Robert Narai

Trump and US imperialism—an interview with Joel Geier

Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the far right portray themselves as radical outsiders at odds with the political establishment, upending norms and breaking all the rules. But in reality, far-right politicians are slavish servants of power—indeed, extreme embodiments of it. 
They personify everything cruel and exploitative about capitalism and are determined to make the system even worse for workers and the poor. Rather than being radical outsiders, the most prominent far-right leaders and their backers are the ultimate insiders: capitalists and those who aspire to be their political representatives. 
Trump made his fortune among the milieu of property speculators and casino operators. Musk, the world’s richest man, is a defence contractor, car manufacturer and media baron. Alice Weidel, leader of the fascist Alternative for Germany, is a banker who has occupied high-ranking positions at some of the world’s most powerful financial institutions, such as Goldman Sachs and Allianz Global.
Whether they own or manage car factories, defence firms or banks, they have the same basic interests: compete with other capitalists for profits and market dominance and fight to secure the best conditions in pursuit of that goal. The political programs they present aren’t in the least bit radical—they are utterly pro-capitalist.
Massive tax cuts for the rich and the pledge to “drill, baby, drill” are quite obviously about direct profit-making for sections of capitalists. But the war on “woke” and the return of machismo also need to be understood as part of an integrated pro-capitalist agenda. 
By attacking limited social gains such as anti-discrimination provisions, the far right is attempting to make open bigotry more acceptable. Mass deportations of undocumented migrants play a similar role. If people can live with these abuses directed against their communities, it normalises the idea that certain groups deserve fewer rights than others. 
In place of anti-discrimination programs, Trump has vowed to “create a society that is blind to colour and based on merit”. But the idea that those at the top of capitalist society are there because of their intelligence and hard work is bullshit. 
Trump, for example, is a trust fund baby who has bankrupted half a dozen companies. He owes his political power to wealthy tech industry backers like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. 
Likewise, Musk is from a wealthy South African family that made their wealth under apartheid in property development and emerald mines. He has built his vast empire off loans from his parents and off the backs of the workers he exploits. This is not unique to Trump and Musk but common to many people in positions of power who inherit their wealth and achieve their status through the opportunities afforded by class privileges.
Musk in particular personifies how economic power under capitalism is transformed into political power. Those with enough money can buy their way into government or bankroll political parties that promote and pursue their interests. Musk donated $246 million to Trump in the 2024 elections, becoming Trump’s biggest donor and most influential promoter. In return, he has been appointed as the head of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Musk has declared that DOGE—which is tasked with restructuring the government, cutting programs, firing workers and investing in high tech to increase the productivity of the remaining workforce—is nothing less than a “revolution”. 
But there is nothing remotely radical about any of this agenda. Republicans have long dreamed of gutting the federal bureaucracy (except for the bloated military and security apparatuses). Democrats claim to be different, but they have spent decades carrying out a milder version of that same project. Cutting government expenditure on social programs while funnelling taxpayer money into the means of destruction is mainstream capitalist politics across the globe. 
There is perhaps no greater illustration of whose priorities dominate the US government than the obscene spectacle of the world’s richest man slashing aid to the poor, sick and elderly under the guise of eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse”.
Musk is now leveraging his massive fortune to finance far-right forces worldwide and to promote them through his social media platform, X. He has endorsed Germany’s fascist party in the upcoming elections and spoke at its recent conference about the need for the country to get beyond “Holocaust guilt”. He recently hosted an X interview with Alice Weidel, which drew an audience of up to 210,000 people. Weidel thanked Musk for the mainstream exposure, saying: “Elon, it’s a completely new situation for me that I can just have a normal conversation, and I’m not interrupted or negatively framed”.
Musk is also considering bankrolling Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK party in Britain (although he has expressed his wish for the party to be led by jailed fascist street agitator Tommy Robinson instead). Among the other fascists he has befriended is Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, with whom Musk has met repeatedly since she came to power in 2022. (Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party traces its origins to Mussolini.) 
Musk has praised far-right Argentinian president Javier Milei’s model, which aims to dismantle public services, labour protections and all regulations on corporate exploitation. He has stated that the “Milei model” is the inspiration behind DOGE.
All big capitalists do this to varying degrees, putting their vast wealth into media empires and behind political parties that will promote and pursue their interests. Gina Reinhart has recently declared that she wants to use her wealth to bring Trump-style politics to Australia; Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has been working tirelessly to create favourable conditions for decades.
Capitalists, in particular, can quickly fall in love with the far right because it supports an extreme manifestation of the system they already benefit from and preside over: a dictatorship of the rich built on exploitation, competition, social hierarchy and bigotry.

Why the capitalists have fallen in with the far right

Los Angeles is an icon of global capitalism. Home to 18 million people and some of the largest and most profitable corporations in the world, this sprawling city is a mecca of production and exchange. As the seat of the American entertainment industry, it is unsurpassed in its cultural influence. 
