On October 9, a new ceasefire in Gaza was announced. The last one took effect in January 2025 as Donald Trump assumed office. Many hoped this was the end of the Gaza genocide.
In March, the genocide resumed as Trump and Zionist entity leaders made clear their aims included the complete removal of the Palestinian population from Gaza. Kept open was whether this process was through ethnic cleansing or physical annihilation (literal genocide).
Physical annihilation was achieved by killing through mass bombing, cutting off food and water, causing manufactured famine, and disease.
Trump tried to convince various countries, ranging from Indonesia to Somalia, to take in the Palestinian Arabs from Gaza. This would mean those who physically survived would be scattered, ending any hope for a Palestinian nation. There were no takers. (1)
The main author of the disaster made clear that it will not take in any Palestinians. Gazans are themselves largely descendants of refugees from other parts of Palestine who became refugees in the 1948 Nakba.
Trump planned to replace the removed population with a resort complete with casinos and towering apartment buildings, taking advantage of Gaza’s beautiful Mediterranean coastline, where the wealthy, as long as they were not Palestinians, could enjoy swimming, gambling, drinking, drugs, and sex. Trump made clear he hoped his Trump Organization (it resembles an old-time New York City crime family) would play the key role in developing the new Gaza.
Colonialism, old and new
Trump, like Zionist entity leaders, lives in a world where colonialism (not neocolonialism) and open racism come naturally. (2)
In this bygone world, settlers recruited from the European surplus population conquered the wilderness in North America, Africa, and Australia, killed off as many of the Native population as possible and drove survivors into reservations or Bantustans. They engaged in farming or sometimes in mining the land, hoping to get rich in the new worlds. They recruited from the most wretched of the surplus white population of Europe, even the mass of Eastern European Jews, who were viewed as superior to Brown and Black Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Asia, and Africa.
Drawing on insights from historical materialism, this colonial ideology reflects a stage in the history of production characterized by small-scale production, especially in agriculture and mining. It was said American streets were paved with gold. Europeans who left for the colonies were admired as tough and self-reliant, clearing the wilderness, fighting off native savages, and growing rich.
In this environment, it was easy to sell “Israel,” including to the left wing in Europe as well as in the U.S., as a heroic endeavor by survivors of the holocaust, who, after two thousand years, were returning to their ancestral homeland. The fact that this wasn’t true made no difference.
Decline of Settler Colonialism
Times have changed — but why?
Though the Russian socialist revolution was overthrown between 1985 and 1991, the seventy years it survived made a big difference. So did the Chinese, Korean, Cuban, and Vietnamese revolutions. When China stood up in 1949, so did billions of people — the great mass of humanity — who lived in the still-colonial and semi-colonial world.
Meantime, the decline of small-scale production undercut the roots of settler colonialism. The Zionist entity was established at the tail end of the settler-colonial era.
U.S. Imperialism and the Zionist Entity
For the U.S. world empire emerging from World War II, Israel was what was needed to establish domination over what U.S. imperialism called the Middle East. U.S. imperialism took up the Zionist project from Great Britain.
During the 1950s, the Zionist entity maneuvered between declining British and French imperialism and the more powerful U.S. imperialism.
Between 1954 and 1962, France engaged in a colonial war against the Algerian people. When Britain, France, and the Zionists went to war against Egypt after it dared to nationalize the Suez Canal, Washington read the riot act to London, Paris, and Tel Aviv for daring to act without permission.
After that, the Zionist entity has been forced to work within U.S. policies. This has given rise to the notion in progressive and reactionary circles that the Israeli and Zionist lobby acts independently of U.S. imperialism, and somehow controls it.
Myth of the ‘Zionist Lobby’ Control
Progressives and some reactionaries, such as Tucker Carlson, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and others, proclaim that due to the domination of the Zionist lobby, the U.S. government puts U.S. interests second (or last) and Israel’s interests first.
These progressives have no notion that the U.S. is divided into classes, and whose class interests are being discussed. This is ABC for Marxists but not for progressives.
Global Uprising Against U.S.-Israel
In recent months, protests and growing strike actions have been mounted against the increasing Palestinian genocide. In Italy, demonstrations swept through Rome, with estimates reaching 1 million. Italian workers show the way forward by supporting the Sumud Flotilla, which attempted to provide relief to the U.S.-supported Israeli-manufactured famine.
Among flotilla participants is well-known climate activist Greta Thunberg, who has used her fame (or, in capitalist circles, infamy) in the climate movement. Instead of resting on her laurels, she’s brought her name and allegiance to the anti-genocide movement.
As expected, the Israeli military attacked the flotilla in international waters. This was Thunberg’s second flotilla attempt.
According to reports after capture, the arrested participants were taken to a prison designed to hold Palestinian resisters. Thunberg was forced to kiss an Israeli flag and to listen to a speech by the terrorist thug Itamar Ben-Gvir, who serves as minister of national security.
To be accused of terrorism by this police thug would be a great honor. They were then thrown into bedbug-ridden cells, denied food and water, and threatened with gassing.
How great is modern Israel to threaten brave people like these, whose only crime is trying to stop a genocide with the same fate that European Jews faced eighty to eighty-five years ago?
Fortunately, the Israeli authorities were forced to release Thunberg and most of her fellow protesters. Arriving at Athens airport, she refused to dwell on her own mistreatment at the hands of her Zionist jailers, claiming (I think she does an injustice to herself) she did only the bare minimum.
Instead, she and the other flotilla members focused on the suffering of the Palestinian people and the shameful inaction of Western governments.
The moral gap between Thunberg on one side and the thugs like Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu, and Trump on the other was underlined in the sharpest possible way.
The flotilla participants would have been impotent if it weren’t for the millions of people in the West — and more so in the Global South — who are taking to the streets and picket lines to show they have had enough. Things have reached the point where imperialism can no longer ignore the mounting wave of resistance of the world’s people against the crimes the U.S. and its Zionist entity commit in Palestine.
Almost all Western governments, except the U.S., announced they will recognize the State of Palestine.
U.S. polls reveal that Democratic supporters (not leaders) in a massive super-majority support the Palestinian people in their struggle against genocide. Though Republicans continue their support for Israel, in reduced majorities among young Republicans are turning against it.
As noted above, some far-right-wing Republican leaders are speaking out against Zionist entity crimes. The motives of these figures are not to support Palestinian liberation, but it shows that even they judge that the only pragmatic political calculation is that it’s time to abandon their traditional stand of solid support to Israel.
In earlier posts, I explained that anti-Semites, including Nazis themselves, have a long history of supporting Zionism as a solution to the so-called Jewish Question.
