis of revolutionary leadership, however, remains to be resolved. There is and will be no shortage of mass, revolutionary upheavals. Workers are driven into struggle by objective developments.

The working class internationally confronts the treachery of the right-wing organizations that still call themselves Labor or Social Democratic Parties, the many pseudo-left and nationalist organizationsmany of which trace their origins to the Pabloite repudiation of the program of the Fourth International. In the United States, as in other countries, the massive anger of workers is constrained by union bureaucracies that function as nothing more than agents of management and the state.

Cannon concluded his summary of the basic principles by stating that the revolutionary situations opening up on every hand as Trotsky foresaw have only now brought full concreteness to what at one time may have appeared to be somewhat remote abstractions not intimately bound up with the living reality of the time. The truth is that these principles now hold with increasing force both in political analysis and in the determination of the course of practical action.

This conclusion applies with even greater force to the present situation. Throughout the world, masses of workers and youth are entering into struggle and are beginning to draw revolutionary conclusions. There is a growing understanding that a fundamental reorganization of society is necessary. No one believes the media and its propaganda. The bankruptcy of all political parties becomes evident.

The task facing workers in every country is the building of a genuine socialist movement in the working class, that will fight to take power from the criminal oligarchs and warmongers, the purveyors of genocide and their accomplices, and reorganize social and economic life, on a world scale, based on social equality. In accomplishing this task, workers and youth cannot escape history.

The present is formed and molded by the past, and it is on the basis of the experiences of the past that we will prove up to the challenge of meeting the problems of the present and building a socialist leadership to win the future.

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Imperialism, the genocide in Gaza, and the world struggle for socialism - WSWS

We are publishing here the tribute to Helen Halyard given by Joseph Kishore, the national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (US), to a memorial meeting for Comrade Helen held on December 3.

Dear Comrades and friends,

I am currently en route to Sri Lanka. The conditions for speaking to this meeting are not ideal, but I am honored to be able to participate in this very important and historic event.

What can one add to the previous statements of comrades about Helen? She was an extraordinary comrade, an extraordinary person. The adjectives used by comrades in todays meeting give a sense of her character: principled, self-sacrificing, warm, dedicated, cultured, honest, devoted, empathetic, blunt, unpretentious, tenacious, generous, optimistic, and, in the revolutionary and materialist sense, the real thing, the genuine article.

Comrade Helen Halyard reflected the strength of the party and, in turn, imparted her strength to the party, in many different ways. As Comrade North noted, a full summary of Comrade Halyards influence would require a review of the history of the Trotskyist movement over the past half-century. She played an important role in the struggles of the Workers League and the International Committee, in the fight against Wohlforths renegacy and the struggle, led by Comrade North, against the national opportunist degeneration of the Workers Revolutionary Party. She was centrally involved in the fight to expose the political assassination of Comrade Tom Henehan, in the campaign to free Gary Tyler, in the opposition to the victimization of Roger Cawthra and Mary Coleman, in countless strikes and struggles of the working class, and, of course, in the early election campaigns of the Workers League.

My own experiences with Helen began shortly after I came into contact with the movement. She was one of the first comrades I met in Detroit, in 1999. The discussion we had addressed many issues with which, at that point, I had very little familiarity: Pabloism, the Socialist Workers Party, the history of our party, Trotskyism, the Russian Revolution. I stayed with her and Comrade Tim when working for a summer at the plant. I recall not only the many political discussions, but also the immense amount of literature, books and pamphlets, that filled their basement and shelvessomething that I came to learn was a common feature in the houses of comrades.

It is impossible to recount all the discussions, all the many elements of the work of the party she contributed to in the years since I became national secretarythe development of the work in Detroit, the Committee Against Utility Shutoffs, the fight to defend the Detroit Institute of Arts; the finance work, which involves critical discussions with contacts and supporters. If it was necessary to make a call to an important contact to have political discussion, one could always rely on Comrade Helen.

I think she took most pride, however, in her work in politically educating the younger members. Up until the final week of her life, despite many health problems, she participated in educational classes of the South and Southeast branches. She took very seriously the responsibility of the older generation to bring to the newer generations the experiences of the past. The comrades have spoken often of her indispensable role in providing guidance and leadership.

As comrades have reviewed, Helen was won to the party through a political struggle, against Pabloism, against black nationalism and its promotion by the Socialist Workers Party. Having been won to the party, she fought for the program of the party, guided by the understanding that there was no higher personal responsibility or personal satisfaction.