Yet for more than a week now, large parts of the City of Dreams have been transformed by out-of-control wildfires into a nightmarish inferno. That predictable and preventable fires have overwhelmed the second largest city in the United States is an indictment of the system that Los Angeles has come to symbolise.
The worst of the many fires burning around the city is the Palisades fire, which has so far consumed nearly 24,000 acres [9,700 ha], including most of the coastal Pacific Palisades neighbourhood with a population of more than 23,000. The Eaton fire has consumed almost 15,000 acres, including much of the neighbourhood of Altadena. In total, fires have burned through approximately 40,000 acres in the Los Angeles area—an area larger than the entire city of San Francisco. One Pacific Palisades resident who was forced to evacuate and witness the fires consume her neighbourhood <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ag/podcast/la-fires-it-was-like-watching-the-end-of-the-world/id1715473158?i=1000683863231">told</a>
the BBC, “It was like watching the end of the world”.
More than 170,000 people living near the Palisades and Eaton fires currently remain under evacuation orders or warnings. Many have been forced to make the heartbreaking decision to flee their homes as embers surrounded them, with some becoming trapped in their vehicles. Twenty-seven deaths have been confirmed, but many more victims are likely to be discovered among the smouldering ruins. What’s more, many millions have been exposed to the toxic smoke, which blankets the city, with health consequences that will be felt for years to come.
Images and videos shared widely on social media show whole neighbourhoods and city blocks burned to the ground. Tens of thousands of people are now returning to the burned-out ruins of what was once home to their entire lives. One Altadena <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000009916693/los-angeles-residents-burnt-homes-fires-.html">resident</a>
told the New York Times, “The flames have consumed all our dreams of years here. Everything has turned to ashes”.
This unfolding catastrophe is not merely a “natural” disaster. It has been driven in large part by the irrationalism of an economic and political system that subordinates all social needs to the logic of profits and capital accumulation. The wildfires illustrate the inability of capitalism to plan properly for and deal with the realities of the environment on which it depends: from climate change to urban planning to basic fire and water management.
Climate change—driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels that are integral to the global capitalist system—intensified the inferno. LA already has a uniquely fire-prone geography, with powerful winds that fuel wildfires flowing out of the Great Basin in Nevada and Utah toward the southern California coast. These Santa Ana winds push dry desert air over the mountains and accelerate as they blow into canyons and valleys. Los Angeles County and much of southern California have been in climate change-induced drought conditions, having recorded no significant rainfall for eight months. Longer dry seasons in southern California have not only aggravated the fire danger but also reduced available water supplies and complicated efforts to develop countermeasures. One recent study found that human-caused climate change resulted in a 320 percent increase in burned areas in California from 1996 to 2021. 
Capitalist urban development has transformed LA’s unique geography into the wildfire capital of the world. In his seminal essay <a href="https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/">“The Case for Letting Malibu Burn”</a>, American Marxist Mike Davis argued that the wealthy, and the political establishment that serves them, are to blame for these increasingly disastrous fires.
In what can only be described as the opposite of rational urban planning, property developers and wealthy homeowners have fought for their “right” to expand into the scenic but fire-prone foothills of Los Angeles, along the coastlines of Malibu, with the expectation that the government will protect their investments. The southern Californian fire policy of “total fire suppression”, intended to protect these houses, in fact means that there is more fuel to burn when fires do start, which they inevitably do. “At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea”, writes Davis. “A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.” The current wildfires are the latest episode in what Davis calls fire “holocausts” that regularly (and, with climate change, more frequently) wipe out whole sections of LA.
In the aftermath of each fire, government resources have been swiftly mobilised to rebuild the fire-damaged homes of the wealthy, while fires in Los Angeles’ downtown slum tenements received comparatively little support or attention. “Why more mansions in the fire-loving hills?”, asks Davis. “Because of a perverse fact: after every major California blaze, homeowners and their representatives take shelter in the belief that if wildfire can’t be prevented, nonetheless, its destructiveness can be tamed ... Yet, as a contemporary Galileo might say of defensible space, ‘still it burns.’” 
Local firefighting resources have been completely overwhelmed by the current inferno, handicapped by insufficient numbers and a lack of water pressure caused by high demand in fire hydrants. Firefighters have been mobilised from neighbouring states like Nevada, Oregon and Washington, as well as Mexico, to support local resources that have been depleted. An estimated one-third of those deployed to fight the inferno are hyper-exploited prison inmates who are paid as little as 16 to 74 cents per hour. As one inmate told Al Jazeera: “Sending us to fight fires was abusive. We preferred it to staying in prison”.
Adding to the problem are recent budget cuts for firefighting services imposed by Democratic Mayor Karen Bass. Last summer, Bass cut funding for the fire department by US$17.6 million, leaked documents revealing that Bass recently proposed an additional US$49 million in budget cuts. In December, LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley prophetically <a href="https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/california-wildfires/la-widlfires-budget-cuts-palisades-fire/3598438/">warned</a>
that “the [budget] reduction ... has severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires”. Whether $17.6 million extra would have made a tangible difference to the outcome of these fires is difficult to determine, but it indicates a governmental complacency about the threat that defies science and logic. 
