April 29, 2026
Commentators point to the rise in oil prices driven by the Strait of Hormuz closure and damage to the refineries in the Persian Gulf region as the main force driving up inflation. They say it will cause a return to a 1970s-type stagflation — high inflation, economic stagnation and unemployment — and deep recession. Others predict that if the current ceasefire ends in renewed war this will cause a world Depression (with a capital D) worse than even the 1930s.
How much truth is there in these predictions? Historically, a war did not precede the 1930s Great Depression to drive up the prices of various commodities. True, the high commodity prices in general relative to commodity values and production prices played a crucial role in putting the “Great” in that economic crisis and Depression. Could something similar happen as a result of the current war, even though it has not yet reached the scale of World War I?
Early in this blog, in examining the causes of crises, we explored the theory of disproportionate production that arises out of the anarchy of capitalist production. The main question political economy dealt with was not explaining why it occurred in an unplanned capitalist system, but how the proportions needed to continue production are achieved at all. In reality, disproportionate production occurs and has occurred almost every minute throughout the history of capitalist production. At any given moment, some commodities are overproduced relative to others, while some commodities are underproduced. When one kind of commodity is underproduced, its market prices rise above its value, or more strictly, its production price. When overproduced, a commodity’s market price falls below its value and production price.
During the industrial cycle’s boom phase, there’s a tendency for the primary commodity prices to rise sharply. After years of lagging demand, once in the boom phase, through the multiplier and accelerator effects, demand exceeds commodity supply. This causes their market prices to jump, reducing the profit rate of industries that use them as inputs. The result is that the profit rate causes a drop in investment and capitalist economies slip into recession. In some industrial cycles, but not all, this plays an important role in the transition from boom to recession. An example where this didn’t happen was the 1920s cycle that ended with the super-crisis of 1929–33.
In addition to the anarchy of capitalist production, disproportionate production can arise from political and military developments — the U.S.-Iran war will go down in economic history as a cause of disproportionate production. Before the war, the dollar price of oil was fairly stable, considering that the dollar price of gold soared from under $2,000 to over $5,000 an ounce over a few years. In terms of gold’s use value, the price of oil fell in this period. Oil was being overproduced largely due to the policies of the top oil monarchy, Saudi Arabia — surely a result of U.S. pressure. Trump hoped that keeping down the dollar price of oil would avoid general inflation and allow the Federal Reserve to keep down interest rates, avoiding a recession until he left office.
The military operations during March and early April 2026, before the ceasefire and Iran’s defensive actions against oil refinery operations that were in range of its highly effective computer-controlled missiles did massive damage. Media estimates are that it will take years to repair the damage in the Gulf even if the war ends immediately. Unless the global economy sinks into recession within the next few months, it will suffer an oil shortage. Oil is important as a raw and auxiliary material in the production of fertilizer and food as well as plastic and other commodities that require energy to make — which is all commodities.
The rise in the oil price leads to higher costs for fertilizer — and food, as a result — by the time of the northern hemisphere’s autumn. No less an authority than the head of the Federal Reserve, Jay Powell, stated at his April 29, 2026, press conference: “If consumers are spending 25% or more on their gas and other necessary expenses… heightened prices on necessities have to come out of more discretionary spending.” The disproportionate production caused not by normal capitalist economic anarchy but by war will have a recessionary impact on the global economy, including that of the United States.
How great an impact depends on the evolution of the war, which is unclear as I write these lines. Diplomatic negotiations between the Trump administration and the Islamic Republic of Iran appear to have broken down. As of now, the war is taking the form of a U.S. military naval blockade against Iran under the current “ceasefire.” Blockades are themselves considered acts of war. If the war drags on, China and maybe Russia could get involved. If the war turns into a nuclear one, economic recession will be the last thing to worry about, as billions will die and our civilization could be completely destroyed. The class struggle between the capitalist and the working classes will have ended in their mutual ruin.
If the war escalates but falls short of going nuclear, gold production would be hindered as it was during World War I and other wars, resulting in rising prices in terms of gold as well as in depreciating currencies. Even as the world economy recovers from the immediate effects of the war, the danger of a massive depression after the first post-war industrial cycle will be considerably increased. If the war ends soon, there’ll still be major economic effects caused by oil production disruption that could last long after all fighting and blockades cease. This could lead to severe stagflation followed by deep recession or just recession, depending on the fiscal and monetary policies capitalist governments adopt.
The movements of the price of gold
The spectacular rise of the dollar price of gold indicates that an overproduction crisis was near on the eve of the Iran war. It has been about 18 years since the last general overproduction crisis of 2008 — a new one is due in the not too distant future even without the current war on Iran. A general overproduction crisis has been staved off first by unusually slow growth following the crisis of 2008, and then the COVID shutdowns, though not a cyclical recession, had some of the same effects in liquidating overproduction. In what is already turning out to be an eventful year, the U.S. has used military action to take control of the world oil trade, and through that, it’s trying to prop up the dollar-dominated international monetary system in which the so-called petrodollar is an important part.
On the eve of the current war, the dollar price of gold hovered several hundred dollars north of $5,000, and has dropped since then. Shouldn’t the uncertainty and the inflation provoked by the war increase the price of gold? Actually, the answer is no.
The reduction of the amount of oil on the markets increased its price — this is classical supply and demand — and spread to all the industries that use oil and fossil fuels. As prices increase, more dollars are needed to circulate commodities with higher price tags. This means that more dollars must be drawn into circulation from the banks, or the velocity of circulation has to increase, or some combination of both. Soon after the war broke out, we saw complaints of “liquidity problems” in the financial press. Higher dollar prices tighten the money market with higher interest rates. As interest rates rise, the dollar price of gold falls; when interest rates fall, the dollar price of gold rises. Tightening money markets tends to lower gold’s dollar price. As this continues, recession follows.
If the war continues and liquidity problems accelerate, the Federal Reserve will deal with it by, in effect, printing more dollars. Then the dollar price of gold will soar upward, and the inflation rate will surge even more. Assume for now that the war is contained or ends, and recession spreads worldwide. This will bring down interest rates and gold prices may fall further — but unemployment will skyrocket.
Now, turning from the 2026 money market movements, let’s examine what’s happened on the military and political fronts during this eventful year.
First, in January 2026, Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores were kidnapped, then taken to New York to be tried as common criminals, and the U.S. took control of Venezuela’s oil trade. (1) On February 28, the Trump administration tried to take control of Iran’s oil trade. Venezuela, Iran, and the People’s Republic of China are all threatened by these moves. Can China, with its energy-hungry industrial economy, afford to stand by idly?
Trump was emboldened by his success in finally destroying the Syrian government in December 2024. With this achieved, his administration is now focused on destroying Iran’s government.