Many Jews, particularly the younger members of the Jewish community, have indicated for some time that they’ve had enough of Israel and Zionism. Jewish Americans were an essential element in demonstrations that swept college campuses, giving the (big) lie that those opposing genocide were anti-Semitic.
Both Biden’s and now Trump’s administrations have moved to suppress these demonstrations, but pro-Palestine sentiments are stronger than ever.
While a few months ago the Trump administration indicated its solution to the problem was to empty Gaza of all Palestinian Arabs, they have been forced to retreat.
The latest peace proposal that includes setting up a so-called peace commission headed by Trump and the hated former British prime minister Tony Blair indicates Palestinians can stay in Gaza.
Coming from the arch-racist Trump administration, this is quite a concession, though, to be realistic, it shows not a change in aim so much as a change in tactics and timing.
How long the current pause in the bombing will last and how much food and water will be allowed into the strip (whose material foundation has been destroyed by mass bombing) remains to be seen.
Aid must be allowed in before we can say the genocide has even been paused. This is no time to ease the pressure on the genocide’s architects in Tel Aviv and Washington.
Why the Genocide Happened
Assuming this time we are entering a pause that lasts more than two months, it doesn’t answer why this horror that unfolded both under the relatively liberal Genocide Joe Biden administration and its far-right successor, the Trump administration. Different styles and rhetoric, but the same results.
While the majority of Democratic Party supporters have turned against the Zionist entity, the leadership continues its stubborn support.
As with his Democratic predecessor, Trump continues to support Israel in words as well as with billions of dollars.
Marxist Analysis vs. Liberal Explanations
Why did both Democrat Biden and Republican Trump support and bankroll the genocide?
This is where Marxist analysis and liberal-progressive and reactionary explanations diverge.
In preparing these blog posts, I have to spend many hours online listening to various liberal podcasters on that great twenty-four-hour-a-day salon that the modern internet has become. Occasionally, I switch to a podcast on dinosaurs, the search for ancient life on Mars, or another scientific topic to clear my head.
To their credit, most liberal-progressive podcasters denounce the Palestinian genocide with great, I believe sincere, passion. Explaining why the genocide occurs is another question.
We hear a lot about how AIPAC bought Congress, or speculations on how Israel might be using compromising material on Trump gathered by the late Jeffrey Epstein to blackmail him into supporting Israel’s genocidal policies.
The story told by progressives and reactionaries alike is that a corrupt U.S. government (and I certainly do not deny this corruption) puts Israel ahead of the interests of the U.S., which ignores the fact that the U.S. is a country profoundly divided by class.
To avoid misunderstanding, I believe there may be some truth to the claims that Netanyahu is blackmailing Trump. It is widely thought that Epstein was an Israeli Mossad agent, and it’s likely the Netanyahu government has some compromising material on Trump.
It wouldn’t be tough for such intelligence to be gathered because we know he is both financially and sexually corrupt (as are, by the way, the leaders of the Israeli government). Perhaps Israeli intelligence has managed to gather some particularly shocking information not generally known. Conspiracies do happen, so conspiracy theories are not necessarily wrong. I wouldn’t be surprised if Epstein were killed in prison, his murderers working for people in high places who had things to hide, though I can’t prove it.
Imperialism’s support of Zionism, at least since the Balfour declaration of 1917, cannot be explained through conspiracy theories or the personal corruption of this or that prime minister or president. Corrupt politicians come and go; support of Western politicians for the Zionist program and ideology remains a constant.
To find the root of imperialist support for Zionism, first by Britain and, after 1945, by the U.S., we have to look into the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production.
The Chinese Revolution and Its Development
We only have to look at present-day China to get a hint. This is not a place to examine the Chinese Revolution, and I do not attempt to do so; it could fill volumes.
It is a fact that many Western leftists beginning in the late 1970s have been disappointed in the results of China’s Revolution. Many believe there was a counterrevolution similar to the one in the USSR in 1985-91.
Indeed, since the 1990s, large-scale capitalist enterprises have been developed. Forgotten is that the Chinese Communist Party’s program, when it came to power in 1949, envisioned just such a development.
Most Western leftists — whether Trotskyist or Stalinist — have looked at the Chinese Revolution through the prism of the Russian Revolution. The Chinese Revolution has followed its own course, reflecting China’s conditions and history, not Russia’s.
The Soviet Union developed behind the protection of a foreign trade monopoly, a closed, state-owned, socialist planned economy with minimal trade with the surrounding global capitalist economy.
Since the 1980s, the Chinese economy has developed large-scale for-profit private enterprises and for-profit state enterprises where the state is a major shareholder alongside private shareholders. Unlike Soviet state enterprises, you can buy shares in Chinese state enterprises on the stock exchanges.
It was not possible to purchase shares in Soviet state enterprises, as they operated exclusively within the Soviet Union and there were no private shareholders. Chinese state companies, as well as private enterprises, operate in many countries.
China’s Industrial Transformation
Whatever you think of its economic model and relationship to the aim of an eventual communist society without classes, this much cannot be denied. China has emerged as the leading industrial country in the world market.
For the first time in its four or five thousand-year history, China is no longer a peasant-majority country but a predominantly urban society — though a large peasant minority still lives in the vast countryside.
This change in Chinese history has been so rapid and dynamic that we are still struggling to grasp its full significance.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, U.S. media gloated over the development of private enterprises in China, but not anymore. Today, the U.S. views Chinese private capitalist enterprises as well as for-profit state enterprises as a Frankenstein monster that threatens to bring down many corporations through the weapon that not that long ago was the main one wielded by a rising U.S. capitalism.
This weapon is cheap commodities. Nowadays, it is not Britain nor the United States that speaks of “free trade,” but rather representatives of the People’s Republic of China. History has come full circle.
From Peasant Economy to Industrial Power
In pre-1949 China, though there were a few small islands of capitalist production in coastal cities, the economy remained largely small-scale peasant agriculture. The conditions for establishing a socialist society were almost entirely absent. Today, no matter how capitalist its economy, a powerful industrial base has been created with textile industries (light industry), traditional heavy industry, and now high-tech or computer industries.
This has created a powerful industrial working class that is laying the foundations for a modern socialist economy and, eventually, a full-scale communist society.
The Threat to U.S. Imperialism
Coming back to the present, the Chinese economy has emerged as a powerful alternative source of finance and markets for other countries seeking industrialization, even if on a capitalist basis.
When Western banks refuse to finance their development, they can now turn to Chinese financial institutions.
This has enraged U.S. leaders of both parties, Trump supporters and opponents alike. What happens if Arab countries unite in a common state and end their centuries of humiliation as China did in 1949?
This doesn’t mean Arabs will follow China’s example. Economic conditions and class relationships differ from those in China.
Obviously, a triumphant Arab revolution that created a Soviet-style socialist economy would be a massive blow to U.S. imperialism.