Class inequalities also affected how fire resources were and are used, with the wealthy using scarce resources to protect their assets without regard for the wider firefighting effort. Meanwhile, LA’s poorer communities have been left defenceless against the fires, with many of the dead older and disabled people who were not able to leave their homes.
None but the wealthiest will be able to recover fully from the damages and displacement caused by the fires. Many will be added to the growing number of homeless, who numbered more than 75,000 last year in Los Angeles County. The problem is compounded by insurance companies’ decisions to cancel hundreds of homeowners’ policies in Pacific Palisades last summer. State Farm, one of the biggest in California and the US, cited the area as high-risk and unprofitable due to the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires brought on by climate change. 
Toxic smoke from the fires now blankets the entire region, exposing the 18 million people who live in the LA metropolitan area to the effects of inhaling carcinogenic particles. And it will be the poorest and most vulnerable who will suffer the worst effects, such as the tens of thousands of homeless people with no protection from the hazardous air as well as the many workers who can’t afford to stay home to avoid the smoke. People with underlying health issues, as well as older people and children, are particularly vulnerable. Carlos Gould, an environmental health scientist at the University of California San Diego, told the New York Times that the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/climate/wildfire-smoke-risks.html">levels of wildfire smoke</a> in LA could be raising daily mortality by 5 to 15 percent. 
Meanwhile, US media coverage of the fires has tended to avoid mentioning climate change as a factor in the disaster, at the same time as it repeats right-wing conspiracy theories peddled by President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters as they seek to capitalise on the crisis. These include the claim that diversity, equity and inclusiveness programs are behind the shortage of firefighters and that environmental protection programs are the root cause of the water shortages. In doing so, they deliberately divert attention from those responsible for this catastrophe: the fossil fuel companies driving climate change, property developers and wealthy homeowners that have transformed LA into a giant tinder box and the entire political establishment, which supports the rich whilst cutting the essential public services needed to manage and prevent such tragedies. Not surprising, given their policy of “drill, baby, drill” to increase domestic fossil fuel production. 
The LA wildfires have global implications. Capitalist-fuelled climate change is driving more intense and frequent extreme weather across the world that will result in increasingly devastating disasters such as the one unfolding in LA. This is particularly true for countries like Australia, with a climate conducive to bushfires and urban centres vastly under-resourced to deal with the threat. As urban development <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-fastest-population-growth-in-the-wests-wildland-urban-interface-is-in-areas-most-vulnerable-to-wildfires-173410">expands into </a>wild lands, the probability of fires and the property potentially exposed to fire increase, creating a feedback loop of escalating wildfire risk. 
It is not enough to say that climate change needs to be reversed. Even with drastic action now, the majority of the planet will still be living with the consequences of a rapidly warming planet. In the absence of planning and rational decision making, crises like the LA wildfires are going to become increasingly worse and more normalised.
Only a democratic and rationally planned society is capable of dealing with the threat posed by climate change and the social catastrophes that it will produce. Decisions should be made by the many millions who produce the wealth of society but don’t control it and therefore can’t use it to protect themselves from the worst effects of climate crisis. They are the same people who could reorganise wealth production to make it sustainable and geared towards meeting need, not simply accumulating wealth for the sake of it. 
The Los Angeles metropolitan area is home to 53 billionaires, whose combined wealth totals US$222 billion. The US$222 billion held by Los Angeles billionaires could cover the estimated US$150 billion in damage caused by the fires and provide immediate relief to those affected. 
A democratically and rationally planned society run by the working class could immediately abolish the fossil-fuel industry and direct resources toward building renewable energy and reversing the effects of climate change. Urban development could be rationally planned rather than subject to the whims of the wealthy without regard for the realities of the natural world. And rather than cutting and chronically underfunding essential public resources like firefighters, a society run by the working class would allocate the resources needed to prevent and respond to the threat of wildfires and other climate change-induced catastrophes.
Unless we fight for socialism—a democratic and rationally planned society run by the working class based on genuine human needs—the Los Angeles wildfires provide a window into our terrifying future.

LA wildfires show the future of capitalism

US President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed trade war, his proposals to increase military spending and the stacking of his cabinet with China hawks have made it clear that the US will continue preparing for war with China. Australia’s military alliance with the United States means that Canberra has practically signed up the country for such a war if it breaks out.
For the Australian political establishment, Trump’s election victory was an opportunity to express unwavering commitment to the US alliance. PM Anthony Albanese was one of the first world leaders to phone Trump and congratulate him on his election victory. Opposition leader Peter Dutton, who considers himself an Australian version of Trump, said the relationship with the US “will strengthen, and we will make sure that we work very closely with the incoming administration”.