At the beginning of 2026, we saw anti-government demonstrations organized by pro-imperialist elements within Iran with CIA and Mossad agents lurking in the background. Believing it was about to fall, the administration apparently convinced itself that it would collapse if there was a wave of assassinations of top Iranian leaders and a few days of bombings. That didn’t happen. Instead, the Iranian people rallied behind the government while the rug was pulled out from under the feet of pro-imperialist elements — at least for now.
As explained last month, Trump failed to prepare economically or politically for the kind of war that could really crush Iran for a certain historical period. I believe that unless civilization is completely destroyed, it’s impossible to defeat that nation and people in the long run, though they can be set back in the short run. If Trump wanted to do this, he first should have shelved the idea of another tax cut. As we have seen in this blog, in 1964, the Johnson administration passed through Congress what ultimately proved to be a disastrous tax cut just before escalating the Vietnam War. The tax ultimately played not a small role in the eventual defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam.
Instead, from the viewpoint of our class enemies, the Trump administration should have increased taxes and encouraged the Federal Reserve to abandon the policy of running the economy “hot.” He should have pressured the Fed to end its policy of cutting the target federal funds rate, thereby cooling the economy and, in effect, inducing a recession. This would stabilize the dollar and create a huge pool of unemployed workers who could be used to build up the army needed to invade Iran, a mountainous country of more than 90 million people with a geographical area as large as Western Europe.
But the shady businessman from New York was unwilling to do this because it would have made him very unpopular. Instead, he went ahead with the tax cuts and pressured the Federal Reserve to continue lowering its federal funds target, even threatening its chief, Jay Powell, with prosecution and possible prison time if he didn’t cooperate — Trump wanted to eat his cake and have it too. He did everything possible to keep overproduction going to maintain a facade of capitalist prosperity while the already highly overvalued stock market keeps breaking records. As Lyndon B. Johnson found out to his sorrow in the 1960s, this is no way to prepare for war.
Apparently, Trump convinced himself the war would be over in a few days. When the Iranian people rallied behind the government, anti-government demonstrations collapsed, and Iran took highly effective defensive military actions, this scheme unraveled. By late April 2026, Trump had painted himself into a corner and seems to have no way to get himself out of it. While other recent wars against Iraq, such as the one in 1991 and again in 2003, as well as the one against Afghanistan in 2001, failed to have much of an inflationary impact, it’s not the case with the current war. Trump agreed to a ceasefire in April and direct negotiations to try to buy time. He was emboldened by his apparent success against Venezuela and his 2024 success in overthrowing Syria’s government. Fortunately, his attempt to duplicate these “on the cheap” victories appears to have failed miserably with Iran as I write these lines.
I’m not running a newspaper on this blog, and everything could change by the time you read this. The news these days runs too fast for that. I must focus on the long-term perspective. I want to put the U.S. war on Iran into a broader historical perspective — that of the inevitable transformation from capitalism to socialism. Present-day Iran is a capitalist country, and the fight for its right to develop its economy peacefully without being attacked by the U.S. and its vicious colony Israel is what Marxists call a bourgeois democratic task. What has this to do with the struggle to transform capitalism into socialism? Isn’t this just a struggle to replace one set of capitalist exploiters with another? Will the Iranian capitalists make gains against the U.S., European, and Japanese capitalists, or will the empire crush the upstarts?
This is how some sectarians reason: they argue that we should oppose both sides and agitate for the workers of the U.S., Israel, and Iran to unite against their common enemy, the capitalist class. What this ignores is the importance of what Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” calls “the battle for democracy.” The working class must win this battle before they can begin the transformation to socialism. Iran’s struggle is for democracy, including its right to develop capitalism under the most favorable conditions possible. The struggle bears on the conditions for overthrowing capitalism, even if that is not its immediate aim. Right now, there is no more important task than working toward Iran’s victory in the current war. To understand this, we must examine the economic laws governing the transformation of capitalism into communism.
The economic laws that govern the transformation of one mode of production into another
In Marx’s preface to “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” he gave perhaps the clearest description of historical materialism found anywhere in the literature of scientific socialism:
“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, that are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
“In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
“Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence — but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.”
Keeping these words in mind, I’ll examine two related questions. One is the U.S.-Israel-Iran war, and the other is the development of the so-called Jewish question and through it the creation of the so-called State of Israel and its transformation into the Israeli-Palestinian question. Thanks to the creation of Israel, the Jewish question seems further from a solution than ever in the history of capitalism. Before we look into the Jewish question, now the Jewish-Palestinian question, let’s look at the Iran war in light of Marx’s “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” (Trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya, Progress Publishers, 1977)
The nuclear threat
On April 7, 2026, Trump declared, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” Iran’s civilization dates back 6,000 years. This is the one that Trump, in such a casual way, said would be destroyed through his command unless the country knuckled under to his demands. This was not the rantings of an isolated psychopath but of the most powerful man on earth. What exactly was he threatening? Was it pure bluff? It was widely suspected that he was threatening to use nuclear weapons against a country that doesn’t possess them and has no intention of acquiring them, despite claims of the U.S. and Israel to the contrary. Perhaps Trump was simply bluffing as he maneuvered toward a ceasefire agreement without losing face. But can we be sure?
In 1968, almost sixty years ago, as Richard Nixon was running for president, he claimed he had a “secret peace plan” to end the war in Vietnam. His plan to end the war was to win it. By 1972, he realized that he couldn’t win the war, or even continue it much longer, as antiwar sentiment swept the armed forces, and the dollar tottered on international money markets. Nixon believed he had one more card to play. What would happen if he convinced the Vietnamese people, their government and their allies that he was a true madman — one willing to “push the button” to launch a nuclear war if the Vietnamese leadership and the governments of the Soviet Union and China did not force an agreement on Nixon’s terms. We know today that Nixon was indeed, from a mental health point of view, a deeply unstable man. As it turned out, he wasn’t crazy enough to push “the button,” but he was counting on the opposition’s leaders not knowing that.
Trump may be playing that same game Nixon did — and I suspect he is. Trump appears to have believed that Iran would fold within days or a couple of weeks at most when he attacked on February 28, 2026. By April 7, he began to realize that he’d been wrong. Like Nixon in 1972, Trump sought an “off-ramp.” I suspect this is what happened: Trump, like Nixon, was seeking to find a way out without abandoning imperialism’s goals of crushing Iran, so he used Nixon’s old “madman” tactic.
But can we be sure? Did Trump really play with the idea of using nuclear weapons, or was he simply bluffing? We may someday find out. Could he still do it in the coming weeks and months? Again, we don’t know.