For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that Arabs create an economy more like present-day China — or even a more capitalist one —but with the same dynamism as China’s.
The result would be catastrophic for U.S. capitalism, as one China is already more than they can handle. The United States is determined to stop this at any price, not because it’s in the head of any one president, but because the economic interests of capitalism require it.
Oil Monarchies and the Zionist Entity
To guarantee U.S. imperialism’s control of Middle Eastern oil and prevent any dangerous independent economic development of the Arab countries, first, the British, until 1945 and since then, U.S. imperialism has followed two tactics.
One: Imperialism created oil monarchies in oil-rich regions.
Second: Imperialism created the Zionist entity, the State of Israel.
During the first half of the 20th century, imperialism eliminated Jews who had lived in Europe for thousands of years, killing the majority in the holocaust, with survivors transferred mainly to Palestine, creating the Zionist entity.
In a secondary process, Jews who had lived in the Arab world for hundreds, even thousands of years, were also transferred to Palestine. It’s beyond the scope of this post to examine how this was done, but ultimately, it was the pressure of imperialism that lay behind it.
The creation of Israel began at the end of the 19th century by settling European Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe, in Palestine. The ideology of late 19th and early 20th-century Zionism preached that in Palestine, Jews would return to the land their distant ancestors had supposedly inhabited thousands of years ago. (3)
Kibbutzim and the Myth of Socialist Zionism
Since most European Jews were primarily engaged in commercial pursuits, not agriculture, collective farms called kibbutzim were established to teach the art of farming. It was easier for a Jewish settler to fit into the kibbutz’s division of labor than to farm the land individually, though a few did.
Since most of the settlers came from Eastern Europe in the era of the Russian Revolution, the Zionists found it advantageous to give kibbutzim a pseudo-socialist coloration.
It was claimed that not only were Jews returning to their ancient homeland, they were also leaving their traditional occupations in trade behind and learning to be productive workers on the land, that the kibbutzim were socialist enterprises. As late as the 1960s, Israel was portrayed as a socialist society. Then, socialist opponents of Zionism wrote pamphlets explaining why Israel was not socialist.
Today, we no longer have to waste time explaining this illusion!
Behind the pseudo-socialist facade, what was really happening was, in alliance with the British, and even to an extent, 1930s Nazi Germany, which was determined to get rid of its own Jews one way or another, and then U.S. imperialism, the settlers created a settler-colonial society along colonial-capitalist lines. (4) Today, the kibbutzim are purely capitalist enterprises. They grabbed the land of the native peasant Arab population (as confirmed by modern DNA testing), who, for the most part, have lived on the land for thousands of years, and drove them out of their own country.
The Zionist leaders pursued a policy of displacement and elimination against Palestinian Arabs, marked by both mass expulsion and massacres.
This bears a tragic resemblance to the methods used by U.S. pioneers, who also sought to remove and destroy Native communities through warfare and massacres, and differs from the South African apartheid model, which was primarily based on the exploitation and subjugation of the Black majority.
Naturally, the native Palestinians had no choice but to fight back. This made the settlers more dependent on their imperialist backers in opposition to the increasingly anti-imperialist aspirations of the native people, as well as those throughout the Arab world.
The real purpose of the kibbutzim was not to build a socialist society, but to eliminate the Arab peasantry. In line with capitalism’s economic laws, the kibbutzim evolved into purely capitalist enterprises. The socialist society of the Zionist colonizers was a mirage.
The Making of a Colonial Country
The development of Israel into a European-American-sponsored colony made the position of Arab Jews living in other Arab countries increasingly untenable. Zionism did everything it could to see that Arab — and Iranian — Jews were removed from their native countries.
Once in Israel, they were de-Arabized and encouraged to forget their native Arabic language, like European Jews were encouraged to forget their native Yiddish and other European languages and instead speak the artificially created neo-Hebrew language of the colony along with English, the language of global imperialism.
Israel, more accurately called the Zionist entity, is not a real nation. It exists only because it is a direct representative of imperialism in the heart of the Arab world.
As such, it is in permanent opposition to the modern Arab nation that is attempting to form. Only the destruction of the entire 450 million-strong Arab nation, and possibly the Iranian nation as well, could make it possible for Israel to maybe become a nation. In reality, there is no path for Israel to become any more than what it has always been, an imperialist colony, not a neocolony, planted in the heart of the Arab world.
Having this entity, which resembles a classic European colony, in the center of the Arab world has made it impossible for the Arab world to develop, even along capitalist lines. It remains divided into weak states that U.S. imperialism tries to further break up into smaller and weaker states, as we see in Syria today.
In the meantime, the area’s natural resources are being burned away by the oil monarchies in league with the oil monopolies, a double crime. One, by pumping out more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, a crime against the ecology of the entire earth; and two, it is a crime against the Arab people.
The oil monarchies have a different structure than Israel, but also exist for the sole purpose of preventing the Arab nation from developing into a modern nation like China, Vietnam, and even India.
As desert countries, the oil monarchies are thinly populated. They are forced to import workers from the subcontinent of India and Pakistan. These workers have no intention of settling in where they are currently employed, but plan to return to their home countries.
Israel, with a population of only around seven and a half million Jews, is not a true nation and represents no serious economic competition to U.S. capitalism. This is why both political parties are determined to continue to maintain it, even at the cost of the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Neoclassical economics versus Marxism
If you believe neoclassical economics, the policy of the United States is irrational. As long as free-market policies are followed, the full employment of both machines and workers should prevail in both rich and poor countries.
The law of comparative advantage holds that, as long as free trade prevails, each nation will produce the types of commodities that maximize labor productivity on an international scale, given prevailing technical conditions of production.
As neoclassical economics says, since the living standards of all classes rise with the growth of labor productivity, the maximum freedom of trade is in the interests of every person on earth. Just as government shouldn’t hobble trade within a nation, it shouldn’t do so on an international scale.
Governments should make no attempts to determine prices — doing so prevents the market from setting prices that reflect the degree of scarcity of various commodities.
Since currency exchange rates are just the price of one currency in terms of another, the government and central banks should get out of the business of setting currency exchange rates.
Marx’s economics is based on his critique of classical capitalist political economy, which, unlike neoclassicalism, was a real science. By correcting the mistakes of classical economists and taking them to their logical conclusion, Marx showed that capitalism is a transitory stage in the history of production, and that further development will give way to a communist economy without social classes.
After a transitional period of working-class rule, classes and class rule that began about ten thousand years ago will come to an end.
If we take neoclassical economics seriously, none of Trump’s policies makes any sense. The U.S. should be following a free trade, not protectionist, policy or even one of promoting certain industries, as liberals and progressives advocate.
