EDITORIAL - IMR 39

Brian O’Boyle and Kieran Allen

Naomi Klein has coined the term ‘end times fascism’ to describe the emerging alliance between far right influencers and the Tech Bros in Silicon Valley. The influences are mainly catastrophists who predict the world will soon burn. They dream only of past glories and wallow in nostalgia for a 1950s-style society where real men protect ‘their’ women and non-whites know their place.

The Tech Bros are different. Before the age of Trump, they pretended to support ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion.’ But in the twinkling of an eye, they changed. Once Trump and his MAGA movement took control of the White House, an authoritarianism that has always been at the core of corporate thinking, was given a new lease of life. The CEOs finally felt they could say what they really felt. And how they have let rip! 

Take Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, who recently claimed that students who protested about Palestine should be sent to North Korea to eat tree bark. Or look at the erstwhile ‘progressive’ capitalists of Google. Alongside Amazon, they have been providing services to the Israeli Defense Forces and have fired 50 workers who spoke out. Google, somewhat accurately, now openly boasts that ‘since our early days, Google has partnered with the US government’.

We have entered a new authoritarian era; one where any migrant who utters support for Palestinians is deported from the US. One where declaring support for Palestine Action – as this journal has - can land you with a 14-year jail sentence in Britain. And one where, in Germany, you risk being fired for ‘antisemitism’ if you support Palestine. 

This represents a new level of state repression, and as Nigel Gallagher expertly shows in this issue of the journal, state repression is being backed up by the tech companies, which manipulate their algorithms to increase the audience of the far right. And it is not just X. TikTok, for example, has a former IDF soldier as its hate speech manager!

Conventional theorists argue that democracy arose during the 19^th century because there was an active civil society where bourgeois men frequented cafés and discussed the issues of the day. This tradition apparently gave rise to Western values, which include not only democracy but the rule of law, the freedom of the individual, and the separation of powers. Missing from this account, of course, is the intervention of the working-class movement, which agitated for the right to vote. From the Chartists in Britain in 1848 to the Belgian general strike of 1893, working people have always had to fight to win their rights.

Today, these rights have steadily been eroded as the titans of the corporate world demand the rule of a ‘strong man’. Elections are held periodically, but that is where democracy ends. Our rulers understand that our unions have been weakened by decades of neoliberalism. So, they increasingly protect their rule by recycling discourses about protecting democracy and the center ground. They have nothing to offer and everything to hide. They worry about rising levels of anger against Israel’s genocide and think the best way to protect their privileges is to divide working people. Hence, the tech lords are happy to bow to the Trump agenda. How else can one explain Elon Musk openly endorsing the British fascist, Tommy Robinson, while the CEOs of the other big companies bring gifts and pay homage to Trump? 

Left Unity

Some imagine that the Irish elite are immune to these changes. The reality, however, is that the Fianna Fáil (FF)/Fine Gael (FG) form of rule is running out of road because middle Ireland is being assailed from both the left and the right. 

Ireland’s far right is divided into an older group of Catholic conservatives, like Maria Steen, who wants FF or FG to return to its more right-wing roots. The other group are open fascists who elevate a criminal element as the bully boys who earn respect by targeting migrants and, of course, protecting ‘their’ women. But the two wings are not exclusive. Take the recent ‘spoil your votes campaign’ for example. It was fronted up by Declan Ganley, a CEO who makes his money from links with the US military, but sitting beside him at the campaign launch was Michael McCarthy who openly espouses a ‘race science.’ He wants mass deportation because migrants come from places that are so ‘genetically dissimilar’ that their IQ could apparently be 15 points lower!

Yet the main challenge in the Presidential election came from the left – a fact that the mainstream media try to gloss over as they focus on the number of spoilt votes. The sheer scale of Catherine Connolly’s achievement is evident in the figures. She won a landslide victory with 63 percent of the first-preference votes, much higher than the vote of the combined FF/FG alliance in recent times. As Dan Finn has pointed out in Jacobin, since 1990, the highest percentage for a successful candidate, even after second-preference votes were taken into consideration, was 57 percent for Michael D. Higgins in 2011. It is claimed that the turnout was unusually low, but turnout was less than 50 percent on three occasions since 1990. The turnout this year, at 46 percent, was higher than in 2018. 

Connolly won because she refused to back down from mainstream questioning that tried to shame her left-wing politics. But the decisive factor was a united left which was able to mobilise over 15,000 supporters for her campaign. People Before Profit and the Social Democrats first proposed Catherine for President because the former wanted to see a left-right contest. Labour then joined in July and Sinn Féin backed the campaign in September. Connolly’s victory has created enormous momentum for the left; but momentum of this nature doesn’t last. Recognising this, some have already spoken about rolling it on to the Galway by-election which may be held in May next year. In reality, left unity needs to move beyond purely electoral considerations more quickly than this. This journal therefore proposes three simple initiatives to the wider left.