Whatever the truth may be, Trump’s so casually threatening the extermination of a 6,000-year-old civilization produced a powerful reaction against it. This is, of course, a good thing. What the capitalist media is trying to do is focus attention on one old man instead of on the economic and political system that has given this mentally unstable man the power to order the destruction of a civilization. Of course, no one should have such power, but what permitted this? Marx’s preface to “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” gives us a clue. The current level of productive forces that determine the power of the destructive forces combined with increasingly outmoded capitalist production relations and the capitalist nation-state has reached such a level that our modern society is in danger of destruction at the hands of one man — a terrifying situation.
Though I doubted it would happen, for a few hours I had a terrifying thought. What happens if Trump really is that crazy and enough people in the military (Trump had just fired a series of military commanders) follow his orders, even if it meant using nukes? Top military officers are not supposed to follow illegal orders, but who decides what’s legal when things move so fast that decisions have to be made in minutes, not hours?
Trump didn’t “push the button” on April 7, 2026. Instead, he opted for a ceasefire. What about next time, which could be as soon as the next few weeks? Even if he never touches the button — perhaps his personal mental disorders are not such that he will — what about one of his successors? He isn’t the first “mad president,” and he won’t be the last. Sooner or later, we will run out of luck.
This takes us to the bigger picture. For decades, we have faced the danger of nuclear war. Where does this danger come from? It comes from two sources: One is the continuing existence of bourgeois nation-states. I explained in other posts that the bourgeois nation-state can be seen as a street gang dealing illegal drugs. Forced by the laws of economics, the street gang must continually expand its territory, bringing it into inevitable conflict with other gangs under the same pressure to expand, leading inevitably to gang wars. The modern capitalist nation-state is essentially a street gang writ large — though unlike a street gang, the capitalist state has nuclear weapons.
Behind the state lurks capitalist private property. Each capitalist is in a struggle with “their” workers, as well as in a life-and-death struggle with each other. Like a street gang, each capitalist has to expand their market share. Despite the attempts of economists to deny it, capitalists have the power to produce more commodities than can be sold at profitable prices.
I have devoted this blog to explaining this, and all attempts under capitalism to overcome this contradiction are in vain. The competition among capitalists sooner or later degenerates into a life-and-death struggle for existence just like the competition among animals and plants in the natural world. This happens again and again for reasons I’ve been examining since I began this blog with my late comrade Jon Britton and his comrade Susan in 2009 and for years before that.
While the continued existence of the nation-state is increasingly a threat to the continued existence of our civilization, we should not overlook the fact that, for a time, it was a great step forward from the city-states, empires and feudal structures that preceded it. Nor has the progressive fight to establish nation-states entirely ended — far from it! While it has exhausted its progressive role in the sense of accelerating the increase in the productivity of human labor in Europe, the United States, and Japan, it isn’t true for Iran, to name one example, nor is it true for the “Global South.” There, the struggle to establish truly independent nation-states remains a (bourgeois) democratic revolutionary task still to be accomplished. (2)
Let’s examine the specific case of Iran. In 1951, Iran nationalized its oil. In 1953, the U.S. and Britain organized a coup that shifted power from the Majles (the Iranian parliament) and its leader, Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, to the Shah (Farsi for king). The pro-imperialist coup established brutal police-state rule that was overthrown by the 1979 revolution. Though the system emerging from this popular revolution was in no sense socialist, the U.S. reacted with fury. Though 47 years have passed since this development, U.S.-Iranian relations have never been normalized. Why?
Is it because the U.S. fears the spread of Shiite Islam around the world? No. If the entire world were to convert today, capitalism would happily go on. What U.S. capitalism cannot tolerate is the capitalist development of Iran. This is nothing new, nor is it associated with the United States alone.
The history of capitalism since the 16th century is characterized by commercial wars that raged between capitalist states over access to markets, sources of cheap raw materials and fields for the profitable investment of capital. The competition for market share is, among other things, a competition for the cheapest energy possible, not merely the most plentiful. Everything else remaining equal, a capitalist with access to cheap energy has a lower cost price than one with more costly energy sources. The one with the cheapest energy can undersell the others and win the competition.
Compared to what preceded it, the capitalist nation-state was a step forward. Instead of tariffs, and different languages and currencies every few kilometers, today we have a larger area where people speak the same language, use the same currency and weights and measures standards, enjoy a broad free-trade zone, and are unified by a common religion. This allows a faster and more thoroughgoing development of capitalist production, and a more rapid rise in labor productivity. This leads to the development of the two social classes that dominate modern society, the capitalist class that owns the means of production, and the working class that sells its labor power to the capitalists. The survival of pre-capitalist political and religious institutions like city-states, feudal or semi-feudal relations, tribal relations, separate languages, or warring religious sects (Lebanon is an example) stands in the way of capitalist production.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the rise of the capitalist nation-state in the sense of developing the productivity of human labor — not as a humane institution — played a progressive role in Europe and America. We should be careful to note what this means and doesn’t mean — it means this process was accompanied by tremendous cruelty, including both the genocide of Indigenous Peoples and the enslavement of Africans. Marx stood with the Indigenous Peoples and enslaved Africans against the conquistadors and slaveholders. We must follow Marx in this respect.
At no stage has capitalism ever been a humane institution. Its development meant that whole peoples were exterminated, whole cultures destroyed, languages disappeared, and nations enslaved. As we know, even during its progressive phase of free competition, during the time that Marx wrote about in “Capital,” capitalist exploitation was extremely cruel as children were literally worked to death. The only progressive phase of capitalism was in the sense of developing productive forces. Never have the interests of the capitalist class been aligned with those of the working class and other oppressed people.
As capitalism developed in the course of the 16th through to the 19th centuries, crimes unprecedented in all previous world history were committed by the rising capitalist class and their nation-states. The material foundation of a future humane society is created — though from the capitalist class’s viewpoint this was only a byproduct of the never-ending struggle for maximum profit — and the maximum exploitation of the class obliged to engage in labor.
Over the last 7,000 years, all class societies have been based on the exploitation by a group of people who are freed from the need to labor only by exploiting the labor of others. During that time, we saw wars that exterminated most female lines of descent, what Engels called “the defeat of the female sex,” the class division of society, and a sharp decline in the working conditions, health and life expectancy of the great majority. The majority of people had to work so that a small portion of society could free itself from the need to labor and engage in higher forms of cultural production. Compared to what existed even before the rise of capitalism but especially since then, it made possible an unprecedented growth in human knowledge and culture. Yet for the great majority who had the unfortunate experience of living through it, this was a total disaster. During those thousands of years, progress appeared for only a few.