The U.S. should not be worried about the dangers of Chinese competition or from other nations. Free trade and the law of comparative advantage guarantee that an optimal international division of labor will emerge, serving all nations equally well.
Nor should Trump be trying to bully the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. Says Law, part of neoclassical economics, guarantees that a recession (a crisis of general overproduction) can never occur. Whatever neoclassical economics describes, it is not our world.
Neoclassical economics and the closely related Austrian school stand in fundamental opposition to the Marxist critique of classical political economy. This opposition parallels the philosophical divide between idealism and materialism.
However, just as intermediate positions exist between these philosophical poles, numerous theoretical tendencies in economics occupy the middle ground between the Marxist tradition on one end and the neoclassical-Austrian position on the other.
Keynes and the ‘Middle Ground’
John Maynard Keynes’s “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” (1936) exemplifies such an intermediate position. Keynes modified neoclassical economics by arguing that, under conditions of mature capitalism, state intervention becomes necessary to prevent depressions and mass unemployment from reaching catastrophic levels.
Nevertheless, Keynes — like orthodox neoclassical economists — maintained that capitalism represented both the optimal system for organizing economic life and was the final form of production. While the Keynes of the General Theory had departed from pure neoclassical orthodoxy (which characterized his earlier work), he remained much closer to the neoclassical school than to Marxist political economy.
The Monthly Review school, led by Paul Sweezy, is another intermediate school, one that stands closer to Marxism. This school believes that socialism will eventually replace capitalism.
While Keynes rejected the law of labor value in favor of neoclassical scarcity theory of value, or marginalism, the Monthly Review school upholds Marx’s law of value at least to the extent they understand it.
They believe Marx’s “Capital” has long been out of date. They think that, from about the last third of the 19th century onward, competitive capitalism has been replaced by a monopoly governed by entirely different laws.
They believe Marx’s “Capital” and his other economic works describe the economic laws that govern competitive capitalism, but not those that rule monopoly capital.
They believed, at least in the 1940s and 1950s, that Keynesian-style intervention involving government spending could be effective in combating depressions. And though I don’t have the space to go into it here, the influence of neoclassical economics and Keynesianism is apparent in Sweezy’s work.
At times, Sweezy confused neoclassical notions with Marxism.
The most significant difference between them was that Marx believed the working class would eventually conquer political power and use it to transform capitalist society into a communist one.
Sweezy believed socialism would come from a movement of marginalized people and peasants, especially in what we now call the Global South. He held out little hope for the working class of his own nation, the United States, and imperialist countries in general.
Another example of an intermediate position involves the late David Horowitz (1939 – 2025). Throughout the latter part of his life, Horowitz was notorious for his far-right, extreme-Zionist views. But back in the 1960s, he was considered a leader of the new left, a radical socialist opponent of U.S. imperialism.
When Baran and Sweezy’s “Monopoly Capital” was published in 1966, Horowitz praised it for dumping Marx’s labor theory of value and embracing Keynesian notions. Sweezy denied he had rejected Marx’s theory of value. The Horowitz of the 1960s held an intermediate position between Sweezy and neoclassical economics, upholding socialism but already standing closer to neoclassical economics than Sweezy. In contrast, Sweezy remained a socialist until he died in 2004.
Trimming Marx’s beard
Sometime in my youth, I heard the phrase “trimming Marx’s beard.” This referred to various attempts to water down Marx’s work, removing its sharp revolutionary edge.
Regarding Marx’s economic work, trimming his beard often means accepting all of it except his finding that money always remains a commodity.
An example of this is Anwar Shaikh. Shaikh has stubbornly defended most of Marx’s economic work. Unlike the Monthly Review school, Shaikh defends Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and makes it central to his economic analysis.
The Monthly Review school describes Shaikh’s views as fundamentalist because he refuses to bring Marx “up to date” by scrapping key findings, such as the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
But in one sense, Shaikh has given Marx’s unruly beard a trim — Marx’s theory of money.
Like most contemporary Marxists, though with some qualifications, Shaikh believes that what he calls pure fiat money is possible under the capitalist system. He believes that since 1940, capitalist money has been just that — money in its own right, not a representative of gold in circulation.
To be sure, Shaikh’s beard trimming has itself been rather untidy. He acknowledges that gold continues to act as a means of safety during crises and, in his work on long waves, actually calculates price movements both before and after 1940 in terms of gold.. Most other academic Marxists, at least in the West, support the view that, after 1971, when Nixon broke the link between gold and the dollar, money has completely lost its character as a commodity.
A reader has pointed out that at least one academic economist rejects the view that non-commodity money is even a theoretical possibility within the capitalist system, let alone that it has been established in reality. This academic economist is Claus M. Germer, a professor at the Federal University of Parana in Brazil.
In a 2005 article, “The Commodity Nature of Money in Marx’s Theory,” Germer explains that “Marx’s theory of money has become a growing subject of debate in recent years. A specific point in the discussion deals with the physical nature of money, that is, whether or not money must be a commodity within this theory. A significant number of contemporary Marxist authors defend the point of view that money need not be a commodity in Marx’s theory, or that such a theory is compatible with non-commodity forms of money (Reuten:1988; Lipietz:1983; Foley:1986).”
Germer explains, “Numerous literal quotations from Marx’s work can be justified by the need to leave no room for doubt regarding my interpretation. I also seek to show that attention must be paid both to what Marx says and doesn’t say. This is important because we can thus appreciate the total absence of any reference in Marx to the hypothesis that money must at any point become a non–commodity. [my emphasis -SW]
“Money, (…) the universal commodity — must itself exist as a particular commodity alongside the others” (Marx, 1939:165); “… the universal equivalent form becomes identified with the bodily form of a particular commodity, and thus crystallized into the money-form. … Commodities find their own value already completely represented, without any initiative on their part, in another commodity existing in company with them” (Marx, 1867a:42)
Germer goes on, “That Marx maintains his conception of money as a commodity — and of gold as its final evolutived form — throughout his entire work, even after the analysis of the complex credit system of capitalism, in Part Five, Capital III. There is no indication at all that he may have considered the forms of credit money — bank notes and deposits — as more developed forms of money itself.”
He explains that Marx held this position to the end of his life. Two years before he died in 1881, Marx wrote, “In the development of the value form of the commodity, in the final instance its money form, and thus of money, the value of a commodity presents itself in the use-value of the other commodity, i.e. in the natural form of the latter” (Marx, 1881).
Germer says, “Lastly, the fact that social labor — or value — should be represented in a commodity — money — is for Marx one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism, from which capitalists are unable to free themselves, notwithstanding their continuous efforts to do so.”