The US alliance—and new agreements such as the AUKUS military pact between Australia, the US and the United Kingdom—have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/24/us-military-base-australia-china/">transformed</a>
Australia into a central <a href="https://youtu.be/a3HhPU9DGsQ?si=msq1o2NhLzPADK3x">base of operations</a>
for the <a href="https://youtu.be/CW1TYDVBSmI?si=iKjpIQ1cbsoksrgA">US military</a>
in recent years. 
Northern Australia is now routinely used by the US Marines and Air Force. The Tindal air base near Darwin has been expanded to accommodate nuclear-capable B-52 bombers. The construction of giant fuel storage tanks on Darwin’s RAAF base means that both now act as a stationing and refuelling point for US aircraft, enabling the US to conduct more flights to and from the NT.
Western Australia will soon host <a href="https://www.defence.gov.au/about/locations-property/infrastructure-projects/submarine-rotational-force-west-infrastructure-project#:~:text=Overview,West%20(SRF-West).">rotational deployments</a> of US nuclear submarines and a <a href="https://www.minister.defence.gov.au/media-releases/2024-10-16/new-defence-precinct-henderson-deliver-continuous-naval-shipbuilding-and-nuclear-powered-submarine-maintenance">naval industry</a> that WA Premier Roger Cook claims will rival the state’s massive resources sector.
The joint US-Australian “<a href="https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/is-gweo-on-target/">guided weapons and explosive ordnance enterprise</a>” aims to transform Australia’s weapons manufacturing industry to produce large enough quantities of precision-guided missiles to support deployed US forces across the Indo-Pacific. Spy and communications bases—such as the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/pine-gap-australias-secret-and-deadly">Pine Gap</a> satellite surveillance facility near Alice Springs, which covers the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East—are vital elements of US strategic command, control, communications and satellite systems for launching attacks against China. Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles recently bragged that the US military is now operating in Australia across “all domains ... land, sea, air, cyber and space”.
What explains this slavish support for the US alliance—shared by Australia’s main political parties, the security establishment, business elites and mass media—no matter who occupies the White House?
The answer given by the political establishment is that the alliance protects the Australian population and deters threats from “our enemies”. Chief among these threats, we are told, is China. Yet the Australian government’s own strategic planning documents admit that an invasion of this island continent, by China or anyone else, remains a remote possibility. The risk of a Chinese attack on Australia arises only because Australia serves as a base for US military capabilities and because Australia’s own defence forces have pledged their commitment to joining a US war against China in the Indo-Pacific. 
Most critics of AUKUS and the US alliance answer that Australia is a puppet of the United States: our leaders are nothing but spineless dupes grovelling at the feet of US presidents. Proponents of this view—from the <a href="https://greens.org.au/platform/world">Greens</a> to former Labor PM <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/08/13/paul-keating-aukus-australia-us-alliance/">Paul Keating</a>—argue that Australia should pursue a foreign policy that is “more independent” from the United States.
But the Australian state jumps at the opportunity to stir imperialist tensions more often than not. This can be seen in it joining or supporting every US war since World War Two with little to no prompting.
The Australian political establishment backs the US not because it is too weak to resist US bullying but because the alliance enhances the power of the Australian ruling class and increases its capacity to dominate the Pacific region.
Australia is an imperialist power in its own right, with the thirteenth-largest economy in the world and the strongest military in South-East Asia. However, as a middle-ranking power, it has always relied on a “<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6557">great and powerful friend</a>” to help safeguard its regional interests, first through an alliance with Britain and since the Second World War with the United States.
Chief among those interests is the security of the sea approaches to the island continent: Australian capitalism is dependent on international shipping to buy and sell commodities in Asian markets, to import oil from the Middle East and to access deliveries of weapons, machinery and equipment from the United States. Only the US Navy can control the wide arc of maritime territory from the Indian Ocean off north-western Australia to the South Pacific. 
In addition, Australian capitalists have long regarded the country’s neighbours—in particular Papua New Guinea, East Timor and the Pacific island states—as Australia’s “<a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7150">backyard</a>”, with Australian companies dominating their economies.
Australia also lacks the industrial base to field a modern military without the support of a larger ally. Without the backing of the US, Australia would need to triple or quadruple its military spending. Instead, through AUKUS and the US alliance, the Australian capitalist class can piggyback on the US military. And this allows Australia to access the latest US military technology—not just nuclear submarines, but advanced jet aircraft, missiles, naval combat systems and more. 
This is why the US alliance remains an article of faith for both ALP and Liberal governments. Any party that is serious about governing Australian capitalism must sign up to the alliance—the alternative is to face destabilisation by the capitalists and the military top brass.
Australia’s dependence on its “great and powerful friend” means that the ruling class goes out of its way to keep its “friend” firmly anchored in the Indo-Pacific. This helps thwart the emergence of a rival imperial power or nationalist forces that might obstruct the country’s sea lanes or disrupt its investments. One example is the Menzies government aggressively lobbying the Johnson administration in 1964 to commit more US troops to the Vietnam War. 