To return to the capitalist era, as the first modern nation-states appeared and consolidated, a new phenomenon appeared. The emerging capitalist nation-states did all they could to prevent the emergence of other nation-states. Marx observed that one capitalist kills many; similarly, one capitalist nation-state, propelled by relentless economic laws rather than the ill will of individual rulers, works to prevent the rise of any new ones and, if possible, crush or subordinate them. This was the doctrine of mercantilism that dominated the first phase of the development of bourgeois political economy.
For example, when the development of Britain’s North American colonies led to capitalist industrial production within them, Britain passed laws forbidding this. This pressured the colonies, themselves based on crushing the Indigenous peoples and enslaving Africans, to establish their own capitalist nation-state. Britain tried to crush it at the end of the 1700s — what Americans call the War of Independence and the British called the Rebellion of the American Colonies. It tried again during the War of 1812, and again during the war of the slaveholders’ rebellion, the U.S. Civil War.
In 1870, France went to war against Bismarck’s Prussia to prevent the unification of Germany, which if successful, as the French capitalist ruling class correctly realized, would become a powerful threat to the French capitalist nation-state. This was proved during the 20th century’s two world wars. Since the late 1800s, the U.S. has worked tirelessly to prevent the emergence of any new strong independent capitalist state. This is why the CIA, a government organization, along with Britain, moved to overthrow Iran’s government. In 2026 (I write this in April), the U.S. has already moved decisively against two states, Venezuela and Iran again, and the year is not even half over.
While the nation-state has exhausted its progressive role insofar as the imperialist states of Europe and North America are concerned, this isn’t true of countries oppressed by dominant imperialist states. There, the struggle to build independent states, no matter what political forces lead it, is historically progressive — in the sense that any success creates conditions more favorable for the development of labor productivity.
As demonstrated throughout this blog, we know that capitalism has the ability to develop the forces of production that exceed its ability to develop the market for the same commodities. If the formation of additional nation-states leads to the expansion of commodity production, the problem of overproduction — the ability to produce commodities faster than the market can absorb them at prices of production — will only increase. It’s perfectly rational for the leaders of existing capitalist states to do everything they can to prevent the emergence of new capitalist states that threaten to compete with them. The struggle against wars being waged by the United States against countries like Iran that are in the process of building new capitalist states, especially antiwar struggles located in the “old” or imperialist states, is a pre-condition for socialist revolutions in those capitalist countries.
Multipolarity and nuclear weapons
As more nation-states acquire nuclear weapons, the chances of them being used increase. The proposed solution is to prevent their spread by allowing only the countries that now have them, the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and the Zionist entity (Israel), to continue to possess them.
This is what Rosa Luxemburg called a peace utopia. It is unjust that some countries should have nuclear weapons while others don’t. Would the U.S. have dared attack if Iran had them? It’s inevitable that as years pass, more states will get them. And as long as the world is divided into states with antagonistic economic and political interests as is the case today, it’ll be only a matter of time before they, so far used only by the United States against Japan, will be used in war again.
The Zionist entity
Liberals and conservatives alike claim the war on Iran was launched by the Trump administration due to the influence of Israel and its lobby. How could this so-called “Jewish state” with a Jewish population of under 7 million manage to dominate the United States of more than 340 million people with a continental landmass rich in fertile agricultural lands and raw materials and a military with bases around the world? The dollar, not the Israeli shekel, serves as the world reserve currency. In reality, the Zionist entity’s main function is to prevent the Arab nation from creating a powerful nation-state of its own. The Arab world uses a single language, as standard written Arabic can be read and understood by any literate person. While Israel is the most important obstacle preventing the Arab nation from creating its own nation-state, it’s not the only one. There are the Arab oil monarchies, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (which has just left OPEC). They possess territories made up of deserts rich in oil and natural gas and controlled by incredibly wealthy families controlling a population made up mostly of migrant workers from the Indian subcontinent.
Instead of the money used to pay for oil and gas creating an internal market that could provide a basis to build up a domestic industrial capitalist system, it’s squandered on luxuries consumed by the royal families and their hangers-on or deposited in dollar-denominated bank accounts, so-called petrodollar securities, and real estate. This is the petrodollar system that plays a crucial role in keeping the international monetary system afloat. This happens even as the United States runs deficits in its balance of trade and current account payments year after year.
In the U.S., Democratic and Republican politicians dismiss pan-Arabism as a wildly dangerous ideology, while Zionism is treated as perfectly rational. Only in the last few years, against the backdrop of the Gaza genocide, has support for Zionism begun to decline, though not among most politicians.
In addition, as the twelve-day war last June and this year’s war show, the Zionist entity is a threat to the Iranian people and their struggle to build up the power of their own nation-state.
Zionism claims to be a nationalist — sometimes even a national liberation — movement promising to free the long-dispersed and oppressed Jewish “nation” and return it to its historic homeland. But are the Jews even a nation? If a nation is defined as a group of people who inhabit a definite geographical area, speak a common language, and have a common religion, the answer is that modern Jews are not a nation. Just sharing a common religion is not enough. Marxists have historically opposed that idea.
According to the Bible, the Jews were a tribe within a larger nation called Israel — not a modern bourgeois state — named after the biblical patriarch Jacob’s alternative name. If you take the account literally — and few modern secular historians would — Jacob had twelve sons whose descendants are the twelve tribes of Israel who ruled over parts of what later became known as Palestine. According to the Bible, this fulfilled God’s promise to his human friend Abraham that his descendants would rule Palestine. The name Palestine arose from the biblical Philistines, referring to a people who are believed to have originally spoken a form of Greek and settled in southern Palestine during the crisis of the 12th century B.C.E. that swept the ancient Mediterranean world. This crisis wiped out most of the nations and empires that existed before, a crisis that historians believe to have been caused by a climate shift. After the crisis, new empires and nations emerged on the ruins of the old. Its most important consequence was the transition from a stage in the history of production centered on bronze to one centered on iron.
The real history of the Jews
While we don’t know the details of how the Jewish people began, we have a general picture that would be agreed to by most Marxists, and many non-Marxists, who have studied this question. In ancient West Asia and North Africa, there were two main production centers, the Nile River Valley in Northeast Africa, and the land between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers that together form the “fertile crescent.” Along the east coast of the Mediterranean lay Canaan, which essentially included Palestine in the south, now occupied by the Zionist entity, and Lebanon and parts of what is now Syria in the north. This meant that, beginning long before there was a hint of biblical Israel, a relatively large number of people from Canaan followed mercantile professions. These Canaanite merchants served as middlemen between the two main production centers in the eastern Mediterranean world. The only thing that changed after the 1200 B.C.E. crisis was that in the south a significant number of the people of what had been the Canaanite peoples came to be called Israelites and Jews after their new rulers while in the north they were sometimes called “Phoenicians,” but continued to call themselves Canaanites. Biblical Hebrew was actually a dialect of the Canaanite language.
