David Cameron, please tell Sid and his Neighbourhood Watch social entrepreneurs to piss off.

Cameron's Tory recidivism will send us back to the society of pre-war Britain.

"Red Toryism derives largely from a British Tory and imperialist tradition that maintained the unequal division of wealth and political privilege among social classes can be justified, if members of the privileged class contribute to the common good."

Ron Dart

Under the cover of social entrepreneurship and community the Tories and Cameron plan to privatise all aspects of state service provision and send us back to pre-war Britain.

The devil quotes scripture and Cameron is sweetening his plans to sell off the whole state apparatus of Britain, with the possible exception of the army and the police, with talk about the importance of community which he seems to think of as a Neighbourhood Watch writ large.

Like the fascists in the 1930s and Thatcher in the 80s he hides behind words. But he can tell Sid and the Neighbourhood Watch to piss off, as far as I'm concerned.

The example is a little extreme, but did you know that when the fascists took power in Germany many people thought it was a terribly good thing because the Nazis sent workers on holidays and introduced heating allowances for the elderly and looked after war veterans. They thought fascism and the Nazis were providing friendly and caring government. Underneath the warm and bollocking guff about communities Cameron came out with today is precisely what I was discussing on my previous blog. The sell off of the state apparatus to the private sector and the complete destruction of social democracy.

Do you remember Thatcher's bribes to the populace? That they could buy shares in British Gas and British Telecom and buy their own homes and buy shares in the public utilities. Where have those shares ended up? In the pockets of the wealthy. In the pocket of Cameron's mob: the establishment with its sinecure on power through the self selection procedure of money, elite public schooling and Oxbridge.

Ordinary people, apparently, will be in a position to bid to take over the running of public services. F****** Sid and his mob of Norman Tebbit, racist neo-Thatcherite Sun and Sunday Times reading, self interested, Neighbourhood Watch, proto-fascist scum.

But in addition to Sid and the odd deluded liberal, private companies will be encouraged to tender. The complete takeover of the state by private interests is projected. Education, the NHS, municipal services, absolutely everything. At least a quarter of Britain's Gross Domestic Product.

What this will effectively mean is the complete destruction of social democracy. Under the guise of community and the Victorian facade of "voluntary work" Cameron will destroy our social democracy and make the private sector all powerful in Britain and we will soon be heading for a US style country but without the advantages of imperial hegemony..

The devil quotes scripture, Cameron speaks of communities. Don't believe a word the Tory estate agent bastard says.

By Phil Hall

Gramsci: Lenin’s contemporary

Gramsci: Lenin’s contemporary

It is a mistake to treat Antonio Gramsci’s contribution to political thought as substantially separated in time, or in content, from that of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik revolutionary internationalists who were his contemporaries. Gramsci was in Moscow in 1922 and 1923 and met and married his wife there. As a representative of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Gramsci was familiar with the workings of the Comintern.

Lenin died in 1924. Gramsci was imprisoned by the Italian fascists in November, 1926, and not released until just before his death, eleven years later, in 1937.

The unfinished document “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” (download linked below) is the last that Gramsci wrote before his incarceration. To understand its relevance to the National Democratic Revolution, one can begin with its third paragraph, where Gramsci says:

“The Northern bourgeoisie has subjugated the South of Italy and the Islands, and reduced them to exploitable colonies…”

Northern Italy, where there are many great cities (including Turin, home of the giant Fiat company) was “developed”, much as France, Germany and England were in the first quarter of the twentieth century. But south of Rome, and on the large Italian islands of Sardinia and Sicily, the people lived very differently. In many ways the situation resembled the “Colonialism of a Special Type” that was emerging in South Africa in the same period, and which lasted until the South African democratic breakthrough of the 1990s. Colonised and colonisers were present in the same territory.

The Italian Southerners were even subjected to racial contempt, such that, as Gramsci records: “It is well known what kind of ideology has been disseminated in myriad ways among the masses in the North, by the propagandists of the bourgeoisie: the South is the ball and chain which prevents the social development of Italy from progressing more rapidly; the Southerners are biologically inferior beings, semi-barbarians or total barbarians, by natural destiny…” and so on.