The AUKUS agreement fits within this general orientation: it is an aggressive alliance designed to maintain US imperialist domination of the Indo-Pacific region. But it also strengthens the power of the Australian state as a junior partner of US imperialism. Rory Medcalf, the head of ANU’s National Security College and a leading China hawk, has <a href="https://nsc.anu.edu.au/content-centre/article/opinion/australian-way-war-and-peace">hailed</a>
AUKUS as Australian imperialism’s “coming of age as a truly Indo-Pacific power”.
The price paid for US military protection is that Australia contributes to almost all US wars and occupations. From Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s to staking itself as China’s most aggressive antagonist in the region today, the Australian government embraces these opportunities to remind the US of Australia’s value to its broader imperial project. 
China is indeed challenging US domination of Asia and hence Australia’s own imperialist project, which is closely identified with the US. China’s growing ambitions threaten Australia’s informal empire in PNG, East Timor and the Pacific island states, as well as its trade routes and, potentially, its influence in Indonesia, a critical power to Australia’s north.
China’s state capitalist model of economic development is also viewed as a threat to the US-dominated liberal economic order that Australian capitalists have greatly benefited from.
Trump’s first administration was an <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-trump-presidency-us-imperialism-and-the-future-of-the-neoliberal-order/">aggressive</a>
response to the rise of China (although he only generalised what Barack Obama before him acknowledged with his “<a href="https://isreview.org/issue/88/us-imperialisms-pivot-asia/index.html">pivot to Asia</a>”). His program to “Make America Great Again” used tariffs and increased military spending to increase US military-industrial might. Nonetheless, by alienating US allies and destabilising American politics, the Trump administration created opportunities for China to expand its influence, thereby undermining America’s ability to contain its new imperialist rival. 
Rather than mark a break with Trump, the <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/bidens-plan-for-the-us-empire/">Biden administration</a> continued and intensified the China pivot, continuing the focus on rebuilding domestic manufacturing capability and infrastructure alongside an <a href="https://pacforum.org/publications/pacnet-85-countering-complaints-about-bidens-china-strategy-lessons-from-the-us-asia-first-policy/">escalation</a>
of military pressure in the South China Sea and Taiwan. 
Where Biden did depart from Trump was in his multilateral approach to building <a href="https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/has-biden-checkmated-china">alliances</a>
and his ability to sell war as peace. Indeed, Biden and Albanese (the so-called “progressive” wing of the establishment) have overseen the biggest destabilisation of the Indo-Pacific region and acceleration toward war with China of any recent governments: they have carried out Trump’s program with gusto.
Trump has made it clear that his main priority during his second presidency will be great power <a href="https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/has-biden-checkmated-china">confrontation</a>
with China. This includes a proposed 60 percent tariff on imports from China and a promise to raise the military budget from 3 percent to 5 percent of GDP (US$1.5 trillion) annually. His appointment of aggressive <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-nsc-china-hawks">China hawks</a>
to key positions in his new administration fits with this general strategy. <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3286448/what-does-trumps-pick-pentagon-chief-mean-us-china-military-ties">Peter Hegseth</a>, the proposed defence secretary responsible for the Pentagon, recently bemoaned: “China has a full spectrum long-term view of not just regional but global domination and we have our heads up our arses”.
Contrary to what much of the liberal commentariat says about him, Trump is not an isolationist, nor does he propose a withdrawal of US global power. Trump is an economic nationalist who sets out to make deals with both friends and foes alike; unlike liberals such as Biden, he does not hide the fact that it must be to the advantage of the United States and its corporations. It is this transactional nationalism that leads Trump to downgrade participation in geopolitical alliances or withdraw from them completely. In place of alliances and multilateral pacts, Trump prefers bilateral deals with US allies. 
While Trump’s strategy is to restore US imperial dominance, it will most likely, just as it did in his first term, accelerate its relative decline. This means other imperial powers as well as regional ones becoming more assertive, which will intensify conflicts between states over a failing capitalist system.
What this means for AUKUS and the US alliance is unclear. Trump’s demand that US allies “pay their own way” already fits with a general consensus among Australian ruling circles that they must do more to <a href="https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/australias-defence-strategic-review-forging-partnerships-and-self-reliance/">increase</a>
their self-reliance as part of the US alliance. The AUKUS pact is a prime example of a junior partner that “pays its own way”.
What is clear is that the Australian political establishment is frantically preparing to use the second Trump presidency to further enhance the power of Australian imperialism. Their main orientation so far has been to accept Trump’s argument that US allies must do more to foot their own defence bills. For example, John Blaxland, former head of ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies, recently <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/the-prospect-of-australias-defence-being-dependent-on-the-whim-of-donald-trump-points-to-a-need-to-muscle-up-on-our-own">argued</a>:
“The prospect of Australia’s defence being dependent on a presidential whim points to the need for Australia to muscle up on its own, including with as much US-sourced technology as can be accessed, without waiting for another white knight or great white fleet to come to the rescue.” 