About the time the city-state of Rome was rising in central Italy, the northern Canaanite people, Phoenicians, created the powerful city-state of Carthage in what is now Tunisia. Eventually, this led to war between an increasingly powerful Rome and Carthage that led to Carthage’s destruction in the Punic Wars, ending the domination of the Phoenicians in Mediterranean trade. This established Jews as the dominant commercial actor in the Mediterranean world. During this time, Jewish trading communities spread throughout the area. Many Jewish men married European women who converted to Judaism and were integrated into the Jewish trading communities in Europe. Inevitably, those communities located in Europe lost their Palestinian character and took on a European one.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, many Jewish communities in Europe had a mixed ancestry; modern genetic studies suggest that Ashkenazi Jews, for example, may be roughly 50% to 60% European in descent, with much of the rest tracing back to ancient Judeans and other West Asian peoples. (3) Indeed, modern genetic analyses suggest that the modern Palestinian Arab population, Muslim and Christian, are the chief biological descendants of the ancient Israelites and Jews — those whose ancestors never left Palestine. Even if modern genetic analysis proved that today’s Jewish Israeli ancestors came 100% from ancient Palestine and modern Palestinians were 100% descended from Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula, this would in no way justify modern Zionism. Nationality, especially today, is not based on “race” or genes but on socioeconomic factors.
During the Middle Ages, the feudal mode of production based on serf labor in western Europe succeeded the chattel slavery of the Roman Empire. By the later Middle Ages, a modern bourgeoisie was emerging in Europe whose members were largely descended from former serfs who had moved to the now-reviving cities fueled by growing trade. This new layer of Christian merchants was called the “bourgeoisie” (French for “people of the cities”), who were eager to remove the competition of the old Jewish merchant caste. As the power of the Christian bourgeoisie grew, Jews were kicked out of country after country and driven into the Muslim world or into a still-feudal Eastern Europe.
The Jews under capitalism
During its progressive phase — in the sense of the development of the productive forces and increasing labor productivity — capitalist society began assimilating the Jews. This was the program of the French Revolution and of the early United States. During the Middle Ages, the myth maintained by both the Christian Church and the Jewish synagogue was that the Jews were the exiled nation of Israel — that in reality hadn’t existed for thousands of years. This false idea later became the basis of Zionist ideology. According to Christians, Jews were exiled from their ancient homeland as a punishment by God for killing the true messiah, the anointed one, Jesus Christ. According to Church Fathers, God allowed them to continue to exist as a warning to anyone who failed to accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior — which could only be done through the Christian Church.
According to the Church, things would remain this way until the end of time, when Jesus Christ would return and the Jews would either be converted to Christianity or thrown into hell. In the Jewish version of the myth, the Jews were exiled from the land promised by God to their ancestor Abraham because they failed to properly observe the Torah, the Jewish law. At the end of time, God would send the “true messiah,” not Jesus, and the Jews would at last return to the ancient homeland promised to Abraham and rule the world from Jerusalem in “a world to come.”
Under capitalism, the power of these religious myths began to fade. The 1789–1794 French Revolution as well as the newly formed United States established the program on the so-called Jewish question that marked the liberal era of capitalism, based on free competition.
The Jews would be considered full citizens without having to first convert to Christianity. This meant that in terms of nationality, Jews would consider themselves French or Americans. During the era of liberal capitalism, this idea spread to other capitalist countries. Under this program, “Israel” would no longer be viewed as a nation but only a religious community. Jews would give up any idea of “returning” to Palestine. The state, for its part, would cease to be “Christian” under the doctrine that religion is a matter of private consciousness and is not the business of the state — the doctrine of the separation of church and state. During this liberal era, this was more or less the program followed by capitalist society in Western Europe and the United States.
While under feudalism, Jews represented exchange value within a society where most products did not take the form of exchange value, in the new capitalist society most use values took the form of exchange value, that is, were sold for money with the aim of making a profit. As a result, Jews lost their basic economic role, and as a social and economic formation, began to dissolve into capitalist society. Those in the upper levels became large-scale modern capitalists, the poorest became proletarians, and those in the middle became part of the modern “petite bourgeois” or middle class. Jews, or increasingly former Jews, shared the fate of the classes they were absorbed into. As this process unfolded, some Jews converted to liberal Christianity, usually for practical advantages rather than conviction (this was true of Marx’s father), while others became liberal-reformed Jews, which was really a step toward becoming liberal Christians. Over time most moved away from any form of organized religion. Unlike feudalism’s demand that every individual belong to a church or a synagogue, capitalist society in its liberal phase did not demand this. Intermarriage with Christians became common while the influence of religious ideas, Christian or Jewish, so central to feudalism, gradually lost importance.
Christian reactionaries opposed these developments. They claimed that Jews could never be assimilated and remained part of a separate eternal nation of “Israel.” According to them, this nation was under God’s curse for killing Jesus Christ — what they called “the greatest crime in the history of the world.” According to mainstream Christianity, Jesus as the Son is as much God as the Holy Spirit and God the Father Himself. Following traditional Church teachings, Jews were guilty of deicide, the murder of God — for by killing the Son, they killed God. In the 19th century, these European Christian reactionaries laid the foundation for what eventually gave birth to the Nazis in the 20th century.
As the workers’ movement began to develop in the 19th century, it adopted the liberal-democratic program of the French Revolution on the Jewish question. Reactionaries who opposed the program dug in on their insistence that Jews must not be accepted as members of the bourgeois nation under any circumstances. As the century progressed and the influence of religion declined before the advance of science, German reactionaries attempting to base themselves on science rather than religion developed the modern notion of “antisemitism.”
Opposition to Jews no longer appeared as an objection to Judaism, but was based on race. Antisemites argued that nations are biological categories. Someone doesn’t cease to be Jewish by ceasing to practice the religion or even converting to Christianity. Without resorting to the Christian argument that Jews gained their allegedly demonic powers by forming an alliance with Satan through killing Jesus Christ, reactionaries had trouble explaining what made the Jews demonic while the “Semitic” Arabs were merely an inferior brown race. What those reactionaries really did was to combine the new ideas based on a misunderstanding of the ideas of Charles Darwin, and the traditional anti-Judaism of the Christian Churches, whether Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant.
During epochs of capitalist prosperity when class struggle softened, antisemitism faded, but when the industrial cycle took a downward turn and class struggle sharpened, antisemitism increased and fought “Jewish Marxism” as well as “Jewish finance.”