What imparts to the Trotskyist movement its strength, its endurancean endurance that is imparted to the cadre who are won to the movement? It is the correspondence of the program of the party with powerful revolutionary tendencies in the objective situation.

This correspondence developed through different historical periods, during which it was more or less evident. There were periods in history when the Trotskyist movement was isolated, when the forces of reaction were able to deliver it terrible blows. The movement persisted and fought, animated by revolutionary optimism in the role of the international working class, convinced that the course of events would, as Trotsky put it, leave of the old organizations not one stone upon another. And so it has.

Traveling to Sri Lanka, I have been thinking of the trip Helen herself took just over three decades ago, as part of the partys powerful presidential election campaign in 1992. I have been thinking about the movement and its strength, which is so much tied up with its international character.

We are a party with powerful historical roots, as Helen would so often emphasize. We are a party of history. We strive at every point to connect the present with the immense experience embodied in the history of the movement itself. This is so closely tied to the partys international character, its international perspective.

Marxismand Trotskyism is the Marxism of the 21st centuryis based on irreconcilable opposition to all forms of nationalism, of which racial politics is one expression. Marxism is a movement based on the common interests of workers of all countries, of all races. The proletariat has no fatherland.

How powerfully this perspective corresponds to objective developments today! The contradictions of the capitalist system are driving the ruling class to barbarism, to reaction, to war and genocide, to fascism and authoritarianism. But the working class, the American and international working class, is a social power of enormous and growing force.

In her remarks in Sri Lanka in 1992, Comrade Helen explained: The growth of global economy strengthens the working class, creating the objective conditions to unite workers across national boundaries. It is only the Fourth International that builds a world party in the struggle for world socialism.

This point was made seven years after the split with the Workers Revolutionary Party, as the International Committee of the Fourth International analyzed the significance of globalization, of revolutionary changes in technology and communications. It was six years before the founding of the World Socialist Web Site, which has created the conditions for an extraordinary integration of the work of the World Party of Socialist Revolution.

Over the past three decades, these tendencies have grown enormously. Global internet usage has increased from only 3 percent in 1996 to more than 65 percent today. The international perspective of the party corresponds powerfully to reality.

The perspective of Pabloism, the orientation to the national bureaucracies, to Stalinism, Castroism, Maoism, to all the supposed alternatives to the building of a revolutionary leadership of the working class, has ended in shipwreck. There is an immense working class that is entering into struggle and the perspective of the party is winning a growing audience. The International Committee is growing and expanding throughout the world, as this meeting has powerfully demonstrated.

We understand, as Trotsky explained, that the crisis of mankind is ultimately reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

Comrades, in her life and in her political work, Comrade Helen fought untiringly for the perspective of Trotskyism. We mourn her loss, as a comrade, as a friend. It is our task to ensure that her life and work are carried forward, with increased devotion, through the political struggle of the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International, and the victory of socialism throughout the world.

In depth

History of the Fourth International

The International Committee of the Fourth International is the leadership of the world party of socialist revolution, founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

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We must carry forward Helen Halyard's life and work through the struggle of the ICFI for the victory of socialism ... - WSWS

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and Chinese president, meets with Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh in Hanoi, capital of Vietnam, Dec. 13, 2023. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

HANOI, Dec. 13 (Xinhua) -- Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and Chinese president, said here on Wednesday that China and Vietnam should sail together on the same ship of socialism.

In his meeting with Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, Xi said both sides should be alert to and oppose any attempts to mess up Asia-Pacific, strengthen coordination and cooperation in international affairs and jointly maintain a favorable external environment.

Xi said that Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee, and he jointly announced building a China-Vietnam community with a shared future that carries strategic significance, opening a new chapter in bilateral ties.

Xi said he believes it will bring greater benefits to the two peoples and make positive contributions to peace, stability and development of the region and the world.

For his part, Pham Minh Chinh said Vietnam-China relations have withstood the test of time and history and will not be affected by any interference provoked by external forces.