And Germer goes on, “Money is an element of the sphere of circulation of commodities, whose nature is not affected by the nature of the internal constitution of the units of production. Whatever the nature of the latter, what is determining is the fact that, although being juridically independent from one another, they depend from one another for their material reproduction. Therefore, the labours they perform are particular labours that have to be converted into social labour. And the absence of a social plan of production able to consciously articulate their material interdependence requires that the particular converted, in the shape of its product itself, into the representation of social labour. The fact that the product of each unit is divided between capitalists and workers, and that the part that belongs to the capitalists is on its turn divided among them according to a uniform rate — the average rate of profit — does not affect the cause that originates money and requires that it be a commodity.”
Germer quotes Marx, “With the development of the credit system, capitalist production continually strives to overcome the metal barrier [money – CMG], that is simultaneously a material and imaginative barrier of wealth and its movement, but again and again it breaks its back on this barrier” (Marx, 1894:574); ‘but it should always be borne in mind that (…) money — in the form of precious metal — remains the foundation from which the credit system, by its very nature, can never detach itself’ (Ibidem:606); “The banking system shows, … by substituting various forms of circulating credit in place of money, that money … as antithetical to the basis of private production, must always appear in the last analysis as a thing, a special commodity, alongside other commodities” (Ibidem:607, emphasis added).
I [SW] want to draw special attention to Marx’s statement: “But it should always be borne in mind that … money — in the form of precious metal — remains the foundation from which the credit system, by its very nature, can never detach”. Marx, the master dialectician, does not use the word “never” lightly.
What do these quotes from Germer and Marx have to do with U.S. policy in Palestine? It turns out quite a lot.
In “Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises,” Anwar Shaikh draws a significant conclusion about pure fiat money — a monetary form that both Germer and Marx considered impossible under capitalism. Shaikh argues that, with fiat currency, the state and its central bank possess the capacity to generate any amount of demand they desire.
At bottom, overproduction is relative to something, and it’s not human needs. Under capitalism, production is for profit, which, in the final analysis, is measured in the use value of the money commodity. The flip side of every crisis of overproduction is a money famine.
If pure fiat money were genuinely possible under capitalism, the capitalist state could resolve crises of overproduction by producing more fiat money whenever a money shortage threatened. Under such conditions, the problem of demand and the realization of surplus value would become trivial — a mere technical matter solvable through administrative-technical means. The prescription would be straightforward: whenever crisis looms, flood the money market with newly created fiat currency, whether in the form of paper and ink or electronic entries.
Commodity money is another matter entirely. Expanding the money supply requires profitable gold production — itself dependent on lower commodity prices, which increases the profitability of producing gold. Capitalists must locate gold-bearing ore, develop new mines, extract and refine the metal, and accumulate it in sufficient quantities to expand the golden monetary base.
This process requires years to complete. During this protracted interval, workers, factories, and machinery remain idle due to insufficient markets. As previously discussed in this blog, only under conditions of total war mobilization, which suppresses expanded capitalist reproduction, can the economy absorb this unemployment for a while before a new crisis erupts. In capitalism, the nature of money as a commodity means the system cannot respond quickly enough to prevent the next downturn.
If the expansion of the market could be explained purely by the multiplier and accelerator effects, we would live in a very different world.. From the viewpoint of an individual nation like the United States, the growth of industry through multiplier and accelerator effects would increase the size of the market, as happens during the upward phase of the industrial cycle.
If this were all there were to the growth of the market, the United States would welcome the increased demand for its products, for example, due to China’s industrialization.
The United States would welcome the increased demand produced by the industrialization of the Arab nations, as well as the rest of the world. Why then try to hold back the Arab world’s development by creating Israel?
If money didn’t have to be a commodity, there would be enough markets to satisfy American, Chinese, Indian, Arab, indeed, all the world’s capitalists. This is indeed the pretty picture taught by neoclassical economics.
Since, thanks to the commodity nature of money, the market cannot keep up with the growth of production. U.S. capitalists have good reason to fear that the development of production in other countries will take markets away from them, whether those markets are abroad (foreign markets) or at home.
Trump’s trade war and protectionist policies, no matter how destructive and dangerous, particularly in the nuclear age, did not fall from the sky. If the genocide of the Palestinian people is the necessary price to prevent the Arab world from emerging as an economic competitor, U.S. policymakers, whether under Biden or Trump, believe it’s a price worth paying.
Of course, Palestinians and Arabs and the people of the world have a different view of the matter.
Why money must be a commodity
The recent price rise in the dollar price of gold is a drop in the quantity of gold — real money — that one dollar represents. If the dollar price of gold is $4,000 an ounce, the dollar represents half as much gold as when the price is $2,000.
It takes a while for dollar prices to adjust to a sudden decline in the amount of gold a dollar represents. When the amount of gold a dollar represents suddenly falls (as it has over the last year), dollar prices of non-money commodities rise at an increasing rate.
If the amount of dollars remains unchanged, interest rates will rise since it takes more dollars to buy a given commodity. As the money market tightens, a recession is triggered.
Higher interest rates reduce the demand for gold. As a recession sets in, demand for dollars rises because it serves as the chief means of payment in the home market as well as on the world market.
This is because the law of value dictates that in the long run, the prices of commodities calculated in gold terms settle at a level close to the actual value at the prices of production. The law also dictates that prices of commodities must be calculated in terms of the use value of the money commodity, gold.
If the Federal Reserve, in the face of a rising dollar price of gold, in its attempts to stave off recession, accelerates the pace at which it creates new dollars, an inflationary monetary crisis is inevitable.
As long as the Federal Reserve keeps the federal funds rate within a fixed range to prevent it from rising above its target range, the Federal Reserve, in order to fight the rise in interest rates, must increase the rate at which it creates new dollars. The dollar price of gold continues to rise, with occasional but increasingly infrequent market corrections. When this happens, the Federal Reserve System falls into an inflation trap.
If allowed to continue, it would end in a hyperinflationary collapse of the dollar, followed by an extreme depression. The result would be the worst economic crisis in the history of capitalism (worse than the 1930s Depression).
A full-scale hyperinflationary collapse of the dollar won’t happen without a pre-existing severe political crisis. The reason is that hyperinflation cannot occur without the creation of new dollars at ever-increasing rates.
The Volcker Shock and After
In the 1970s, the U.S. appeared headed toward hyperinflation, a suicidal policy for the capitalist class. So instead, we got the Volcker Shock of 1979-82.
The Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker refused to accelerate the rate of creating new dollars. This caused rising interest rates, then rising unemployment, to double-digit rates according to official government statistics for the first time since the Great Depression. High interest rates caused capitalists to shift back to dollars, triggering a steep drop in the dollar price of gold, ending the threat of hyperinflation.