The rise of Zionism
In early 20th-century Europe, for reasons noted above, most of the Jewish population lived in what was still semi-feudal Eastern Europe. As the Russian Revolution approached, Jews in that area, especially within the Czarist Empire, reacted in different ways along class lines. Many working-class and progressive intellectuals put their hopes in a democratic and eventual socialist transformation of society. Among other things, this meant the defeat of the antisemitism encouraged by the Czarist government. Other Jews reacted by leaving Europe and immigrating to the United States, the stronghold of liberal capitalism where antisemitism was milder. Without Europe’s feudal heritage, to be in the U.S. was the great hope for many Jews. Naturally, there were individuals who combined both of these solutions, and there were many Jews from Eastern Europe prominent in socialist and later in U.S. communist movements.
The Zionist movement, representing the modern Jewish capitalist class, sought another solution. They agreed with antisemites that Jews and “gentiles,” non-Jews, could not tolerate one another for long, and that this was eternal and could never be changed. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were the era of colonialism. Europe’s surplus population was encouraged to go to the colonies, clear the forests and jungles, drive out or kill the native peoples, and expand European civilization. Zionists proposed that Jews do the same: leave Europe, colonize some patch of land in what’s now called the “global south,” and create a Jewish state. Within this state, white Jews would be the majority, or even the sole inhabitants, as Christians were in Europe and America.
The Zionist colonial movement chose Palestine as their new colony to appeal to the mass of Jews in Eastern Europe still living under semi-feudal conditions. This choice drew on the influence of religious myth that Jews would one day return to their ancient homeland promised to them by God Himself. In practice, Jewish capitalists exploiting Jewish workers in Eastern Europe supported this program even if they had no personal desire to move to Palestine. They supported it anyway, since it allowed them to claim that Jewish workers had more in common with other Jews — capitalists and workers alike — than with Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs or South Slav workers.
The great majority of the Second International, including its ideological leader, Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), opposed the Zionist movement. To compete with the socialist movement among Jewish workers and progressive intellectuals, some Zionists claimed to be socialists. They argued that Jewish workers would colonize Palestine and then build a socialist society there. Kautsky and others asked what would happen to the native Palestinian Arabs? A so-called Jewish state in modern Arab Palestine could only be created by driving out or killing the native Palestinians. This could only be done by making a mockery of democratic principles — you cannot build a socialist society on such a foundation. Though Jews were victims of one kind of racism, antisemitism, they were not immune from the general racism against “people of color” that gripped Europe and its American extension at that time. As antisemitism represented reaction among the Christian population, Zionism represented reaction among Jews. At bottom, the antisemites and the Zionists were two branches of the same racist tree. The socialist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had no alternative but to fight both antisemitism and Zionism.
The coming of the Nazis
It is sometimes said that if capitalist society had developed normally, the horrors of Nazism and Zionism would have been avoided. Jews would have continued to be peacefully and relatively painlessly absorbed into capitalist society while Palestine would have gradually become part of a liberal, modern, capitalist Arab world. But as we’ve seen throughout this blog, the normal development of capitalism requires crises. The periodic overproduction crises, cyclical recessions, lead to other crises: wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions. Capitalism cannot develop in any other way. As long as crises remained within certain limits, European antisemitism and its twin Zionism remained within certain limits. But in the period between August 1914 and August 1945, crises did not stay within the usual limits, nor did antisemitism or Zionism. The results have been disastrous for untold tens of millions of people.
In 1918, capitalists, large landowners, and the military caste in Germany were terrified that Germany would follow Russia into socialist revolution. Indeed, because of its high degree of industrialization, Germany was far more ripe for socialism than Russia, still largely a peasant country. From the viewpoint of the ruling classes, even if a German revolution could have been contained within bourgeois democratic limits, landlords might still have faced expropriation. The military officer caste loved Germany, no doubt, but they loved landed property and ground rent even more.
The noncommissioned officers drawn from the middle class had little property to love (though they dreamed of acquiring a lot more). During the war, they marched obediently behind their commissioned officers to “Make Germany Great Again.” But in the autumn of 1918, when revolution broke out in Germany, the officer caste, largely big landowners, concluded that the war had to end at any cost, even if the sacred cause of making Germany Great had to be sacrificed. They determined that landed property came before even the supreme cause of defending the fatherland. How would they explain this to the NCO who really believed in making Germany Great?
They surrendered to the miserable terms offered by the allies — the United States, Britain, and France — but not in their own name. Instead, they handed power to the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), who had betrayed the cause of socialism, who then signed the terms demanded by the victorious allies. The military officer caste then told the middle-class NCOs that the Social Democratic Party had stabbed an otherwise victorious Germany in the back. Since the NCOs were still largely under the influence of Christianity, they claimed that behind the Social Democrats were Jews, the very people who had killed Jesus Christ and were now destroying Germany! After all, wasn’t Karl Marx, whose writings inspired the founders of the Social Democratic Party, a Jew? Weren’t the Rothschild banking dynasty also Jews? Now they were working to destroy Germany and the German middle class.
While most NCOs already had some antisemitic prejudices, now they were thrown into blind hatred toward the Jews who had stabbed their beloved Germany in the back and ruined their dreams of becoming rich. One of these soldiers was a certain Adolf Hitler, recently immigrated to Germany from Austria so that he could serve his beloved Germanic fatherland in the trenches. And now Jews, whether Marxists or bankers, had betrayed everything that was dear to him — his beloved fatherland! Hitler was hardly alone in feeling this way.
And so German fascism, with its extreme antisemitism, took shape. The so-called National Socialist Party led by Hitler formed itself over the first few years after the war. It blamed everything — Germany’s defeat, the threat of Bolshevism (meaning socialist revolution), hyperinflation, and then the super-crisis of 1929–32 that brought more ruin to the German middle class — on demonic Jews determined to destroy Germany. The Nazis’ original program was to expel all Jews from Germany and then from a German-dominated Europe, but nobody would take the Jews. This included the United States, which closed its doors to Jewish immigrants from Germany and Europe. Jews were trapped and would soon face physical extermination, since the only thing the Third Reich would not tolerate was Jews on any territory in Europe it controlled. If no country would take them in, the Nazis would simply kill them.
On the eve of the 1917 Russian October Socialist Revolution, Britain issued the notorious Balfour Declaration. In it, Britain looked with feigned sympathy on the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine while claiming that the rights of non-Jews (Palestinian Arabs were not described as what they were, a people with their own national aspirations) would be protected. After the war ended, the newly established League of Nations, forerunner of the United Nations, gifted Palestine, formerly a province of the Ottoman Empire, as a mandate to Britain. It wasn’t long before European Zionist colonists began to descend on Palestine, launching what amounted to war against the native Arab Palestinians, which has lasted to this day. The increasingly genocidal war against the Palestinians, later expanded to other Arab nations and now to Iran, has only broadened in scope as the years have gone by.