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and Chinese president, meets with Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh in Hanoi, capital of Vietnam, Dec. 13, 2023. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and Chinese president, meets with Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh in Hanoi, capital of Vietnam, Dec. 13, 2023. (Xinhua/Shen Hong)

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Xi says China, Vietnam should sail together on same ship of socialism - Xinhua

Launching the second of our Introduction to Marxism series, Judy Beishon traces the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the current brutal war on Gaza. This is a shortened version of the original article which can be read in full at socialismtoday.org

The worlds imperialist powers have always intervened in the Middle East for their own political, strategic and economic interests. On the one hand dishing out investment, aid, trade deals and promises of protection, and on the other hand threats, sanctions and military force, they have extracted what they can for themselves, to the detriment of the regions peoples. The Israel-Arab conflict arose out of imperialist interference following the first world war, and in the century since has seen 13 wars and much other bloodshed in between.

In the feudal period, the caliphates encompassing the Palestinians and other Arab territories were eventually conquered by the Turkish Ottoman empire. That empire fell apart following military defeats before and during the first world war and the Middle East was carved up between the imperialist victors. The plans to grab control had included the 1916 Sykes-Picot secret deal between Britain and France, for Britain to take control of Palestine and Jordan, and France to take Syria and Lebanon. It broke a British promise previously made to Arab leaders that they would have their own state in those areas.

Through that deal and other imperialist treaties, Britain ruled Palestine after the first world war until it withdrew at the time of the creation of Israel in 1948. The way had been paved for an Israeli state by the 1917 Balfour declaration, an undertaking by Britains foreign minister Arthur Balfour to view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.

This was a great gift to the Zionist movement that was campaigning for a Jewish state in Palestine. But it was a massive blow to Palestines Arabs, around 90% of the population, then under British colonial rule with no promise of their own state. Jewish immigration increased, causing growing alarm to the Arabs. They broke out in mass rebellion in 1936-39 and were brutally suppressed by British forces. During that revolt, in 1937 British imperialism proposed that a small Jewish state be created in Palestine.

In the early twentieth century most of the politically active Jews were not looking towards Zionism but rather to workers organisations and struggles. The goal of the Zionists, a small minority of Jews worldwide, wasnt to fight antisemitism and campaign for the rights of Jews in Europe, but rather to escape from it, an ideology that became boosted by the failure of workers movements across Europe to emulate the Russian revolution and remove capitalism.

Following the rise to power of Hitler in 1933 in Germany, support for Zionism increased. Unsurprisingly, the horror under Hitler of the holocaust the slaughter of six million Jews along with many socialists, trade unionists, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and others was widely viewed as further grounds for Zionism.

In the two years following the end of the second world war, British forces reached a crisis in their divide and rule strategy in Palestine. They tried to limit Jewish immigration, to which Jewish militias responded with sabotage and terrorist acts. The Zionist revolt against British rule sent shockwaves worldwide in July 1946 when the Irgun militia blew up part of Jerusalems King David hotel, being used by British personnel, killing 91 people. In 1947, with Britains Atlee government unable to stabilise the wasps nest of Palestine, as British chancellor Hugh Dalton described it, the United Nations (UN) voted to partition Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. That decision wasnt only due to a false perspective of trying to stabilise Palestine; US imperialism also saw it as a destination for hundreds of thousands of post-war Jewish refugees who were being rejected by countries across Europe, and by the US too.

Palestines Arabs reacted with outrage to that imperialist edict. At the same time the Zionists were eager to grab as much land for their new state as possible. Civil war broke out, in which Jewish forces led by the Haganah militia seized territory, leading to them announcing the State of Israel in May 1948.

In a second phase of the war, the new Israeli state fought off an invasion against it by five Arab armies. By 1949 Israel had taken more land than the UN had designated to it, Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt had the Gaza Strip. The monstrous injustice had been inflicted of Palestine being wiped off the map, with around 750,000 Palestinians displaced from their homes, becoming refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and surrounding countries. Palestinians call that terrible expulsion their Naqba, catastrophe in Arabic.

Leon Trotsky, in the month before he was murdered by Stalins agents in 1940, had warned that a Jewish state in Palestine could be a bloody trap for Jews, as the land was already inhabited. That has been tragically borne out, for Palestinians as well as Jews.

In 1949 Israel obtained armistice agreements with its four Arab neighbours: Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Its population grew rapidly due to immigration. By no means were all the post-war immigrants Zionists; a lot had nowhere else to go.

Israel from its birth was based on capitalist relations. After an initial post-war economic crisis its economy grew, spurred on by reparations from Germany, foreign investors and US aid. It benefitted greatly from the high profit and investment rates during the post-war world economic boom.