In other words, Canberra must prepare to further increase military spending (probably funded by cuts to working-class living standards) and pick up the slack among US allies in preparation for the diplomatic dysfunction that is likely to emanate from Washington under a second Trump presidency.
For the Australian ruling class, the lie that the US alliance is about protecting the Australian population helps legitimise increased military spending and the drive to war. AUKUS and the US alliance have been much easier to sell to (and hide from) the Australian public with Biden and not Trump leading in Washington. Under Trump, larger numbers of people might see the alliance for what it really is: boosting Australian imperial power to protect US domination of the region.

Trump, AUKUS and the US alliance

Joel Geier has been a socialist activist in the US since the civil rights movement in the late 1950s. He has written extensively on US imperialism, politics and economics. He spoke to Red Flag’s Robert Narai. The interview has been edited for length.
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How would you characterise the position of US imperialism today?
The US is still the world’s dominant economic, political and military superpower. But it now faces competition from a newly emerging superpower, China, and its allies. This introduces a new, more dangerous phase of imperialism, which has its roots in preceding phases.
There have been three previous phases of imperialism over the last century or so. First was the struggle for the world market and an international economy that led to World War One, the Great Depression and World War Two, the latter of which the US emerged from on top. It was the strength of US industrial capacity that, converted to war production, produced the planes, ships, tanks, trucks, guns and ammunition that were vital to the Allied victory.
After World War Two, there was superpower competition between the victors of that war: the US and the Soviet Union. This was a political and military struggle without economic rivalry, as the Soviet Union could not compete on the world market. 
The third phase begins at the end of the 1980s. After the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union, the US emerged as the world’s only superpower. It used this phase to organise its globalised order under US auspices.
During this time, the US made its greatest strategic gamble and, ultimately, mistake. To gain access to cheaper labour and greater profits, it outsourced its industrial capacity and manufacturing to China and others. The US thought it could incorporate China into the economic world that it controlled. Instead, the US has found itself in the ironic position that it is dependent upon the decisions of the Chinese Communist Party for some of its industrial goods, and even its military is dependent upon parts and supplies from China. The US currently lacks the industrial-military capacity to engage in a major conflict with China. 
There is now an attempt by the US to restore its industrial-military capacity. This requires a major struggle for the world market, raw materials and the military preparations necessary for world domination. This is a new phase of imperialism that has been accelerated by three recent events.
First, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted US industrial supply chains that were dependent upon China. Manufacturing parts didn’t arrive from China and so sections of manufacturing ground to a halt. Supplies of pharmaceuticals and other medical supplies were dependent upon China. This highlighted to the US ruling class that it could not remain dependent upon China; it was necessary to restore self-reliance to ensure its continued control over the world. 
Second, the Russian invasion of Ukraine convinced sections of the American ruling class that they must control Middle Eastern oil and should not pivot away from this commodity that the US’s allies and rivals depend on.
Third, Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and Israel’s advance against Iran and its allies in the Middle East—all of which is dependent upon US support—have strengthened the US’s position in the region.
These events have restored or reinforced alliances and the formation of blocs and coalitions over the last few years. The US has used the war in Ukraine to restore its military dominance over NATO and Europe. In Asia, the US has created AUKUS and restored its alliances with the Philippines and cemented ties with South Korea and Japan against China. On the other side, Russia and China have formed an alliance. Both now have ties with Iran, which is supplying military goods to Russia, and North Korea is sending troops to support Russians fighting in Ukraine.
What were US imperial interests in the Middle East prior to the war in Gaza?
The US’s strategic objective for more than 80 years has been to control world oil and to use this leverage over other countries because no modern capitalist economy or military can function without oil. 
During the first half of the twentieth century, the US was the leading oil producer in the world and supplied oil to the Allies that contributed to their victory in World War Two. During the war, the US made an alliance with Saudi Arabia. It created the modern Saudi state and military in order for US oil policy to be supported by Saudi Arabia. And with the decline of British and French imperialism after the war, the US came to dominate the Middle East and Middle Eastern oil. 
The US fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to extend its control over Middle Eastern oil. These wars were won militarily but were a disaster from the vantage point of US imperial interests. They cost the US trillions of dollars, thousands of deaths of US soldiers and many tens of thousands of injuries. These were endless wars: they could not control and maintain the occupations they were involved in. This weakened the US’s ability to confront China and so they were determined to pivot away from the Middle East, starting with Obama.
Obama was also the fracking president. He restored oil production in the US, which is now again the leading oil producer in the world. The US no longer depends on oil imports from the Middle East: it is now a net exporter of oil. Biden continued this policy by pulling the last troops out of Afghanistan and scaling down the troops in Iraq to a few thousand.
The US withdrawal from the Middle East created a vacuum that was mainly filled by Iran, which has set up allies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen. This shifted the balance of forces in the Middle East and created a clash between Saudi Arabia, the UAE and others against Iran. These Arab states wanted the US back in the region as protectors against Iran.