As the full horrors of the Holocaust came to light — in which 6 million Jewish men, women, and children were deliberately murdered by the German fascist government not for any crime, real or alleged, but simply for who they were — a huge reaction to antisemitism swept Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Antisemitic ideology and its Christian predecessor were discredited as never before. It looked as though the so-called Jewish problem, though at tremendous cost, would finally be solved. In Europe, antisemitism, fascism, and capitalism itself were thoroughly discredited. But the solution to the Jewish question that morphed into the Palestinian question was not to be found.
The main problem was the Truman administration’s decision to throw its support behind the Zionist colonization of Palestine. During the Cold War — in reality, a global class war — the U.S. did not face major economic, political, or military competition from any capitalist power. Instead, it faced a struggle against the Soviet Union, which represented an alternative social system to capitalism. The Truman administration and the Democratic and Republican parties were determined to keep the socialist system in the Soviet Union from spreading, then destroy it for good!
Before the war, many sections of the U.S. capitalist class favored an alliance with Nazi Germany, its potential main commercial competitor, against the Soviet Union. Other capitalists supported Roosevelt’s policy of allying with the Soviet Union against Germany, hoping that the two countries would destroy each other. After 1945, Nazi Germany was destroyed and the Soviet Union was victorious, though at the tremendous price of the deaths of about 27 million Soviet people. The capitalist class was united around defeating the Soviet Union and doing what was necessary to defeat any European socialist revolution. If Europe went socialist, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, reasoned that the United States would be next.
U.S. imperialism, led by Truman, as part of this broad perspective, supported the Zionist movement for several reasons. First, with the Cold War setting in, the last thing they wanted was a large number of left-wing, pro-Soviet Jews to move to the United States. Second, they knew that a Jewish colony in Palestine would come into hopeless conflict with all the peoples of North Africa and West Asia, starting but not ending with the Palestinian Arab people, Muslim and Christian. This was what the founders and leaders of Zionism had foreseen, and they got what they wanted. This led straight to the 1948 Nakba, the year the Zionist entity won its “independence.” This intensified the conflict between Jews and Muslims that began when Britain threw its support behind the Zionist movement in 1917. Until that point, relations between Jews and Muslims had been better than between Jews and Christians. Historically, the Muslim world served as a refuge for Jews fleeing Christian countries.
Confusion grips the international workers’ movement
As we saw above, going back to the days of the Second International, the global socialist movement opposed Zionism. After the split in the international workers’ movement that began in August 1914 — over the Second International parties supporting their own imperialist governments — and deepened with the victory of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, the Third International put particular emphasis on the right of all nations to self-determination. This meant that what was then called the colonial and semi-colonial nations had the right to overthrow their European colonizers by whatever means were necessary. This included fighting the Zionist settlers in Palestine who were arriving with Britain’s support. The opposition to Zionism was integral to the Third International’s opposition to all forms of antisemitism — the two were inseparable.
In the 1940s, the workers’ movement fell into confusion under the impact of the Holocaust and the evolution of the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union away from the internationalism that had marked the first years of the Russian Revolution. As the Holocaust’s full horrors became known in 1944–1945, many people within the communist parties assumed that the traditional opposition to Zionism, first by the international social democratic movement, then the communist movement, was now rendered obsolete. The Soviets raced with the U.S. over who would recognize Israel first.
These factors played into the disastrous mistake made by the leaders of the European international communist movement on the Zionist-Palestine question. One was the fact that Jewish people, including Zionist reactionaries, were truly grateful for the Soviets’ role in destroying the Nazis and saving what was left of Europe’s Jewish population. From the point of view of those who were gradually forgetting the Marxist principles they had learned in their youth, assuming they had fully learned them in the first place, wouldn’t Israel be friendly to the Soviet Union and the new socialist countries of eastern Europe? It turned out that the answer was a definite no. The Holocaust, horrible though it was, had not changed the basic laws of the class struggle.
There were other factors. When the war started, the Arab and Islamic movements dominated by military officers and clergymen reacted in a pragmatic way. Germany had no colonies in West Asia or North Africa, though its weaker ally, fascist Italy, still ruled Libya. During the 1930s, Germany flirted with the Zionist movement to encourage Jews to leave, but that ended once World War II began. Hitler claimed to be the champion of the Arab and Muslim people, as the imperialist allies led by the United States championed the cause of the Chinese and Vietnamese people against Japanese imperialism. Japanese imperialism was “sympathetic” to the Indian people’s struggle against Britain. Hitler was also “sympathetic” to the nationalist movement of Juan Perón in Argentina against U.S. imperialism. And there are other examples.
Any movement fighting against imperialism has the right to take weapons offered by anybody, including rival imperialists. National liberation movements led by bourgeois nationalists tend to make ideological concessions to imperialists who oppose the imperialist bloc oppressing them. Nazis, who were fanatical antisemites, claimed they were fighting against international Jewry as their real enemy. According to Nazi ideology, Jews dominated the capitalist imperialist powers of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. In appealing to Arab nationalism, Nazis claimed that Germany was fighting Jews and so were Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims, claiming thereby that Germany and the Arabs were natural allies. In the end, Nazi Germany provided almost no material aid to Palestinians, other Arabs, or Muslims.
Arab nationalists of the time — we aren’t talking about Arab Marxists who were still few in number — like similar nationalists in India, Latin America, and elsewhere, accepted claims that the Nazis were natural allies of Arab and Muslim peoples, though they squirmed at the term “antisemitism” openly used by the Nazis, because Arabs consider themselves a Semitic people. This played right into the hands of the Zionists. From a European and Soviet point of view that had backslid from the internationalism of the revolution’s first years toward nationalist viewpoints alien to Marxism, the Palestinian nationalist and Islamic movements appeared as reactionary pro-Nazi movements while Zionists were allied with anti-fascist “democratic powers” that included the imperialist United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. This pragmatic thinking was in contradiction to the historic Marxist program. In supporting Zionism, the Soviet and other communist leaders were abandoning not only Lenin’s position but even that of the pre-war Second International and Karl Kautsky.
Lenin believed that one of the jobs of communists is to fight against reactionary ideas within the national liberation movements that are fighting against imperialism. This didn’t change the fact that communists, especially those within imperialist countries and those who led workers’ states, had to support the national liberation movements fighting against imperialism, regardless of any reactionary ideas that may be held by the movement’s leaders at any particular point. It soon became clear that Israel was anything but pro-Soviet — it was solidly allied with imperialism and global reaction in its struggle against the Soviet Union and the new socialist camp as well as all real national liberation movements. The CPSU and the Soviet government were obliged to partially correct their mistakes and began to offer valuable support to the Palestinian and other Arab and Muslim people in their struggle against imperialism and Zionism, but not before a lot of damage had been done. This is a long story, and I don’t have the time or the space to go into it here.