The economy was also developed through a high degree of nurturing by the state. The state and the Histadrut (General Organisation of Workers in Israel) between them employed 40% of the countrys workers in the 1950s and the state gave subsidies to other major corporations. But this was no form of socialism, as finance minister Levi Eshkol stressed in 1957: What is our regime? It is a regime of preparing the way and paving the road for private capital, provided only it exists and wants to come here. Eshkol was a leader of the political party Mapai which led all the Israeli governments for the first three decades, pro-capitalist throughout, firstly as Mapai and from 1968 as the Israeli Labour Party. In parallel with growing the economy was the building of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) armed with hi-tech weaponry, including an unpublicised nuclear capacity.

US imperialism came to have increasing political interest in aiding Israel as part of its strategy in the post-war cold war between the US-dominated western capitalist powers and the Stalinist eastern bloc led by the Soviet Union (USSR), a standoff between two antagonistic economic systems. The Middle East was of interest to both superpowers, not least because of its oil reserves and geographical importance for trade. They were jostling for influence in what was a period of tumult and regime change across that region. The USSR sought to gain influence in Arab nationalist regimes that came to power, including making an arms deal with the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt in 1955, who was balancing between the capitalist west and the Soviet bloc.

Western imperialism wanted to counter that influence, and in any case saw the left-wing Nasser regime and its great appeal to the Arab masses as a major threat. Nasser ruled autocratically and stayed within the boundaries of capitalism, but in what was a revolutionary process that impacted across the Middle East, he adopted aspects of socialist ideology combined with Arab nationalism. His regime redistributed land from the top landowners to the rural poor, nationalised the Suez canal and other British and French owned companies in Egypt, and delivered an unprecedented level of public services to the Egyptian masses. Therefore, Western imperialism saw staunchly pro-Western imperialist Israel as an important base of support for its interests against the challenge that Nasserism posed.

The so-called Jewish lobby in the US was also a factor in US-Israel relations and still is today, with US capitalists from a Jewish background having links with Israeli big business, and US workers with a Jewish background having an influence in the US electorally.

Israels ruling class, on its part wanted US aid and also protection; it feared the arming by the USSR of hostile Arab regimes. It developed a history of aiding US interests in the Middle East and other areas of the world with intelligence and military coordination.

However, the 1956 Suez war wasnt welcomed by US imperialism. In October 1956, Israel invaded the Sinai peninsula, quickly backed up by British and French military forces, to try to seize control of the Suez canal and remove Nasser. Fury erupted on the Arab streets and from other workers internationally, including a 30,000 strong rally against the war in London (the biggest demonstration to that point since 1945). The US was desperate to prevent disruption to oil supplies and other trade, and a spread of the war the USSR was threatening to intervene so piled pressure on the invaders to pull out. The result was a humiliating withdrawal for British and French imperialism, followed by Israel pulling out of Sinai.

In 1967, following the build-up of further tension and clashes between Israel and neighbouring countries, a new war was being prepared on both sides. After receiving a green light from the US, on 5 June Israel launched military attacks on Egypt, Syria and Jordan, in what became known as the Six-Day War. The Israeli forces had dramatic and unexpected success, gaining control of the West Bank, east Jerusalem, Gaza, the Golan Heights and Sinai from Jordan, Egypt and Syria. As well it being the start of Israels occupation, the war created around 400,000 Palestinian refugees, some for the second time.

In November 1967 the UN Security Council passed its well-known resolution 242, calling for Israeli withdrawal from the areas taken. But with the exception of Sinai they remain occupied by Israel to this day. Over and over again Israel has been accused by human rights organisations among others, including many groups on the left, of violating international law, but the entire history of the conflict has shown how inconsequential those appeals are. That law is a creation of the imperialist powers and attempts to enforce it can only be made by their nation state military forces. In the case of Israel, on balance it hasnt been in their interests to enforce it and Israels rulers know that.

Within months of the six-day war Israel started building Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, along with developing a regime of brutal repression against the Palestinians living there. Virtually every aspect of their lives became controlled by Israel, with harsh and deadly punishments for transgressions. Many bloody raids have been carried out by the IDF into West Bank towns and Gaza over the years and assassinations carried out of Palestinian militia leaders and fighters. Time has been spent in Israeli prisons by 40% of the male population in the territories, with thousands detained at any one time, including many without trial.