The current political crisis in the United States has its roots in the decline in the U.S. share of global production. In 1945, the United States produced approximately half of the world’s industrial output — a historically exceptional moment reflecting the devastation of other major industrial economies during World War II. Today, the U.S. share of world GDP has contracted to approximately 15% or less.
The struggle for markets among nations engaged in capitalist production comes to a head during downturns in the industrial cycle. During the rising phase of the industrial cycle, the growing size of the market dampens economic competition between countries and among individual capitalists.
Even if the capitalist is getting a smaller slice of the pie, the overall pie is growing, so the capitalist still experiences overall market expansion. During the downward phase of the industrial cycle, the world market is stagnant or shrinking.
A loss of the total market share means that capitalists face an absolute shrinkage of their market. This can be fatal for an individual capitalist if it lasts for any length of time, and can lead to a severe social crisis for a country.
Today, the Trump regime is desperately trying to stave off a downturn in the global industrial cycle while turning to protectionism to reverse the decline in the share of U.S. industry and agriculture commanded on the world market.
If a recession can no longer be postponed, Trump hopes its effects will be minimized in the U.S., as U.S. capitalists will be able to compensate by capturing a larger share of a stagnant or declining global market. In this way, he hopes to “export” the recession, pushing the crisis onto other countries.
The current surge in gold demand is a sign that a drop in the industrial cycle cannot be far off. Surging dollar gold prices indicate that the Federal Reserve should be nudging up the federal funds rate to encourage interest to rise to kill the current elevated gold demand.
Rising interest rates would bring the dollar price of gold back down at the cost of a downturn in the industrial cycle. The resulting recession would usher in a new period of mass unemployment and still sharper conflicts among nations engaged in world trade for what is left of the market.
The Trump administration has a great fear of such a downturn, even though the capitalist system needs it to stop ongoing overproduction, because it would shrink Trump’s already limited base of support and cause his administration to be seen as a historic failure by the capitalist class.
Trump has been pushing the Federal Reserve to resume its rate-cutting cycle, though the gold market suggests higher interest rates are needed. The Federal Reserve indicated it will follow its September cut with two more by the end of 2025.
Herein lies the danger of increased dollar price inflation. The longer the needed rise in the fed funds rate is postponed, the more an even higher rate increase will be needed to halt the rising dollar inflation (a nastier new “Volcker Shock”).
Could things get out of hand and end with an actual hyperinflationary collapse? While unlikely, nothing can be ruled out given the nature of the Trump regime.
Has fascism won?
Many progressive websites have declared that the U.S. now has a fascist regime. Before we draw this conclusion, we should consider what fascism is.
It’s been more than eighty years since Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker under a bombed-out Berlin. Since then, the word fascism has been used as a political insult against right-wing politicians.
Supporters of U.S. imperialism have even used the word against left-wing governments they don’t like.
You can, of course, define it any way you want. I prefer to use the word’s original meaning because such a regime has unique characteristics.
In its original sense, fascism does not refer to political dictatorship or even just any right-wing capitalist dictatorship.
In addition to what Marxists call bourgeois democracy and the 20th century’s fascist regimes, there lie other types of reactionary and dictatorial regimes that, like the first two, represent the rule of capital.
Even the most democratic forms of capitalism contain repression in the form of modern police forces, intelligence organizations (secret police) and military forces that, in moments of crisis, are called to bolster regular police.
Even in times and countries where capitalism represents real progress (i.e., the rise in the productivity of human labor), it remains a brutal system of exploitation by the capitalist class of the working class. Between the two main classes is that of independent producers, who are also brutally exploited and crushed by capital.
Whatever its form, the state rises because society finds itself in an unresolved contradiction. As Lenin stressed — and progressives and democratic socialists forget — democracy, from ancient Greece, where the term arose, to the USA, is for a specific class. Democracy never transcends its class nature.
Real freedom begins only when even the most democratic state is no longer. In his pamphlet, “Eighteen Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Marx described bourgeois democracy as the unbounded despotism of class rule.
Under favorable conditions, the capitalist ruling class can rule using democratic forms. When class contradictions sharpen, state power becomes centralized in the hands of a small clique or single individual, seeming to rise above society.
In a capitalist society, whatever form of state power it remains subordinate to the supreme power of money.
Nowhere have conditions remained more favorable for a longer time for a democratic capitalist state than in the USA, “where the streets are paved with gold,” as the myth goes, and the dollar rules supreme.
Even during periods conventionally regarded as the zenith of its democracy, the United States has been fundamentally structured by extreme forms of oppression and exploitation. The republic was founded upon the twin pillars of chattel slavery and the genocidal dispossession of Indigenous populations.
The formal abolition of slavery gave way not to genuine equality but to a continuous system of racist oppression against African Americans — from Reconstruction’s violent reversal through Jim Crow segregation to contemporary forms of racist subordination.
These weren’t deviations from the system—they were essential building blocks of U.S. capitalism. Indeed, no other capitalist country has exhibited class rule in such an unbridled, despotic form as the United States of America.
Its gradual economic decline, as measured by its share of global commodity production, has steadily destroyed the material basis of democracy. This is not a mere cyclical phenomenon that an upswing in the global industrial cycle can cure.
The rise and decline of capitalism in various countries, like successive industrial cycles, but over a longer time, are governed by the economic laws of capitalism, as Lenin called it, “uneven development.”
Capitalism has been dominated by a succession of leading powers: Venice, the Netherlands, Britain, and, over the last century, the United States. The era of U.S. dominance is not yet over, but it is coming to an end.
The global U.S. empire has no intention of going gently into the night. It’s putting up a colossal fight to retain and reconsolidate its domination.
Any other country showing any sign, even potential, of independent economic development is viewed as an enemy.
To reassert dominance, U.S. capitalists are determined to increase the rate of surplus value. If the surplus value rate —the ratio of unpaid labor that creates surplus value to paid labor —is sufficiently increased, the profit rate on U.S. industrial and agricultural production will cause a return of industrial capital.
The days when superior U.S. technology meant an hour of U.S. labor counted for far more than an hour of labor elsewhere are over. Without that productivity advantage, the only way left to increase surplus value and revive domestic industrial production is to lower real wages.
Periodic industrial cycle downturns increase these contradictions, while upturns temporarily dampen them. Rising demand for gold, as reflected in the dollar price and the growing obsession with it, is a sign of an approaching major downturn.
In both the long and short term, the contradictions between the U.S. and other countries are going to get worse, along with the relationship between the classes.
Project 2025 and the Drive to Repression
This is what is behind the Heritage Foundation Project 2025. Hourly real wages must be lowered, along with reducing or removing access to medical care, to force more people onto the labor market. Competition among workers must be increased to drive down wages. Workers of different nationalities must be pitted against one another, and a hysteria against “illegal aliens” (as if our fellow workers are aliens) must be whipped up, as well as promoting the “Christian” nature of the United States, which has religious diversity.