As a communist, Gramsci naturally advocated “the political alliance between Northern workers and Southern peasants, to oust the bourgeoisie from State power”. But he follows this bare formulation with many fascinating incidences and details about the class structure and class dynamics of Italy at the time and during the preceding three decades, which included the first world war and the subsequent rise of Mussolini’s fascists. Gramsci accompanies these narratives with an exceptional sensitivity towards the role of intellectuals, whom he comes close to treating as a distinct class.

Gramsci writes: “Intellectuals develop slowly, far more slowly than any other social group, by their very nature and historical function. They represent the entire cultural tradition of a people, seeking to resume and synthesize all of its history. This can be said especially of the old type of intellectual: the intellectual born on the peasant terrain. To think it possible that such intellectuals, en masse, can break with the entire past and situate themselves totally upon the terrain of a new ideology, is absurd. It is absurd for the mass of intellectuals, and perhaps it is also absurd for very many intellectuals taken individually as well - notwithstanding all the honourable efforts which they make and want to make.”

Yet Gramsci regards such an intellectual break as crucial, saying: “This is gigantic and difficult, but precisely worthy of every sacrifice on the part of those intellectuals - from North and South - who have understood that only two social forces are essentially national and bearers of the future: the proletariat and the peasants.”

This introduction has included a lot of quotations, so as to assist readers to navigate through this text in between the many unfamiliar names that are there.

The simple lesson is the same as that of Lenin and the Comintern: Class Alliance will solve the National Question. The Democratic Revolution is a prerequisite for the building of socialism.

Download:

Some Aspects of the Southern Question, Gramsci (9675 words)

Allenby and the Fall of Jerusalem 1917.

1917 was a terrible year for the Allied cause. Russia had ceased to be belligerent after the Bolshevik revolution, reducing the allied numbers by one. Italy clung on to its existence, whilst trying to recover from the hammer blow that was the battle of Caporetto. Britain and France had nearly lost a generation of young men on the battle fields of Paschendale and Verdun respectively for little military gain. The German submarine menace was starting to bring huge shortages to the leading allied industrial producer, Britain. At least a new Ally in the shape of the US had entered the fray. Even still it had seemed a disastrous year. Only one theatre of operations seemed to demonstrate success. That theatre was the Middle East where the British and their Arab allies were steadily rolling up the Ottoman Empire.

To Lloyd George and his coalition cabinet one objective appeared as a sure fire morale booster for a war weary British Empire. The capture of Jerusalem. Lloyd George ordered the able British general , Allenby, to take the city by no later than Christmas. Allenby did better than that, he entered Jerusalem on 11th of December. Many contemporaries quickly picked up on the historical resonances and pronounced it the logical end of the crusades and much lionising of Allenby was evident in the press.

___________________________________________

Are we right then on occasion to suggest that history can be made by events rather than by the logical conclusions of a large scale process?

___________________________________________

The effect on the British cabinet was less than predictable. The very thought of the capture of Jerusalem and the resultant Palestinian lands brought unprecedented debates to the mixed Liberal/Tory cabinet. What arose was a surprise. It appeared that the British cabinet were by and large Christian Zionists and on November the 2nd 1917 they instructed, as a group, Balfour to issue this famous communiqué to the then Head of the Jewish community in the UK Lord Rothschild. The communiqué was for circulation and publication:

The event of Allenby’s entry to Jerusalem was carefully staged managed for the press. Allenby entered Jerusalem on foot via the Jaffa Gate. The Jaffa Gate was traditionally seen as the gate by which conquerors entered Jerusalem. Allenby was instructed to enter on foot as a sign of humility as Jesus had entered on a donkey.

Also at the back of the cabinets mind was the rather overblown entrance by the Kaiser in triumphal style on his good will tour of the Ottoman Empire in 1898:

There are two basic historical questions one may present on first encounter with this historical event:

1 How significant was this event for the creation Israel?

2 How far did the event complete the historical cycle of crusades as was popularly expressed at the time in Britain?

The most interesting question though for me is a different one. This capture of Jerusalem was not a stated key aim of the First World War, it was a by product made possible and desirable by military and political events elsewhere. As such it was an afterthought in the grand scheme of things, and yet its historical impact on the region appears at first glance so profound.

Are we right then on occasion to suggest that history can be made by events rather than by the logical conclusions of a large scale process?