A group of Palestinians formed Fatah, a reverse acronym for Palestinian National Liberation Movement in the late 1950s, led by Yasser Arafat. By 1969 Fatah was the dominant party in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), an umbrella for numerous Palestinian organisations, mainly secular, that developed mass support in the Palestinian diaspora. The PLO promoted Palestinian identity and awareness of the Palestinians plight. It carried out armed attacks against Israelis military and infrastructure. At the same time, however, terrorist acts carried out in the 1970s by various PLO factions repelled many workers internationally from its methods. Those acts included hijacking planes, killing Israeli school children, and taking hostage and killing Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich summer Olympics.

The PLO called for one secular Palestinian state with equal rights for Jews within it, but didnt regard them as having collective rights as Jews. Some of its component organisations were influenced by Stalinism, with some receiving aid from the Soviet Union and China. In tune with Stalinist ideology they relegated the struggle for socialism to a stage after Palestinian liberation. However, not only were the PLOs methods of struggle not going to achieve Palestinian liberation, neither was it possible to achieve it on a capitalist basis. The Israeli capitalist class has never been willing to allow the existence of a neighbouring independent Palestinian state with control over its own borders and resources, fearing that it would elect leaders very hostile to its own interests.

Also, no type of capitalist Palestinian entity will ever be able to provide decent living standards for its population. Where in the world does any capitalist ruling class in todays conditions of capitalist decline consistently provide rising living standards for any class in society but those at the top? Least of all in an area without an industrial base and with a history of bloodshed.

In any case, the Arab regimes, based on capitalism too, have always exerted strong counter-revolutionary influence on the PLO through financing and hosting it. On the one hand their elites try to portray themselves as being as angry as the masses across the Middle East at the plight of the Palestinians, while on the other hand it is in their interests to obstruct any moves towards building the only forces that can end the occupation: working-class-based organisations in the occupied territories and in Israel.

In October 1973 the Yom Kippur war began on the Jewish religious day of that name. Egypt and Syria launched an unexpected but failed military offensive on Israel to regain their lost territories, with the assistance of a number of other Arab countries. Reflecting the cold war, the Soviet Union was arming the Arab combatants, and after the Yom Kippur war the US started seriously to boost Israels arms.

Following the war, Saudi Arabia led an Arab boycott of oil exports to the countries that had supported Israel during it, causing a tripling of the oil price over the following five months. That impacted on a world economy already showing signs of a fall back from the heady years of the post second world war boom. Global recession set in, and Israels economy was badly affected.

By the early 1980s it still hadnt recovered. In 1983, the share price of the largest banks collapsed, and the government resorted to nationalising them. In 1984 inflation reached 445%. A short-lived national unity government introduced a neoliberal stabilisation plan in 1985 that cut government spending, held down workers wages and devalued the currency, among other measures. The government and its successors then embarked on a massive bonanza for the rich through the privatisation of state-owned corporations, including eventually returning the banks into capitalist hands.

Approaching Israels 1977 general election, its Labour government, which since 1974 had been led by Yitzhak Rabin, was still being blamed for being taken unawares by the Yom Kippur war, and there was anger over corruption scandals at the top. The worsening economy made disenchantment with Labour even greater, especially among Israels Mizrahi Jews, whose background is from the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, and Sephardic Jews who originate from around the Mediterranean. They had always suffered discrimination at the hands of Israels Ashkenazi Jews, mainly originating from central and eastern Europe, who were dominant in Labour.

In the 1977 election many Mizrahim and Sephardim voted for the right-wing party Likud, helping the right to come to power for the first time, as a Likud-led coalition. This had consequences for the occupation. The Israeli right have usually rejected any compromise over territory and claim that Israel has the right to all of Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the West Bank, and Gaza too. Once in power, they accelerated the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank with the aim of a Greater Israel.

Menachem Begin, who led the Irgun militia in 1943-48, was the Israeli prime minister at the head of Likud in 1977. Begin oversaw the Camp David accords signed in 1978 and 1979 with Egypts president Anwar Sadat. In return for Egypt accepting Israels existence and allowing it to use the Suez canal, Begin withdrew Israel from Sinai, which the Israeli right didnt regard as part of the Land of Israel.

In 1987 the Palestinians in the occupied territories erupted spontaneously in a massive protest movement that lasted for six years and came to be known as the first intifada. The entire population took part in mass demonstrations and strikes. The IDF responded to the unarmed crowds with rubber bullets, water cannon, tear gas and gunfire. It also resorted to curfews, detentions, closure of schools, house demolitions, torture and deportations.