Ignorance must be encouraged among the working and lower-middle classes, while science is increasingly attacked and discredited.
Reactionary ideology can only go so far. As class antagonisms increase, political power must be concentrated in the presidency, while the power of the courts and Congress must be reduced.
According to the written U.S. Constitution, the power to declare war is assigned to Congress, the legislative branch of government. For all practical purposes, since 1945, the right to declare war has been transferred to the executive branch.
It’s true regarding military wars as well as financial ones. Trump has seized the right to levy import taxes (tariffs) from Congress. He wants to abolish income tax and make tariffs the principal source of federal revenue, as they were before World War I.
This makes taxes completely regressive.
If the president unilaterally decrees tariffs, a fundamental constitutional principle will be overturned. Since the English Civil War, parliaments—not monarchs—have held the “power of the purse,” meaning control over taxation and revenue. In the United States, this power belongs to Congress, not the president. Tariffs are a form of taxation. Presidential imposition of tariffs without congressional authorization would therefore represent an executive seizure of legislative power.
Trump also wants to restrict the power of the capitalist press or anyone else to criticize the president. Critics are denounced as radical leftists (even those who are barely liberals) or even as terrorists.
Karl Liebknecht, the German revolutionary socialist, famously declared during World War I, “Der Hauptfeind steht im eigenen Land”—”The main enemy is at home.”
Now, Trump has declared that his main enemy is at home.
Trump wants to use the U.S. military via the National Guard as a kind of auxiliary police force. This year, National Guard forces and/or ICE secret police thugs have been sent into major cities, including Los Angeles, California, Portland, Oregon, and there are threats to send them to San Francisco and Oakland, California, as well as the U.S.’s largest city, New York City, under the excuse that their crime is out of control. In reality, statistics show street crime has declined over the last few years.
Trump attempts to restrict the right to vote by issuing executive orders that every person must present a picture ID before they can vote anywhere in the country under the pretext of preventing “illegal aliens” from voting in elections.
If the courts do not knock down this executive order — and if Trump is not forced to accept the courts’ decision — millions of legal citizens will lose their right to vote.
ICE thugs are arresting people engaged in the pro-Palestine solidarity movement, and others are accused of being “illegal aliens,” throwing them into concentration camps and then deporting them. Presidents of major Ivy League universities have been fired on grounds that they insufficiently suppressed pro-Palestinian anti- genocide actions. Many of those deported have been sent to prisons where they are threatened with torture or worse. The list goes on.
Pointing to these things, many liberals, progressives, and others have declared the Trump regime to be fascist. Won’t the further intensification of repression and centralization of power in the hands of Trump lead to full-fledged fascism?
Except for the oldest, the current living generations have no experience with the fascist regimes that ruled many European countries in the 1930s and 1940s. In reality, there is an important difference between a brutally repressive dictatorial government that cannot ignore the opposition of the people, especially the workers’ movement, and a fascist regime that has destroyed opposition.
Marxists use the term “Bonapartist” to describe repressive capitalist governments that concentrate power in the hands of a small group or single individual — named after Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon III). While Bonapartist regimes are authoritarian and their level of repression varies, they retain important limitations: they cannot completely eliminate all opposition. Resistance remains possible, whether through legal channels or underground methods.
This raises a critical question: Could the Trump administration and similar right-wing governments in other capitalist countries grow increasingly repressive, developing from Bonapartism into full-scale fascism?
Based on the history of European fascism in the first half of the 20th century, I consider this outcome unlikely.
There was no lack of Bonapartist regimes in 20th-century Europe. As the class struggle intensified, these regimes proved unable to contain it. Once the struggle reaches a certain intensity, these regimes are swept away. They are dependent on the police and the armed forces.
It’s risky to use soldiers against the people, because the history of every modern revolution involves the soldiers going over to the side of the people.
This doesn’t mean capitalists are out of options. In addition to relying on the police and army troops to put down mass movements that challenge them, capitalists also use unofficial gangs of thugs.
Henry Ford developed his notorious Ford Service Department that terrorized workers suspected of supporting unionization efforts.
In the contemporary United States, right-wing militias represent the embryonic form of such extra-legal repression. Under certain conditions, these small armed groups can develop into mass reactionary movements.
In 20th-century Europe, such reactionary mass militia movements developed most rapidly precisely when the working class appeared on the verge of taking power — but then failed to do so.
This occurred in Italy, Germany, and Spain.
The middle class, especially the youth, faced no prospects due to economic crises worsened by costly wars. Enraged, they were receptive to right-wing demagogues who blamed the workers’ movement — which had failed to take power — for the social crisis. Marxism was attacked as having “stabbed the nation in the back.”
Right-wing demagogues organized these disenchanted middle-class youth into paramilitary gangs that waged virtual civil war against the left — first targeting communists, then social democrats and trade unions. Bloody street battles became commonplace, and out of this violence, mass fascist movements were born.
While fascist ideology varies by country and context, certain elements remain constant: extreme nationalism, racism (in various forms), and attacks on immigrants. To broaden their appeal beyond the middle class, fascists employed anti-capitalist rhetoric — but of a particular kind. (5)
They verbally attacked the richest and most powerful capitalists, especially financial capitalists, accusing bankers of causing inflation, high interest rates, and tight credit that ruined small producers and shopkeepers — the core of the fascist base.
Here lies the crucial contradiction: while fascists rhetorically attacked big capital, they were secretly financed by it. Big capitalists funded fascist movements as a bulwark against working-class revolution. As fascist movements grew, they became so powerful that a stable government became impossible without their participation. They entered power through coalition governments with traditional conservatives — but unlike their coalition partners, fascists commanded mass paramilitary movements capable of street-level violence and intimidation.
The mass fascist movement isn’t just electoral like Trump’s MAGA. It’s a movement of organized street fighters waging civil war against all opposition, especially from the working class. Once in a coalition government, fascists seize full power — traditional reactionaries must submit or be pushed out. As suppression deepens, both the organized working class, whether its revolutionary communist wing or its moderate reformist wing, are targeted, as are the allies of the working class.
Workers’ movements rarely recover quickly from fascist defeat. Unless foreign invaders overrun the country — as happened with Nazi Germany — fascist regimes can last decades.
Over time, these regimes bureaucratize and lose their mass movement character. In their declining phase, they resemble ordinary Bonapartist dictatorships — still repressive, but without the totalitarian mobilization of their early years.
This was the general European pattern, with Nazi Germany as the clearest example.
How does this apply to the United States today?
Bonapartism in the U.S.
We see a gradual transition from traditional U.S. democracy toward Bonapartism — a trend apparent since the New Deal, particularly marked during Trump’s first administration and even more so in his second.