By Mark on History

Congress of the Peoples of the East

The first anti-Imperialist international conference - 1920

The 2CCI was followed within two months by the famous “Congress of the Peoples of the East”, in Baku, convened by the Communist International in what is now the Republic of Azerbaijan [Picture: delegates to the Congress of the Peoples of the East]. Its manifesto (click the link below) makes very clear the strategic confrontation that existed following the end of hostilities, and the effective and menacing British Imperial victory, as they saw it.

This was the first international congress of oppressed nations against colonialism. It effectively launched the anti-colonial struggle on a new basis that bore major fruit less than thirty years later in the 1940s, with the independence of India and the victory of the communist revolutionaries in China.

In 1920, the First World War (the Inter-Imperialist World War) had only recently come to and end. Among other things, the conference said:

“Peoples of the East! Six years ago there broke out in Europe a colossal, monstrous slaughter…

“It was fought for the partition of the world, and chiefly for the partition of Asia, of the East. It was fought to decide who was to rule over the countries of Asia and whose slaves the peoples of the East should be. It was fought to decide whether the British or the German capitalists should skin the peasants and workers of Turkey, Persia and Egypt."

The conference manifesto goes on to detail the threat that the victorious British posed towards the Peoples of the East in their many countries, large and small. We know by now that this manifesto was not mistaken. It concludes:

“Long live the unity of all the peasants and workers of the East and of the West, the unity of all the toilers, all the oppressed and exploited. Long live the battle headquarters of this united movement — the Communist International! May the holy war of the peoples of the East and of the toilers of the whole world against imperialist Britain burn with unquenchable fire!”

The Soviet Union is no more, yet the profound change in the entire world that is the consequence of the anti-colonial movement for independence and sovereignty of nations is still with us, in the form of nearly 200 independent nations, most of which did not exist, as such, at the time of the 2CCI and the Congress of the Peoples of the East in 1920, and most of which are by now national-democratic republics conforming broadly with the NDR.

For one example of how quickly the anti-colonial movement took hold, and how close to our home this movement quickly came, the Red Trade Union International (Profintern) of the Comintern, founded one year after the 2CCI, in 1921, had by 1930 organised (in Berlin) an International Conference of Negro Workers that included Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya as well as Moses Kotane, W. Thibedi and Albert Nzula of South Africa.

We should also not forget to mention the founding of the Communist Party of South Africa under the auspices of the Comintern in 1921 in this connection, because the admission of the CPSA was conditional upon its acceptance of the Comintern’s agreed policies, which included the NDR. Therefore the CPSA’s support of class alliance for national liberation and national democracy was not something that was added on later, but was fully present at the birth of the CPSA.

Another example of the swift, strong effect of the Russian Revolution and the Comintern on South Africa is the Black Republic Thesis of 1928 and all that went with it. We will come to it in the next part of this NDR Generic Course (next week). The important thing to note here is that the CPSA’s basic commitment to the NDR had already existed for years prior to the Black Republic Thesis.

Download:

Manifesto, Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East (4383 words)

Genesis of the NDR

Genesis of the NDR

The Hammer and Sickle emblem of the communists, invented in 1917, is a symbol of class alliance between two distinct classes: proletarian workers, and peasants.

Peasants often work hard and they are often poor, but they are not the same as the working proletariat of the towns. Nor are they the same as the rural proletariat. So the hammer and the sickle are not two equal things. They represent two different things, allied.

Practical politics is always a matter of alliance, and in different circumstances, different alliances are called for. Communists commonly regard an alliance between workers and peasants as normal. Proletarian parties have likewise, in the past, often attempted class alliances with the bourgeoisie against feudalism or against colonialism.

Alliances are normal and necessary, in order to isolate and thereby to defeat an adversary, and equally, to avoid being isolated and defeated by the adversary. Therefore, the question of the appropriate alliances in the anti-colonial and anti-Imperialist struggle was bound to arise.

The origin of the specific type of class alliance that is nowadays referred to by the term National Democratic Revolution can be precisely located in the Second Congress of the Communist International (2CCI), in the discussion on the National & Colonial Question, reported by V. I. Lenin on 26 July 1920 (click on the link below).

The founding Congress of the Communist International (“Comintern”) took place in March, 1919, a little more than a year after the October 1917 Russian Revolution.

The first “International Working Men’s Association”, of which Karl Marx had been a founder member in 1864, had been disbanded in 1871 after the fall of the Paris Commune. The Second International fell apart in 1914, when most of the Social-Democratic workers’ parties backed the bourgeois masters of war in the conflict between the Imperialist powers.