First, let’s fight for a left government that excludes FF and FG. This can start by every party ruling out any partnership with FF or FG well in advance of the next election. They have ruled the country for one hundred years and their time is up. If the left can work together in a presidential campaign, surely, it’s time to break the pattern of attacking FF/FG before an election and then discussing joining them afterwards.

Second, a united left should organise joint meetings around the country to defend Irish neutrality. This was a key theme of Catherine Connolly’s campaign, and we should now try to stop the government removing the Triple Lock. The President can refer bills to a Supreme Court and, while this cannot stop the government, it would throw a spanner in the works. Real neutrality also means facing down pressure from the White House and passing the Occupied Territories Bill in full.

Third, a united left needs to mobilise people on a big scale on the streets. For more than a decade, the housing crisis has evolved into a total disaster. Today, it is intimately linked to affordability, as rents are too high, and many can barely pay their grocery bills. We need a housing and affordability coalition that mobilises people for political solutions. In doing so, we will add to a confidence in working people, which is the only sure way to push back the far right.

Reactionary Liberalism

One of the central features of the presidential campaign was the strange hostility of Irish liberalism towards Catherine Connolly. Strange, because many assume that liberals tend to favour left-leaning candidates over the right. But this perception has unfortunately become outdated. At the core of the poisonous campaign against Catherine Connolly was the Irish Times. It suggested questions to discredit her and the rest of the mainstream media then followed. These questions were then repeatedly echoed in the hallowed halls of RTE. The comedian, Aoife Dunne, caught the style brilliantly in videos for Instagram and TikTok with the caption ‘How Catherine Connolly is questioned vs Heather Humphreys’. The doyen of Irish liberalism, Fintan O’Toole, put matters in his usual delicate way.  “You can have a presidency that is alive and kicking – with the kick being that you don’t know what it’s going to mean. You can’t know because often Connolly herself doesn’t seem sure about what she means.” How does one explain this hostility?

At one level, it arises from a D4 culture that permeates the Irish mainstream media, where cosmopolitanism is associated with a rejection of every anti-colonial sentiment; where being nice to imperialists is simply a form of good manners. But an over-focus on this deference neglects an important shift in wider liberal thinking since the Ukraine invasion, the election of Trump, and the Palestine genocide.

Typically, the modern liberal claims to oppose ‘extremes’ on the left and the right. They often pay lip service against Trump’s excesses, but they particularly hate Putin. In this framework, the EU is seen as the liberal hope for resisting the new authoritarianism. It alone ‘respects the rule of law’, and while it sometimes appears to grovel to Trump, this is excused as clever maneuvering. The real threat comes from Russia, and hence the invasion of Ukraine is seen as a harbinger of a wider attack on Western society and its liberal values. Here we come to the most dramatic shift. 

The modern liberal supporter of the EU believes that military might is the only thing that will guarantee protection from the Russian bear and allow the EU to develop a more independent stance from the US. One therefore finds that erstwhile pacifists in the Green movement have become the most ardent European militarists. Similarly, European social democrats have given their full support to the EU’s €800 billion ReArm Europe programme. The double standards on Ukraine and Palestine are also glaring. No one, to our knowledge, has suggested sending weapons to Palestine to resist an occupation. Instead, there is a constant drumbeat about more military aid for Ukraine.

Revolutionary socialists are clear on this issue. We support the right of people to resist occupation even if we disagree politically with those leading a struggle. And we also understand that imperialist powers only ever pretend to support resistance when it harms their imperial rivals. Anti-colonial movements should not be taken in by this opportunism. They should not subordinate their struggle for national freedom to the interests of imperialist states. Tragically, Ukraine under Zelensky has done just that. He has become one of the major advocates of further EU militarisation, even as thousands of young men flee his country for fear of dying at the front. Palestine, by contrast, remains outcast as it suffers an appalling genocide.

Catherine Connolly has different politics to this journal, but she is both a committed European and a consistent anti-imperialist. The political establishment refuses to acknowledge that one can be both. This is why they try to pretend that being ‘pro-Europe’ means endorsing the current military direction of the EU, and in this, they have the full support of the mainstream media. Hence the apparent ‘scandal’ when Connolly referred to the military-industrial complex of the EU. When she had the guts to say that Hamas was part of the fabric of Palestinian society, they pretended that this was not a simple statement of fact. They were outraged because they support the fake promise of a two-state solution tomorrow to allow Zionism to remain dominant today. When Connolly referred to Germany’s rearmament programme, they deliberately tried to discredit her by suggesting she was comparing modern-day Germany to Hitler. They did so because they want to hide the fact that it is really they who support more arms, more conscripts, and more bombs. And as for letting a convicted republican enter Dáil Éireann— what a ‘security risk’. Let’s not forget the number of TDs who previously fought with guns, whether it is Martin Ferris or Fianna Fáil’s own Frank Aiken.

