About “Communismphobia” in the US… Other Dimensions

In her article, Issa clarified that the intensified accusations made by Trump and his foreign minister against the Democrats that they are “pro-communist” or that they “want to transform the US into a socialist country,” and apart from being a far cry from the politics of the Democrats, it is also far from being a mere electoral investment that Trump is using against his opponents.

Hence calling the stage that the US is now living, as the beginning of a new McCarthy era, in reference to the McCarthyism of the 1950s, in which any communist or communist-sympathetic views were suppressed and “blasphemized”.

In parallel, virtually all forms of political and union movements were suppressed in the US, leading to the consolidation of the two-headed “leading party” formula: Republican / Democrat.

The “Ideological” Enemy

In her article, Issa sees – based on the military, aggressive, and plundering nature of the American regime, in one word the imperialist nature – that the permanent existence of an external / internal enemy is truly an “iron lung” through which this regime breathes, through a series of mobile wars. All of these wars are carried out under the eternal slogan of the various types of plundering regimes, whether those in the imperialist center or their deformed copies in our countries: “No voice rises above the sound of the battle”. This slogan has taken different shapes throughout capitalist history, perhaps starting with Louis Bonaparte who butchered the political movement in France in the 1850s under the pretext of a war with Prussia, then later the slogan of “defending the homeland” raised by the Second International under the leadership of Kautsky, to throwing the workers like sacrificial animals to the monsters of European imperialism during the First World War.

Since the enemy’s presence is part of the “stability equation”, and after the end of the Cold War, and with the collapse of the possibility of investing in the “war on terror” with Russia’s direct entry into the war against it, it has become absolutely necessary to create a “new” enemy. From the point of view of the American elite, there is no better enemy than “communism”, especially since this hostility will not only serve in the context of the internal conflict, but also appears to be “a perfect fit” in the hostility with China first, and Russia second.

That is, it is a hostility, the role of which is to complement the contradictions with China and Russia, because war needs something to justify it and to mobilize the people towards it. In this context, the economic and political aspects of the issue are not sufficient. It is necessary to invent a “supreme goal” and assign a “moral value” to the immoral war. This is exemplified by the ideological level of the conflict – the war on terror, and the Islamist one in particular, implicitly and overtly carried the ideas of defending the free world, and in the words of Bush the son, “the free Christian world” against “the Islamist threat”. These ideas were theorized in practice during the 1990s by Huntington in his book “The Clash of Civilizations”.

We now see a repetition of the same propaganda in terms of their essence, which was used during the Cold War against the Soviet Union, but with a huge difference in circumstances, which in our opinion are concentrated in two fundamental points: the depth of the current capitalist crisis and the transformations it has produced in the role of the state.

Urgent Concessions

With the victory of the October Revolution in 1917 and the subsequent formation of the Soviet Union, a fierce competition began between two state models: the Soviet model versus the traditional capitalist model.

In the context of this competition, and especially during the first four decades of it, Western countries were forced to make huge concessions to their workers to discourage them from sympathizing with the Soviet Union, and to prevent having the experience come to their countries.

Examples of this, which are many and may be shocking to some, are that European countries had to take measures such as: limiting the workday to eight hours, providing free or almost free public education, providing health insurance to workers, provide housing to workers, grant women the right to vote and run for elected office, and many many more.

The West boasted about all these matters during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s as its “social virtues”. The fact of the matter is that the Western capitalist countries were compelled to make these concessions under the pressure of the workers’ struggle in their countries on the one hand (the workers who were subjected to a series of massacres during their strikes that demanded eight working hours starting in the middle of the nineteenth century), but also under the pressure of the Soviet model, that is, the power of the workers and farmers at the time, which seized these rights and imposed them during the first years of their assumption of power. As for the Western countries, they reluctantly joined the Soviet Union in partially instating these rights and after many years (for example, in the US, a 40-hour workweek legislation was passed in 1940).

Neoliberalism and the Start of Taking Back the Concessions

History recounts that the neoliberalism era of the late 1970s and early 1980s was inaugurated politically by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

The aspect on which enough light does not get shed is that the practical inauguration of this era finds its most visible representation in the gory repression by the “Iron Woman / Thatcher” in the face of workers’ strikes in Britain.

In essence, the issue was as follows: the Soviet Union had experienced a chronic decline since nearly the early 1960s, and had weakened enough in the 1980s for its opponents to get over the issue of model competition. Consequently, what had been conceded in terms of workers’ rights in the West should be withdrawn.

In parallel, the so-called (since the mid 1900s) “social welfare state” became no longer a necessity, and more importantly, it became no longer viable from a profit point of view.

If the theoretical establishment of the idea of the welfare state goes back in one of its roots to the British economic thinker John Keynes, who theorized the mechanisms of state intervention in the market to get out of periodic crises by controlling government spending and other mechanisms, then the practical reality of competition with the Soviet model on the one hand, in parallel with the successive capitalist crises, is what transformed these ideas into something tangible in European countries.

However, with the dwindling competition on the one hand, and the deepening of capitalist crises on the other, especially with the rise in the power of transcontinental companies, and the decrease of their profit rates despite that (by virtue of the complexity of the organic composition of capital), the transition to the neoliberal model, in which the state gives up a large part of its social role, became an urgent need from a profit point of view.

Post-Neoliberalism

Economic statistics show that the status of the working class in the West, including the US, especially through the real wage index, has not witnessed any positive development during the past three decades. In fact, it has witnessed a remarkable decline if we take into account the aggravated decline of social services as a secondary form of wealth distribution at the national level.

With the explosion of the 2008 crisis and the subsequent recovery bubble, which soon exploded again during the past year in a more catastrophic manner, the hand of the big corporations went loose in confiscating more workers’ rights.

Nevertheless, the “government intervention” to save collapsed banks became in 2008 the beginning of the end of the neoliberalism era, which is mainly based on neutralizing the state and its social role.

More importantly, big corporations today show a multiplied need for the intervention of state apparatus, but in what form and for whose interest?

What we believe, and we see clear indications thereof in the new McCarthyism and the “new war on communism” and other phenomena, is that the world’s elite want the state apparatus today to play its blatant and clear role as a class repression apparatus, without even the inherent function of that which says that it is an apparatus of suppressing, organizing and mitigating the class struggle. This means that what is required today from the state apparatus in the West, from the point of view of its actual owners, is to turn into a mere tool of suppression and subjugation and nothing else, and the waving of “the war on the communist threat” is nothing more than one of the main entry points to this new role.

This blatant shift in the role of the state apparatus threatens the very existence of these countries themselves, and therefore it is not surprising at all, for example, that the momentum of talking about the possibilities of fragmentation of the US is increasing.