The communists, led by Lenin, had held out against that betrayal. After the revolutionary victory in Russia they lost very little time before constructing a new International. The Third, Communist International was naturally and explicitly anti-Imperial and anti-colonial.

In his report to the 2CCI on the National & Colonial Question, Lenin says: “We have discussed whether it would be right or wrong, in principle and in theory, to state that the Communist International and the Communist parties must support the bourgeois-democratic movement in backward countries. As a result of our discussion, we have arrived at the unanimous decision to speak of the national-revolutionary movement rather than of the ‘bourgeois-democratic’ movement. It is beyond doubt that any national movement can only be a bourgeois-democratic movement, since the overwhelming mass of the population in the backward countries consist of peasants who represent bourgeois-capitalist relationships… However, the objections have been raised that, if we speak of the bourgeois-democratic movement, we shall be obliterating all distinctions between the reformist and the revolutionary movements. Yet that distinction has been very clearly revealed of late in the backward and colonial countries…”

In this report we find, for the first time, all the makings of the NDR, including the name, even if the words are not quite in their present-day order. Lenin calls it “national-revolutionary”, but he makes it very clear that he is talking of a democratic class alliance with anti-colonial, anti-Imperialist elements of the national bourgeoisie in colonial countries.

The 2CCI was followed within two months by the famous “Congress of the Peoples of the East”, in Baku, in the southern part of what was soon to become the Soviet Union. This was the first international anti-colonial conference. It had huge consequences. We will deal with the “Congress of the Peoples of the East” in the next instalment, as an optional contribution to the discussion of the birth of the NDR as a concept, which had been laid down in Lenin’s report.

Downloads:

Click here to download the text of Report on National and Colonial Question, 2CCI, Lenin (1983 words)

Further (optional) reading:

1203a Manifesto, Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East (4383 words)

1203b Some Aspects of the Southern Question, Gramsci (9675 words)

Now for our younger viewers - Flight Path Eyes

Butterflies and bombs

It’s not a nightmare but it’s really weird. I don’t have problems falling back asleep later because I know it’s a dream and I know it’s the past. I haven’t had it for a year or two, but I had it last week, after talking about it with Phil and I used to dream this dream constantly one or two years ago. I don’t know why I dream it. It’s the same scene over and over again.

Perhaps I was in Macerata, not far from my town. I was sitting around a table outside a bar with four friends. The man in front shielded me from the early afternoon light. We were celebrating. A married couple sat together on my left and the light from both their rings reflected onto my face. They were happy and elegantly dressed; she wore a black dress and a narrow brimmed hat with lace. Her husband wore a pin-striped suit. The woman on my right wasn’t saying much, but she was attentive. It was hot and I was wearing a sleeveless red dress. I picked up my drink and took a long sip.

The cigarette smoke distracted me from my conversation with the man in front for a few seconds and I watched as it floated up: like a cat might watch a butterfly.

As the smoke disappeared into sunlight, I heard a growing sound, unbearable and close. The sharp nose of an aeroplane appeared, its grey stomach flapped open and I froze as a bomb fell from it like deadweight. I saw the dust rising and the brick shattering and I heard the roaring and the screams.



By Alexandra Santarelli

Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850

Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850

Karl Marx, the son of a lawyer, had a doctorate and was the editor of a magazine. The book that he wrote, which Lenin called (in The State and Revolution) “the first mature work of Marxism” was called The Poverty of Philosophy and it was published in 1847.

The Poverty of Philosophy was a polemic. A polemic is an argument made on the basis of an opponent’s text. Marx’s opponent was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a French petty-bourgeois anarchist, who had written a book called The Philosophy of Poverty. Marx was a fluent speaker and reader of French, had lived in Paris and also in Brussels, and knew Proudhon personally.

The confrontation between Marx and Proudhon was very typical of the confrontations that have happened all along in the history of communism. Proudhon thought that the poorer and more desperate the people became, the more revolutionary they would be. Marx on the other hand believed that it was the working proletariat that was the decisive revolutionary class, and the more organised it was, the better, for that revolutionary purpose.

In 1847, Marx also wrote Wage Labour and Capital, designed for political education sessions with workers, and an early fore-runner of his great work Capital, Volume 1 of which was published 20 years later in 1867.

