The following article by John Molloy was first published in Unity, the weekly paper of the Irish Communist Party.
IF May Day is the “workers’ Christmas” – what would be on our ideal gift list? To reflect on how basic some of the demands might be – is a reminder of the absolute failings of the capitalist economic system – that amidst the planet’s abundance – offers nothing but subsistence for those who, for the moment, are not in the cross-hairs of imperial self-interest and actual or and threatened annihilation for those who are.
This reinforces the perpetual reality, not theory of class struggle. Even a matter of a few years ago – when some assumed that certain collective gains were irreversibly “won” – and not worthy of ongoing attention in, for example, the tedium and “bureaucratic rust” of the trade union movement, it was clear that those advancing the needs of Capital did not take this view (of a “settlement”) and do not accept that any “cessation of hostilities” in the class war is anything other than expedient. For this class, as was said at the time of the hunger marches in the 1930’s, its not about preaching class warfare, its about practising it.
In this way, the counter-revolution from the Right since the 1990’s has seen landmark advances on women’s rights specifically and democratic accountability and the political advance of organised labour more broadly, halted, stymied or subverted, aided and abetted by many Parties who once masqueraded as “progressive” and even had the word “labour” in their titles. Indeed, many of these parties and their supporters (the “B52 liberals”) were always self-indulgent enemies of the historic advances brought about by “actual existing socialism” and to paraphrase the late Michael Parenti “supported every revolution apart from those that worked”.
Unsurprisingly, many of their leading figures became cheerleaders during both Bush Presidencies supporting the “forever wars” of this century, the blowback and consequences from which we are all still suffering.
Communists challenged and continue to reject this delusion. Then and now, they knew that in Malcom X’s words ” the only thing power respects is power” and watched with dismay as many Western European countries saw a surrender of a class analysis of labour relations for a “third way” of outsourced, privatised surrender, domestically, completely sanitising the anti-socialist nature of the European Union’s core neo-liberal economic purpose and abroad, cravenly accepted a new age of imperial expansion that slaughters any challenge to American hegemony. In partnership with Israel, this has reached its genocidal nadir in the rubble of Gaza and the profit gouging of the top 100 oil and gas companies banking more than $30 million every hour during the first month of the illegal war against Iran.
But again, even amidst this darkness, there is hope in the continuing broader geo-political resistance to and realignment away from the ever dangerous but declining US empire. As the song says “they tear down our comrades like leaves from a tree, but the tree still stands, its roots locked to the land” a reminder of why a movement moving beyond survival, shorn of illusion, cannot be bought or beaten if it returns to its ideological “roots”, determined not to lose connection with the masses whose demands it advances.
This declares that there is no golden capitalist tomorrow and that the fight for the historic, modest aims of “only wanting the earth,” – that could once be captured in three words (Peace, Bread and Land) – still presents the collective challenge to the capitalist order.
If we learn from the past (“learn, learn, learn” as Lenin urged), with industrial unity and political action, the “Masters of the Universe,” who with typical ahistorical arrogance, labelled their 1990’s counter-revolution “the end of history” will be reminded that, the “spectre” of communism will haunt them again.