But as author Avi Shlaim wrote: The intifada accomplished more in its first few months than decades of PLO military operations. At least some of Israels leaders began to concede that military power has its limits, and that there could be no military solution to what is essentially a political problem.

The PLO leaders in Tunis had played no role in the outbreak of the intifada but they intervened to gain leadership of it. Under pressure from the Palestinians for an end to the occupation, the PLO decided in 1988 to recognise the existence of the Israeli state and officially adopted a two-state solution: for the occupied territories to become a Palestinian state, alongside Israel. That proposition was quickly rejected by Yitzhak Shamir, Likuds successor after Begin.

The collapse of Stalinism and return of capitalism across the USSR and eastern Europe in 1989-91 profoundly changed world relations. It opened up a period in which US imperialism was able to play a dominant role globally and the Middle East elites could no longer manoeuvre between two different economic systems. A major show of the rapidly changing relations was the coalition put together by the US against Saddam Husseins Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The coalition encompassed 42 countries, including the Soviet Union, the Western powers and many of the Arab states.

To keep the Arab countries on board, the US excluded Israel from the coalition, though Israel gave back-up support. Just two months into that first Gulf war the IDF killed 19 Palestinians in Jerusalem, which jeopardised the coalition because it exposed US imperialisms different approaches to the Iraqi occupation of oil-rich Kuwait and the Israeli occupation that it was brushing aside.

Trying to paper over those obvious double standards was one of the USs reasons for pushing for Israel-Palestine peace talks after the war. But the overriding reason was that the first intifada was still raging, with military repression not subduing it, so the US and Israeli leaders were seeking to head it off through talks. They were also hoping to cut across Palestinian militias in the territories based on right-wing political Islam that were becoming more combative.

In October 1991 talks began in Madrid and multiple rounds followed in Washington. Despite the fact that Shamir was conceding virtually nothing, his governing coalition in Israel lost its majority when two ultra-nationalist parties resigned in opposition to the talks. In the subsequent general election in June 1992, Israels electorate brought to power a Labour-led government headed by Rabin on the basis of him promising a deal for Palestinian autonomy. That election result reflected the desire of ordinary Israelis for an end to repeated conflict, which has been expressed many times over the decades, for example in a 100,000-strong peace demonstration in Tel Aviv in 1978 on the eve of the Camp David accord, or the 90% support for withdrawing Israeli troops from Lebanon in 1985.

The Washington talks were going nowhere, but a separate channel started secretly in Oslo for the first time directly with the PLO which led to the 1993 Oslo accord. It partly ended direct occupation but opened up a period of major disappointment and increased bloodshed because conditions for the Palestinians only worsened. It led to a Palestinian Authority (PA) being set up to administer part of the Gaza strip and just 18% of the West Bank, in 14 disconnected areas. The IDF continued to invade Palestinian areas; and Jewish settlements with their supporting infrastructure were expanded, imposing facts on the ground to make a Palestinian state seem impossible. The accord didnt even mention a Palestinian state, which for Rabin as for every leading Israeli pro-capitalist politician wasnt on offer.

Today there are around 670,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Most of them live in the settlements for financial reasons housing there is less expensive than in Israel but a minority do so for the ideological purpose of colonising West Bank land, with mobs of them regularly inflicting atrocities on Palestinian villages to try to expel the residents.

The PA, firstly led by Arafat, and later by his Fatah successor Mahmood Abbas, is condemned by Palestinians as corrupt, with enrichment by those at the top while ordinary people live in poverty. It acts in collaboration with Israels security and military forces, as a first line of repressive policing. Today the PA is so unpopular that President Abbas has refused to call legislative elections for 17 years, knowing that Fatah wont be re-elected.

After the collapse of Stalinism, Fatah had turned to the Western capitalist powers for aid and looked towards them to put pressure on Israel to make concessions. But the Western capitalists have never had any genuine concern for the peoples in the region. The terrible devastation inflicted by coalitions led by the US and UK on the people of Afghanistan from 2001 and Iraq from 2003 is a reminder of that.

US imperialisms alliance with the Israeli ruling class limits US interventions for concessions towards the Palestinians, though at times US presidents have felt compelled to exert some pressure on Israel, reflecting pressure on them to do so.