In the second half of 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned by the secret communist organisation to which they belonged – the Communist League – to write a Communist Manifesto, which they did and published at the beginning of 1848.

Marx’s next full book, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, was written in 1850. It is a detailed account of the revolutionary events in France from 1848 onwards, including the rise of Louis Bonaparte. Marx was frequently in Paris during this period. The first chapter of this book is given below, as a download.

So in this period you have examples of Marx writing polemic; educational text-book; party propaganda; and then this detailed, original account of real events, combined with understanding of the events, which is The Class Struggles in France. Marx’s next great book, The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, finished in 1852, was different again. It was pure journalism but also very great journalism indeed.

What The Class Struggles in France does for us here, early in our course on the National Democratic Revolution, is to demonstrate the realities and permutations of class conflict. It shows once again how the working class must have allies, and it shows how treacherous, brutal and ruthless the bourgeoisie can be. It also shows how lightning-fast revolutionary events can be.

The period covered by chapter 1 is only four months, from February to June, and yet almost everything that can happen in a revolution, happened in that time. Among other things, it is a very exciting story.

The question of the republic arises, and the necessity of supporting it. The revolutionary national democracy is crucial.

Pictures are of Dolores Ibarurri, "La Passionaria", defender of the Spanish Republic against the fascists, shown during the struggle, and later in life after the fall of the fascist regime.


All the works mentioned above are available free on Marxists Internet Archive.

Click here to download Part 1 of Karl Marx’s “The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850”

Permanent Revolution

Permanent Revolution

Karl Marx’s March 1850 Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League begins by describing the working proletariat as the “only decisively revolutionary class”, and ends with a battle-cry for the workers: “The Permanent Revolution!”

In the Address, Marx is advocating all possible means of achieving revolutionary change which, even if theoretically reversible, would not in practice be reversed.

“The workers' party must go into battle with the maximum degree of organization, unity and independence, so that it is not exploited and taken in tow by the bourgeoisie,” said Marx, rehearsing the events of the previous two years when the bourgeois allies of the working class had treacherously sold the workers out as soon as they could secure favourable terms for themselves from the reactionary feudal powers.

Marx then very frankly reviews the competing self-interests of the contending classes and fractions of the bourgeoisie.

“There is no doubt that during the further course of the revolution in Germany, the petty-bourgeois democrats will for the moment acquire a predominant influence. The question is, therefore, what is to be the attitude of the proletariat, and in particular of the League towards them,” declared Marx.

“As in the past, so in the coming struggle also, the petty bourgeoisie, to a man, will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, to return to work and to prevent so-called excesses, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory,” warned Marx.

The working class must “be independently organized and centralized in clubs,” and “it is the task of the genuinely revolutionary party… to carry through the strictest centralization” of the nation. Reading this section, it is clear that Marx was convinced that the building of the democratic republic and the building of the nation had to be one and the same set of actions.

The working-class tactics in alliance with the bourgeois democrats should be to “force the democrats to make inroads into as many areas of the existing social order as possible,” and constantly to “drive the proposals of the democrats to their logical extreme”.

The workers must always look ahead to the next act of the revolutionary drama. They will “contribute most to their final victory by informing themselves of their own class interests, by taking up their independent political position as soon as possible, and by not allowing themselves to be misled by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute the necessity of an independently organized party of the proletariat.”

Download:

Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League, Karl Marx, 1850

We're moving again. Hold on tight till 1919

Origin of the National Republic

Barricade, Rue Soufflot, Paris, February 1848, painting, Horace Vernet

Origin of the National Republic

The Great French Revolution that started in 1789 did not immediately produce a lasting democratic republic in France. Napoleon Bonaparte’s Empire, launched with a coup d’etat on 9 November 1799 had attacked feudal monarchs all over Europe. But it was followed during the next three decades by the restoration of weak versions of the French monarchy, culminating in the “July Monarchy” of Louis Philippe. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels anticipated a coming revolutionary upsurge and published the Communist Manifesto at the beginning of the revolutionary year of 1848.

The Manifesto’s first major section is called “Bourgeois and Proletarians” and it says among other things that: “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat.”