But the long-range perspective is not one of gradual evolution toward increasingly repressive Bonapartism. Instead, it points toward an intensification of class struggle.
At a certain stage, even full Bonapartism — what Trump and Project 2025 seek — won’t contain the intensifying class struggle. The seizure of power by the working class will be directly posed.
If the working class fails to take power, we’ll likely see fascist movements grow and consolidate into a single party led by a charismatic politician — likely a veteran of one of U.S. imperialism’s many wars.
The process won’t be linear; there will be many ebbs and flows before any showdown. But this represents the likely general pattern.
The current Trump regime is revolting, corrupt, repressive, and increasingly Bonapartist. But to call it fascist is strategically dangerous — it amounts to surrendering before the struggle has truly begun, while simultaneously minimizing the actual threat fascism represents.
Consider what remains possible today but would be impossible under genuine fascism: Podcasters can still denounce the Gaza genocide. The No Kings movement, antiwar activists, and anti-genocide protesters can still apply for police permits and hold legal demonstrations. These activities may be harassed or surveilled, but they remain viable.
Under actual fascism, political space becomes effectively “dead” — not merely restricted but extinguished. This happens through two mechanisms: direct state and paramilitary repression that physically eliminates opposition, and beyond that, a pervasive political demoralization that can paralyze resistance for years or even decades.
It is this combination — violent repression plus the crushing of political hope — that defines fascism’s totalitarian character.
The October 18 No Kings demonstrations indicate that we are still far from the victory of fascism. Estimates are that nearly 7 million people were in the streets of U.S. cities, towns, and villages.
As far as I have been able to find out on the internet, none of them were attacked by police or ICE, there was little to no violence, and few arrests. According to internet videos I watched after returning from a peaceful local demonstration, there were zero arrests in New York City, though there were demonstrations in all five boroughs.
Importantly, I saw no sign of Trump’s MAGA movement counter-demonstrating. I can’t say it didn’t happen anywhere, but as of the morning of October 20, I haven’t seen any such reports. This despite the verbal attacks by Trump and his regime’s leaders, accusing demonstrators of being “anti-American,” “pro-Hamas,” and “Antifa terrorists,” which seemed designed to provoke some kind of street response by pro-Trump MAGA elements.
If a large fascist movement existed and was close to seizing power, we would have seen massive street fighting, attacking the anti-fascist No Kings demonstrations, with blood flowing in the streets.
This does not say that it couldn’t happen in the future, nor deny the real dangers of a Bonapartist-style dictatorship growing out of Trump’s increasingly repressive rule that’s doing all it can to end democratic rights. We must defend hard-won rights, including the right to protest in the streets, as 7 million people did on October 18.
If we lose these rights, at the hands of a Bonapartist police state or, worst of all, a real fascist regime, the consequences will be grave indeed.
If fascism were victorious in the United States, there would have been no mass campus demonstrations against the Gaza genocide. It would not have been possible to use social media to expose the genocide and express opposition.
If some brave people tried anyway, they would be tracked down and arrested and thrown into concentration camps, or simply killed. There would be little to no organized opposition, no millions of workers in Italy’s streets, no mass demonstrations in U.S. or European cities, no flotillas trying to bring aid to Gaza, no Greta Thunbergs shaming the Zionist entity and its imperialist masters in Washington.
If fascism were victorious, U.S. imperialism and its Zionist stooges would have finished the job of physically exterminating the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. They might go further and seize, imprison, or kill any person of Palestinian descent living anywhere.
To fight the genocide of the Palestinians, we must resist the Trump regime and its European counterparts’ threats to take away our right to oppose genocide in the streets and picket lines away from us.
In the end, perhaps sooner than we expect, the question of the working class’s conquest of political power will be posed.
No more genocide, no more imperialist wars, no more unemployment, no more threat of ecological destruction, no more capitalist political rule!
If these struggles are beaten back, fascism will have the chance to impose its solution that, unlike the 1920s, 1930s and the 1940s, would lead to the end of our civilization. Above all, the struggle must not be declared lost before it has really begun.
(1) The feeble development of Arab capitalism limits the demand for Palestinian workers’ labor power. Capitalists view Palestinians as an angry, dangerous mass of people. Though popular among the Arab people, Arab capitalists fear Palestinians will spread “subversive” ideas among their own people, especially the workers. The same goes for the broader Islamic world and other capitalist countries, not least the USA. (back)
(2) Neocolonialism refers to a situation where a country is formally independent but its government is dominated by or subservient to imperialist finance capital. In Palestine, we have a population — the so-called Israelis — that were sent as colonizers to replace the Indigenous population by driving them out or killing them outright. Due to its colonial-settler nature, the Jewish population, terrified of the hundreds of millions of Arabs who surround them, looks to the Western capitalists who sent them there in the first place for protection. The Zionist entity is an example of classic colonialism, not neocolonialism. (back)
(3) Zionist ideology is based on a wild distortion of modern and ancient history. Recent studies of human DNA reveal that European Jews get 19% of their DNA from those who lived in the Levant in biblical times. (The Levant includes Palestine, Lebanon, parts of Syria and Jordan.) Another 20% shows descent from other West Asian populations, and the rest shows descent from other European populations. In contrast, Palestinian DNA shows an ancestry of about 85% from the inhabitants of Palestine in the era when Judaism was emerging in ancient Palestine, with 15% from people from neighboring regions.
These studies back up the claim that the Palestinian people and their ancestors have lived in Palestine for thousands of years with a bit of admixture from neighboring regions, that no modern Jewish population in the world can match. The closest are Iraqi Jews. Iraq, known in ancient times as Babylonia, borders the Levant. A large Jewish community lived in Iraq until the mid-20th century, when they were relocated to Palestine and became part of the Israeli Jewish population. (back)
(4) The Nazis’ driving out numerous German Jewish intellectuals during the 1930s, before the holocaust, had disastrous consequences for German science. Before the Nazis, German science led the world in many fields, not least of all physics. Among the first German Jews who left Germany was Albert Einstein. German physics and mathematics, previously the best in the world, were devastated. As a result, during World War II, Germany made no real progress toward developing the atomic bomb, despite global fears to the contrary. Einstein himself regretted his role in encouraging U.S. development of the atomic bomb, which he expected would be used on Germany. He was horrified when it was used against Japan instead. If Germany had developed it, World War II might have ended differently. The current cuts in science and the general know-nothing attitude toward science by the Trump administration, if continued, may yet produce results similar to what the Nazis did to German science. (back)
(5) Mussolini was a socialist leader before World War I, while Adolf Hitler called his fascist movement the National Socialist German Workers Party. (back)
A Critique of Crisis Theory 