In November 1995 Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing religious Jew who opposed the Oslo deal. Shimon Peres took over but then lost the May 1996 general election to Likuds Benjamin Netanyahu, who proceeded to undermine the paltry results of Oslo. Peres had been 20% ahead in the polls but Netanyahu gained an advantage from several suicide bombings that killed 67 Israelis, carried out by Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas in opposition to Oslo.

Hamas, based on right-wing political Sunni Islam, was founded soon after the start of the first intifada and provided charitable services like health and education. Through its armed wing it came to be seen by many Palestinians as a leader of the fight against the occupation because of its combative approach and opposition to Oslo, in contrast to the inaction of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority.

However, its actions arent under democratic control, and while its atrocities against civilians draw attention to the oppression of the Palestinians and show the desperation of the young Palestinians who join the militias committing them, they cannot defeat the Israeli state with its massive military superiority. In every case they serve the interests of the Israeli right and the whole agenda of the Israeli capitalist class and its political representatives. The latter can point to the killings to step up their nationalist and racist propaganda and draw a large layer of the Israeli population behind the use of massive firepower with the false aim of delivering security.

This certainly doesnt mean the Palestinians should renounce arms. On the contrary, they have the right to armed resistance against the brutality they are up against. But their resistance needs to take the form of mass struggle and actions under the control of democratically elected popular committees of the working class and poor; and be directed against the occupation and not Israeli civilians. They would then be building the most effective means of struggle, and by targeting the forces and infrastructure of the occupation they would be better able to appeal to Israeli workers to oppose the military slaughters carried out by the Israeli state and gain the ear of a layer of them. This would be part of a process of helping to expose the class divide in Israel and of creating links between the Palestinian masses in the occupied territories and the working class in Israel.

More talks with the PLO in 1999 back at Camp David ended in failure. Desperation at their terrible conditions, together with frustration and despair following Oslo, led to the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000. The trigger was a mega provocation by the then Likud leader Ariel Sharon. He walked into the Noble Sanctuary the third most important religious site in the world for Muslims, containing the al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock. To Jews it is the Temple Mount, once the site of Jewish temples.

Palestinian anger erupted, initially as an unarmed popular uprising. Ahron Bregman, in his book Cursed Victory, argues convincingly that Israeli strategists wanted to transform it into a violent insurgency so they could take advantage of Israels military capacity. The IDF fired a staggering 1.3 million bullets during the intifadas first month and did indeed manage gradually to transform the Palestinian civilian uprising into an armed insurgency in which guns replaced stones.

The IDF sent in tanks, attack helicopters and fighter jets. So this intifada had a different character to the first one. Mass action became superseded by individual and group terror attacks, with Israeli civilians targeted. This again played into the hands of right-wing reactionaries in Israel and led to Sharon winning the 2001 election. Its worth noting, though, that to take into account the desire for peace in Israel, Sharon promised to pursue peace talks, a gross deception as he didnt ever start moves towards a final status settlement for the Palestinian territories.

The settlements expansion continued, and it was Sharons government that began construction of a massive security wall inside the West Bank that annexed a strip of West Bank land into Israel.

In 2003 came the intrusion of then British Labour prime minister Tony Blair, who spearheaded a road map from the quartet formed by the UN, the European Union, UK and US. Then later in 2003 came a separate initiative the Geneva Accord. Sharon made sure these limited interventions went nowhere and turned to superseding them with a plan of his own: unilateral disengagement from Gaza.

That went ahead in 2005, with the removal of settlers from the Gaza Strip, not as a concession to the Palestinians but to remove the settlements that were the most difficult and costly to protect and to turn the strip into a blockaded prison. His senior advisor, Dov Weiglass, bluntly said: The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Israels ruling class was concluding that the Palestinians couldnt be subdued militarily, the occupation was expensive, and relative birth rates would result in Palestinians outnumbering Jews in all the land controlled by Israel, so a forced separation was in the best interests of Israel, not least to keep it as a mainly Jewish state.

It shouldnt have been a surprise to anyone that Hamas won the PA elections in 2006, under the banner change and reform, in what was a crushing defeat for Fatah. US agents in collaboration with Israel intervened to try to prevent Hamas from being any part of the PA leadership. They encouraged Fatah into a violent power struggle with Hamas. The resulting clashes led to Hamas ruling in Gaza, and Fatah continuing to control the West Bank.

The blockade of Gaza was stepped up, along with regular missile strikes on Palestinian fighters and civilians inside the strip, killing around ten times more Gazans than the number of Israeli civilians who were being killed by rocket fire into Israel from various Palestinian militias.