Karl Marx arrested in Brussels, March 1848, drawing, N Khukov

Yet it was Marx in particular, in two great books and one short Address (see the links below), who described, better then anyone else, the much less simple, more complex, permutations of class conflict at the time. For example, in the following cut from “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (click on the link below for a longer selection) it is clear that the proletariat suffered an almost immediate disaster, because it had no allies. The proletariat was isolated and attacked by all the other classes together, and massacred, in June of 1848 in Paris.

This is the situation that the proletariat must always avoid, and it is one reason why the working class must always have allies. Here is the cut from Marx’s outline of events, given in the “18^th Brumaire”:

“a. May 4 to June 25, 1848. Struggle of all classes against the proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days.

“b. June 25 to December 10, 1848. Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois republicans. Drafting of the constitution. Proclamation of a state of siege in Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship set aside on December 10 by the election of Bonaparte as President.”

In the “18th Brumaire”, not only do the contenders of the Great French Revolution, the Aristocracy, the Peasantry (sometimes called the Montagne), the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat reappear. Also described are the clear contradictions within the bourgeois class. Plus the classless, manipulative Bonaparte, who played the four main classes off against each other for more than two decades until he lost the plot.  And notably the “lumpen-proletariat” of idle adventurers who were Bonaparte’s willing, and paid (with “whisky and sausages”) accomplices.

Berlin, March 1848, painting

In his March 1850 Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League (linked below) Marx spoke in particular of Germany, which had also caught the revolutionary enthusiasm, again in terms of a precise and dynamic comprehension of the patterns and permutations of class contradiction, and of who must ally with whom at any particular moment.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were deeply, personally and very effectively involved in these events as individuals and as organisers, and in Engels’ case as a military combatant.

These events shaped the new form of democratic republic that was consolidated in France after the eventual fall of Louis Bonaparte in 1871, and after the brief life of the Paris Commune.

Barricade, Paris, June 1848, photograph

That newly-formed kind of “democratic bourgeois republic” still remains the standard form of nation-state in the world, and it is the same kind that our republic has become, here in South Africa.

This historic understanding, as well as the unsurpassed clarity with which Marx in particular describes the nature of practical multi-class struggle, can serve to prepare us for a progressively more specific, historical examination of the theory and practice of National Democratic Revolution (NDR) through the 20th Century, in Africa, and in South Africa up to the present time.

The NDR is nothing if it is not about class alliance, and about democracy on the national scale.

As the second component of the CU Generic Course on the NDR, the extracts from the “18^th Brumaire” would be used as the discussion text, with the “March Address” and the extract from “Class Struggles in France” offered as additional reading.

Downloads:

Click here to download the text of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapters 1 & 7, Marx 

Further (optional) reading:

1202a March 1850 Address to the CC of the Communist League, Marx 

1202b Class Struggles in France, Part 1, The Defeat of June 1848, Marx

Now for our younger viewers - Wooden Runway

Battle for the nation state

Battle for the nation state

Alex Gordon, Morning Star, London, 18 March 2010

Monopoly capital and the forces of so-called "globalisation" face yet another deep crisis. This has awakened new interest in the ideas of Karl Marx, which have proved much more resilient than the forces of imperialist globalisation have claimed.

The international banking system has been temporarily saved from complete meltdown, but only by the extensive intervention of the state with public money.

If the situation were not so serious, we may even have been amused to witness the spectacle of those who once claimed the total victory of global markets, the "end of history" itself and the death of the nation state scrambling for government bail-outs and demanding state intervention.

Over the last 40 years the drive for world market integration has unleashed and intensified competitive pressures on capital and labour.

Capital markets now have a global reach and capital flows have increased in speed and volume. This has undermined "normal" democratic policy cycles.

These factors weaken the ability of organised labour to resist economic exploitation and of nation states to regulate economic activity.

Labour practices such as offshoring and flagging out - the operation of commercial ocean-going vessels under "flags of convenience" to avoid health and safety and social legislation - have thrown into doubt the ability of the state to act as a regulator of markets.

The primary vehicles for limiting nations' rights of nations to self-determination and for removing sovereignty are the G8, the International Monetary Fund, the North American Free Trade Agreement bloc and the European Union.

However, by unleashing the forces of capital with little or no regard to the consequences no-one has been immune from the fallout. The weakening and total removal of political and economic levers to deal with the crises at a national level is simply intensifying the nature and depth of the malaise.