Israel and the imperialists in the 1950s
In the 1950s, France and Britain were trying to hold on to their colonial empires. In 1954, war broke out in the French colony of Algeria, an Arab country in North Africa. France claimed Algeria was not a colony but part of France. In northeastern Africa, Britain was trying to hold on to the Suez Canal in Egypt, where Nasser had recently come to power. The fact that the two main traditional colonial powers, Britain and France, were trying to hold onto their North African strongholds drew the two colonialist powers together. This led to a rift between London and Paris on one side, and Washington on the other. In 1956, Egyptian President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Britain invaded Egypt to overthrow Nasser and reverse the nationalization. This provided an opening for the Zionist entity. While the U.S., for its own imperialist reasons, opposed the British-French war, Israel jumped in on the side of Britain and France and seized the Sinai Peninsula.
Washington reacted by withdrawing monetary support from the shaky British pound on the international currency market as Washington ordered London, Paris, and Tel Aviv to withdraw from Egypt. There was nothing they could do but obey Washington’s command. Since then, the Zionist entity has not been able to take advantage of splits between the imperialist powers as it might have in a former era. The only thing Israel can do is to embrace its role as a U.S. colony, not a neocolony, and try to build its influence within the United States. Over the decades, the U.S. and its West Asian colony have more and more merged together. The Israeli colonials may want to do many things, but they can only do so if they get the go-ahead from Washington. Israel can propose, but only act with Washington’s consent. For example, Tel Aviv has agitated for war against Iran for more than thirty years. Only in June 2025 did Washington give the green light for the 12-day Israeli assault on Iran, and then again on February 28, 2026.
Liberals, progressives, and the Zionist entity
Until the Six-Day War in 1967, U.S. liberals and progressives strongly supported Israel, as did, to a considerable degree, the U.S. Communist Party. Hard as it seems to people today, Israel was painted as some type of socialist and left-wing country in those days. Only after 1967 did the new left and the new generation of African American militants, inspired by Malcolm X, who opposed Zionism before his 1965 assassination, and supported the resistance of the Vietnamese people against U.S. imperialism, turn against the Zionist brand of apartheid. But broader liberal public opinion remained pro-Israel. The Israeli genocide against the Gaza people that began in October 2023, the first genocide in history that could be viewed on the phones in your pocket, finally caused the people in the U.S., younger and older, to turn against Israeli apartheid and genocide.
Today, non-Marxist liberals, progressives, and even a growing number of conservatives oppose Israel and Zionism, and this is a good thing. But these forces, precisely because they are non-Marxist, do not understand that the imperialist powers, especially a declining capitalist-imperialist hegemon like the U.S., cannot tolerate independent emerging capitalist powers such as Iran, and this inevitably leads to war by established capitalist powers against emerging ones. This was true even before the imperialist era. For example, how many liberals and progressives can explain why the alleged law of comparative advantage — taught in college economics, claiming that industrialized and underdeveloped capitalist nations share the same interests in free trade under capitalism — is false? And how many have studied Lenin’s 1916 pamphlet “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”?
Unable to explain the real causes of what is now clearly the criminal policies of the U.S. in West Asia, including Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, they cannot get beyond the idea that somehow Israel’s Zionist Lobby has gained control of the United States. If only the power of the Zionist Lobby could somehow be broken by electing anti-Zionist Democrats and Republicans, the U.S. would follow policies in the interests of the people of the U.S. and Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The antisemitic far right is starting to take advantage of the situation by repeating these arguments with a twist. They emphasize how Israel is a danger not so much to Muslims, who the far right are quite hostile to, but to Christians in West Asia without explaining that Israel is attacking Arab Christians as Arabs and not Christians in general. Zionists, or just Jews according to the far right, are a danger to Christians everywhere. Antisemitism, discredited by the Nazi genocide, is now beginning to move out of the rat holes it’s been hiding in since the end of Nazi Germany.
Eighty-one years after the Holocaust ended, the solution to the so-called Jewish Question seems further away than ever. Instead of being solved, the Jewish problem has metastasized into the Palestinian problem. If capitalism had stuck to the policies of the French Revolution, a problem that posed no fundamental threat to capitalism would have been solved generations ago; there would be no State of Israel, no Zionism, and the Palestinian people would have their country. It is sometimes said that if only capitalism developed normally, this would have been the case. Due to its internal contradictions, the normal development of capitalism means crises.
The law of comparative advantage cannot operate under capitalism, nor is Say’s Law valid, nor is the quantity theory of money. Instead, capitalism suffers overproduction crises caused by the fact that production can be expanded faster than markets. This leads to colonialism, wars including wars among capitalist countries, genocides, and finally revolutions and counterrevolutions.
The disastrous failure of capitalism to solve the Jewish question, instead expanding it into the Palestinian question, leading to genocide now being escalated into war against more Arab people and beyond that into war on Iranian and Muslim people in general, ultimately stems from the contradictions of capitalism. These show that capitalism is not the final form of human production and society but only a transitory phase in the history of production that must give way to a new, higher mode of production under pain of the destruction of modern society.
NOTES
(1) Unfortunately, Venezuela lacks the military power to resist the U.S. in this respect. If the U.S. launches a full-scale invasion of Venezuela to take control of the country completely, the people will be able to resist invasion on their home ground. The Trump administration has avoided doing that, so far limiting itself to taking control of the oil production. It is important that the left, especially in the U.S., do everything it can to use the trial of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores to put the Trump administration in the dock. This is more useful to the struggle against U.S. imperialism and the Trump administration than asserting that Venezuela has sold out to the United States. (back)
(2) According to historical materialism, whether an institution is progressive or reactionary at a particular point in history, and in the history of production, is whether it advances the struggle to increase the productivity of human labor. The greater the productivity of labor, the greater a given quantity of use value measured by the unit appropriate to serve as the unit of measurement of that particular use value can be produced with a given quantity of labor measured by a unit of time. Since our ancestors began to separate from the rest of the animal kingdom, pre-human and then human progress has been based on the increase in the productivity of labor. (back)
(3) According to modern genetic studies, modern Jews from Iraq, often called Mizrahi Jews, are far more closely related to the ancient Jews of Palestine than the Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. This is not surprising because Iraq is geographically located closer to Palestine, meaning that the peoples of those countries are, in general, closely related. Many other Jewish communities are even less closely related to the ancient Jews of Palestine than the modern Ashkenazi Jews. Before World War II, Zionism had no presence outside of the European Ashkenazi Jewish community. The genetic studies show how absurd Zionist ideology really is, as it is based on a falsification of ancient, medieval, as well as modern history. (back)