Catherine Connolly won despite the mainstream media. She reached out to tens of thousands of people who have felt an unease about the glibness with which the political establishment talks of war, or joining NATO, or pretending to oppose Israel while doing nothing practically. Specifically, she won the support of younger voters who are tired of the lazy excuses for the interminable housing crisis. She is a voice, a symbol of a wider movement that needs to place anti-imperialism at its core.

Today we live in a world where the evils of Zionism are there for all to see. When Netanyahu murdered a hundred Palestinians in one night because he claimed Hamas failed to return one dead body, he only exposed the obscene values at the heart of this ideology. The sheer brutality of Zionism sometimes obscures other horrors that now grow and multiply across the system. Yet in Darfur, in Sudan, a US-sponsored client, the UAE, has been let off the hook to fund a militia that is causing mass murder. The reason for the UAE’s support can be summed up in one word: gold. They want to grab the gold of the region and will back whatever force will give it to them. Catherine Connolly may only be one voice. But let’s hope she continues to speak out against the horrors which capitalism has imposed on our world, and let’s hope the rest of us can build on her success. 

In this issue

This issue is filled with the horrors of the system as it ages. In the lead article, Odin O’Sullivan captures the cultural logic of the MAGA movement as Trump attempts to divide the US working class along racial lines. O’Sullivan gives the reader three invaluable insights in his essay. Firstly, he outlines a genuinely Marxist understanding of culture, underpinned above all by a sense of the openness that characterises the struggles between the classes. Secondly, he situates the contemporary ‘culture war’ in the longer sweep of reaction that has been growing since the 1970s. Thirdly, he insists that any genuinely Marxist perspective must understand the ‘culture war as part of the class war’. This means Marxists must stand with all of the oppressed all of the time, not just with those deemed worthy of support at any particular moment. Camilla Fitzsimons’ essay is inspired by her recently published book, Rethinking Feminism in Ireland. Her contribution here argues that there are two distinct ‘souls of feminism’ – a dominant liberal variant and a genuinely liberatory feminism rooted in the radical political tradition. Fitzsimons argues that the dominant feminism continually serves to bind women to the capitalist system through its invocation of a ‘sisterhood’. Her own feminism fundamentally challenges this idea with an ideal of human emancipation through collective struggle. She refuses to consign the most marginalised women (and men) to an increasingly brutal system so that white wealthy women get to ‘lean in’. Kieran Allen’s essay underlines this growing brutality through his analysis of the rising tensions between the US and China. Allen’s lens is the writings of Vladimir Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin, but he updates their work for the modern world. Allen insists that capitalism remains a system of competing capitals. He explains the fusion of state power and corporate wealth that underpins the major ruling classes and argues that only a liberation from the system overall will be enough to break the logic of exploitation, oppression, and war. 

If Allen’s essay deepens our understanding of imperialism, Marnie Holborow’s deepens our hatred of it. Her analysis illustrates the links between Western Imperialism and its Zionist client, exposing Israel as a settler-colonialism. By exposing the true nature of the Zionist project, Holborow then draws two essential political conclusions. The first is that the West will never cut ties with its own client-state; the second, is that the pathway to justice in the region must be through a one-state solution that smashes Zionism completely. Nigel Gallagher’s contribution outlines the twisted journey that Silicon Valley has made from its early promise to liberate humanity to its current role in authoritarian capitalism. Gallagher explains this journey not as the contingent outcome of a ‘few bad apples’ but as the necessary evolution of one of the major industries in modern capitalism. He reminds the reader of a central theme from Marx’s Capital – namely that technology can never be neutral in capitalist conditions. Instead, it will always be deployed by the ruling classes for power and profit, particularly when so much of their surplus value is now tied up in Silicon Valley. Gallagher’s analysis takes the reader through the sheer size and scale of Big Tech, emphasising its growing links to the US state and its military-industrial-complex. His insights are as impressive as they are frightening, and this is a theme we will need to return to. 

Brian O’Boyle develops a value analysis of American capitalism. The fundamental argument in Marx’s Capital is that our rulers exploit the labour of the global working classes and then fight among themselves for a share of the spoils. A capitalist economy is often chaotic on its surface, but it is also a structured totality with underlying laws that assert themselves through the strategies and behaviours of market participants. O’Boyle explains some of the fundamental aspects of Marx’s laws of value before applying them to US capitalism since the Second World War. Sinéad Kennedy’s contribution is an extended review of Kevin B. Anderson’s new book, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads. Kennedy does an excellent job of bringing this lesser-known Marx to life. She makes a compelling case that Marx was always a deeply dialectical thinker who fought passionately to understand the possibilities for a revolution that could liberate humanity. And that, in his final years, Marx looked tirelessly for potential pathways out of capitalism in the colonies, in indigenous communities, and in the gender relations of the system. Kennedy insists that Marx was always doggedly determined in his opposition to the system and endlessly flexible in his attempt to understand it. These are skills we would all do well to remember today.