The US also changed its attitude towards the Middle East after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Germany and other EU countries were dependent upon oil and gas from Russia, which made it difficult for the US to organise Europe and NATO against Russia until that question was solved. However, the US and its Arab allies were now in a position to supply oil and natural gas to Germany and others in Europe. 
The war in Ukraine convinced the US that if they are moving towards a conflict with Russia and China, they have to control Middle Eastern oil. They therefore came up with various plans to reorganise the Middle East, the most important of which was an alliance of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan and so on with Israel against Iran and their allies, under US military auspices. This is what was being proposed prior to the war in Gaza. One of the reasons Hamas gave for taking on Israel militarily on 7 October was they wanted to prevent this alliance from taking place. 
How have Israel’s wars against Gaza and Lebanon, as well as their repeated confrontations with Iran, changed the US plans for the Middle East?
The war in Gaza has altered US plans for the Middle East. Although its Arab allies are for an Israeli victory, they cannot openly ally with Israel while the genocide of the Palestinians is taking place, out of fear of how unpopular it would be with their own populations. These plans are either postponed or have to be readjusted when the war ends.
Israel is a close ally of the US: the Israeli military, intelligence services, technology etc. are heavily intertwined with their American equivalents. This has been true for decades. Israel does the dirty work for American imperialism in one country after another throughout the world. When the US do not want to get their hands dirty, they often have the Israelis do it for them.
Israel’s current war could not exist without US-supplied arms, intelligence, technology and so on. The US want an Israeli victory but not a generalised regional war. 
The ongoing support by the US for Israel in this war is not because Netanyahu is smarter than them, or that Biden is a lifelong Zionist, or any of the other reasons the liberal press give that cover up the real nature of US imperialism, which many of them support. They do not want to present the truth: the US is also genocidal, not just Israel. Israel has killed 43,000 people in Gaza. In Vietnam, the US killed between 2 and 3 million civilians. In Iraq, the US killed half a million people, of whom over 200,000 were civilians. It is the US that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is the US that firebombed Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden during World War Two. This is what it takes to become the global superpower.
At the same time, the US does not want the fallout from a genocide against the Palestinians. Politically, it has been a disaster for Israel and the US in parts of the world. And so the US issues press releases to quiet liberal opinion about how terrible it is, that Israel should be giving more humanitarian aid, protecting civilians and so on. At the same time, the US provides Israel with all the support needed to carry out these atrocities. 
Meanwhile, the US has supported Israel’s expansion of the war into Lebanon against Hezbollah and confrontations with Iran.
The US enables Israel—but just as important, Israel is enabling a victory for the US. Unless there is dramatic change in the war, this is becoming the biggest Israeli victory in the Middle East since the 1967 war against the Arab states. It is the biggest US military victory in decades.
Israel enables the US to change the balance of power in the Middle East to the detriment of Iran, which has been rising in importance in the Middle East for the better part of a decade now. This is an enormous shift. It is one that is vital to the US if it is to restore its control over Middle Eastern oil in preparation for bigger conflicts with China and Russia. If the US can control the Middle East, it can control the oil supply from the Middle East to China (even though Russia can provide a large amount of oil for China). This is the long-term goal of US imperialism. 
Israel, with the full support and backing of the US, has inflicted a huge blow against Iran’s allies in Hamas and Hezbollah. It is probably the US that took out the air defences in Syria and Iraq that allowed Israel to get to Iran. Israel has used air power to take out the Iranian air defences. There is total cooperation between the US and Israeli intelligence and military services in carrying out these attacks.
The US has totally decided what Israel could do in terms of Iran. It has protected Israel by providing them with the THAAD defences against Iranian missiles. The US bombed Yemen to send a signal to Iran that the US will take part if they continue to fire missiles at Israel.
The US has told Israel that it would not go to war against Iran and has refused to allow Israel to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. The US refused to provide Israel with the necessary equipment: bunker buster bombs necessary to take out their nuclear facilities or the B-52 bombers that deliver them. It has not allowed Israel to target Iran’s oil infrastructure. Iran said if Israel takes out Iranian oil, Iran will take out oil in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. 
The US also leaked the Israeli war plans to Iran. This is something that is not usually done among allies. The US have also been negotiating with the Iranians publicly and behind closed doors. If the US was for Israel bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and oil infrastructure, it would have happened. 
At this point, the US attitude has been, We will protect and support our ally Israel, but we will not allow this to become a war against Iran. 
The US demanded and got compliance from Israel that US national interests were to be decisive—not Israeli war ones—in the confrontation with Iran.
Israel might do some things that make it difficult for the US to carry out their political objectives for the region. But this is a fight among friends. Despite whatever headaches the Israelis might give them, this is providing the US with the biggest military victory that it has had in decades after winning militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan but losing the occupation.
This has been a cheap war for the US so far. The US spent US$2-4 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and from the strategic vantage point of US imperialism, they were a disaster. The US has spent US$20 billion on Israel in the past year and achieved its biggest military victory in the region in decades by pushing back Iran and its allies. 