The imperialist war machine has developed as the military wing of corporate globalisation over the same period to deny, where necessary, the right to self-determination enshrined in the UN charter.

Nato secretary-general Lord Robertson declared in 1999 that the "Rubicon had been crossed" with the illegal attacks on Yugoslavia. Imperialist military intervention has been dressed up in post-modern, media-friendly terms like "humanitarian war" and "nation building."

Despite the now obvious limitations of letting global capital rip without any meaningful restraints, there is clearly a great deal of confusion as to how workers should respond to the present crisis.

An honest appraisal of the left's response to imperialist globalisation must accept that regrettably there has been a significant tendency to adapt to the logic of market dominance and to post-modernism, the ideology that developed in tandem with it.

Marxian slogans such as "Workers of all lands, unite" and "The working men have no country" have been appropriated as crude justifications for the proposition that the nation state is, indeed, dead.

These death notices, to paraphrase Mark Twain, have proven to be greatly exaggerated.

Marx also had to deal with such idealism in his own time. The Proudhonists famously wanted to "abolish nationalities in the interests of the social revolution." Marx calmly responded by asking whether this meant we must all become French.

The present crisis of capitalism and massive attacks on the idea of the nation state and democracy demand that we return to "the national question" with sober senses, as Marx would have it.

To begin with, we must understand that nowhere did Marx write of nations themselves disappearing, only of the "vanishing of antagonisms between peoples."

Marx's immediate call to action to the working class was to take from their oppressors what had been denied them.

In the Communist Manifesto he wrote: "Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word."

The battle for democracy in this country had been raging long before those words were written down. The first trade unionists asserted freedom of association. The Chartists demanded universal adult male suffrage, secret ballots, abolition of property qualifications and payment of MPs, equal constituencies and annual parliaments in their struggles for political representation to effect economic change.

At that time, the modern nation state was a relatively new concept born of rationalism and enlightenment.

The French serf had only recently become a citizen of the republic. The New England farmer had defeated their British rulers a few years earlier to become a citizen of the United States. The ensuing struggles against slavery and the American civil war were played out in a clearly national context.

These modern developments have continued since the second world war with the growth of the United Nations. Nearly 200 countries sit in the UN general assembly - so much for the death of the nation state.

Even imperialist, supranational organisations such as Nato and the European Union have had to create nation states - for example the client statelet of Kosovo - and oppose the creation of others for their own geopolitical purposes.

However the overriding logic and purpose of the EU is to hollow out the democratic structures of states and incrementally to transfer law-making powers to unelected, undemocratic, supranational institutions in Brussels through treaties and directives.

This anti-democratic, slow-motion revolution in reverse has gone unnoticed by many voters and most political commentators, who still see the Westminster Parliament as the key citadel of state power in Britain.

This is why the debate over many contemporary political and social issues in Britain has such an unreal quality.

On the question of railway privatisation most voters in Britain support renationalisation. Yet how many voters are aware that an EU directive orders the separation of train operations from rail infrastructure? How many know that the European Commission prohibits democratic political control over railway investment and ownership by elected governments?

Faceless bureaucrats are imposing rail privatisation on member states using EU directives.

Other neoliberal EU directives, such as those for general services, postal services, health services and numerous EU rulings and treaties, are designed to hand public services to the private sector, further restricting the power of elected governments to respond to the needs of their electorates.

Imperialist, supranational bodies such as the EU are seeking to roll back democratic advances achieved in previous centuries. Not content simply to defeat and scatter forces for socialism, modern imperialism seeks not "the end of history," but to reverse history.

Progressive forces must respond to this threat by defending and restoring national democracy. Ultimately, national independence is required for democracy to flourish. The freedom of all nations to develop without external, imperialist interference should be the touchstone for our understanding of Marxism in the modern context.

National independence should once again play a decisive role in the defeat of the parasitic class, which has no more interest in the fortunes of workers and their families than an economic army of occupation.

As Marx said, "capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society" - by which, I believe, he meant the state.

Marx also said that democracy is the road to socialism. The war for democracy is yet to be won, but the army of labour is crying out for the battle to be rejoined.

• Alex Gordon is president of the National Union of Rail, Maritime & Transport Workers. This article is based on his oration at the wreath-laying ceremony at Karl Marx's grave last Sunday organised by the Marx Memorial Library

From: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/88164