At the end of 2008 the IDF went to war on Gaza, in Operation Cast Lead, aimed at crushing Hamas. The three-week war killed more than 1,000 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.

Further terrible wars on Gaza were carried out in 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2023, repulsively dubbed mowing the grass by Israeli military figures. Each time the IDF inflicted mass slaughter and terror. None of the wars can wipe out Hamas, as its ideology can live on through a layer of the Palestinian population.

This history of the conflict has been written in November 2023 with the worst war yet on Gaza taking place. Before it, the death toll in the conflict from the year 2000 was 10,655 Palestinians and 1,330 Israelis. Both those figures doubled in the space of just five weeks and the former could treble or more. Terrible devastation, displacement and trauma have been inflicted on the trapped population in the Gaza strip.

The unprecedented attack by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Israeli military bases and residential areas on 7 October 2023 sent a massive shockwave across Israel. Great anger was directed at Netanyahus government for not having prevented it, the sixth government led by Netanyahu, with two of the most far-right parties being part of his coalition. They openly incite racial division, threaten Muslim prayer at the Noble Sanctuary /Temple Mount and desire further expulsion of Palestinians from all the land they claim as Jewish.

Israel is a capitalist, class-based society with the second-highest level of inequality in the industrially developed world. Living standards for a majority of Israelis have been eroded by low wages, exorbitant housing costs, inflation, and cuts in services and benefits.

There have been a great many workers strikes including some general strikes and community-based struggles. In 2011 a mass movement broke out against the housing crisis and extended to other issues, inspired by the uprisings that shook the Arab countries that year. From December 2017 large protests were regularly staged against Netanyahu over corruption charges against him, and from January 2023 a nine month mass movement began the largest ever against the government curbing the powers of the judiciary. There have also been many struggles by minorities in Israel, including among Palestinian citizens of Israel, Ethiopian Jews and Bedouin.

Ordinary Israelis are certainly not happy with the state of their country and the number emigrating is high. Middle East Monitor reported that the most common words in Google searches in Israel had become moving out (6 October 2023). Support for the Labour Party has haemorrhaged away over the last three decades and there is disillusionment towards all the main political parties.

Each war has meant spikes upwards in the siege mentality inside Israel, drawing Israelis into supporting the use of military might. Some left organisations wrongly believe this will always be the case that nationalism in the Israeli working class will forever come before support for the rights of the Palestinians. But the cause and driving force of the conflict has always been the imperialist powers and Israeli ruling class and not ordinary Israelis, who have nothing to gain from it. At many times a majority have expressed support for peace processes and for the Palestinians to have their own state, but the interests of their ruling class have stepped in.

This doesnt mean the Palestinians should wait for Israeli workers to challenge Israeli capitalism. As well as the intifadas there have been many other mass mobilisations of Palestinians that point the way forward for future struggles to advance their interests, from demonstrations next to the Gaza fence in 2018-19 to strike action by public sector workers and others. A third intifada is needed, only this time organised democratically and based on socialist ideas.

Palestinian workers also need to build their own political party that can challenge the pro-capitalist parties in the West Bank and Gaza. The same is true in Israel: an Israeli mass workers party needs to be created. As no solution to the conflict is possible in keeping with the interests of the capitalists and their rotting system, those parties will need to adopt socialist programmes for the removal of capitalism. Public ownership of the main corporations and democratically controlled economic planning would mean the necessary resources could be generated to end poverty and raise living standards on both sides, using environmentally sustainable methods.

The ending of capitalism with its need for competition and markets would deliver the basis for ending the conflict. Democratically elected representatives from both sides would be able to negotiate solutions based on cooperation, in two socialist states if desired, with minority rights protected.

Today, even though there is a loss of hope that two states can be achieved, the idea of them is much more acceptable on both sides than one state, because of the huge level of distrust that has developed after decades of bloodshed and the fears of being discriminated against in one state. But it will be democratic discussion between Palestinian and Israeli workers representatives that will determine what borders there will be and where, if any.

Under capitalism, conditions for the overwhelming majority of people in the entire region are becoming worse as time goes on. The rotten, dictatorial Arab regimes need to be overthrown as well as the ruling class in Israel and the elite in the Palestine territories. A socialist confederation of the Middle East on a free and equal basis will need to be built, with all resources under the democratic control of workers and the poor.

Read more from the original source:
Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Socialist Party