There were several thousand American soldiers killed in those wars and many tens of thousands injured. This victory is taking place without one American soldier being killed or injured and no political blow-back at home for these causalities. It is a very cheap victory for the US.
As this war has shifted from Gaza to include Lebanon and Iran, the left is finally starting to wake up to the idea that the US may be doing more than just enabling Israel. Israel is enabling a victory for the US to restore its power in the Middle East. This victory also pushes back China and Russia, which are allied with Iran. 
What implications does the election of Donald Trump have?
The new Trump presidency will not be a repeat of his first administration. The new phase of imperialism we have entered will accelerate even more with Trump in power. We are in a very different world because of the war in Ukraine and the Middle East, supply chains that must be uncoupled, of the new alliances and bloc formations taking shape.
The foreign policy of the US will not be the ruling-class foreign-policy establishment political strategy pursued by Biden, of managing the status quo of a US-dominated world order. Trump and Republican imperialist foreign policy is to change the world order. It is divided about how to pursue that.
The Trump administration includes both wings of the Republican Party. The traditional Republican hawks generally supported Biden’s foreign policy of restoring American alliances, but criticised him for not being aggressive enough: the US provided weapons to Ukraine but didn’t deliver the weapons that it needed and did not allow Ukraine to use them against Russia. These Republican hawks also criticise the US for holding back Israel against Iran. 
But the greater section of the China hawks—Trump and his associates who now dominate the Republican Party—argue that the US does not have the resources to effectively intervene everywhere in the world: they have to concentrate on China. Despite what Trump and the liberal media say, they are not going to dissolve NATO. Europe is militarily dependent on the US, and NATO is a key pillar of US domination over Europe. Instead, Trump argues that the Europeans have to deal with Russia and make it their responsibility. And he wants to end the Ukraine war and its costs to US imperialism. Trump doesn’t step back in terms of the Middle East because Israel is restoring US power in the Middle East against Iran. 
Trump’s strategy is “make America great again”, to rebuild American economic industrial and military power so that it is capable of preparing for competition and war with China.
Trump has presented this mainly in terms of a trade war against China and if necessary whole sections of the world in order to restore US competitiveness and industry. This is part of what the stock rally was about when he got elected. The capitalist class expects there to be an enormous boom under Trump, who will do away with as many regulations as possible.
The other aspect of Trump’s policy is to quickly raise the war budget from 3 percent of GDP to 5 percent to US$1-1.5 trillion annually. 
Deregulation and lower corporate taxes will be used to try to unleash a new trickle-down scheme that aims to convince US corporations to rebuild the military-industrial complex. 
Biden made a small gesture in that regard with infrastructure and the subsidies for electric vehicles. Trump will make more moves to re-shore production to the US mainland.
Trump’s strategy has been primarily that of a trade war than can threaten the entire world economy through economic nationalism and economic warfare. 
We are in a world in which imperialism threatens not just war but total economic instability. We are entering a whole new period that can produce crises. Both of wars like Gaza and Ukraine. There can be even bigger ones coming. And alongside it there is the threat of economic instability as the US and China attempt to separate and become self-reliant. As these great powers attempt to uncouple from each other, we are back in a world that existed before World War Two. 
What are the tasks for socialists in this new era of imperialism?
Revolutionary socialists, like everyone else, have to face reality, draw conclusions and act on them. We have to understand that the decades of globalisation and one superpower, however bad that was, are now over, and that we are in transition to a more unstable, volatile, dangerous world. A world that threatens economic warfare that impacts on people’s daily living standards, as well as more wars that could culminate in a struggle between the superpowers for world domination. 
Imperialism and war radicalised generations throughout the twentieth century. They created an international movement and led to revolutions—from Russia in 1905 to Portugal in 1975. This new phase of imperialism has the potential to do that again. During previous decades, consciousness of imperialism, war and revolution practically disappeared, even in most sections of the left. We are starting again almost from scratch. In the twentieth century, imperialism and war also created vicious, right-wing and fascist movements. A more aggressive far-right, nationalist movement is under way internationally. 
In the last year, the war in Gaza has produced a new international movement in support of Palestine. It is centred on a new generation of young people opposed to war and its horrors who, like all newly radicalised people, do not have consciousness of imperialism or revolution, but who are suspicious, if not outright hostile, to their rulers, who have excused and supported genocide. Like all new generations, it will take time and experience of struggle for this consciousness to reach radical and revolutionary conclusions. But it is the key question: how to raise the consciousness of people who have been moved by war in the last year to the road of the socialist struggle against imperialism; how to raise their consciousness through struggles, battles, including ideological ones, to win them to the conclusions of the socialist struggle against imperialism and war. We have to win them to internationalism, to support all the struggles of workers, students and the oppressed against all the ruling classes in the world, that the struggle against imperialism and war have to be connected to the struggles against exploitation and oppression. It is a long struggle in front of us. But it is essential we build a much larger and stronger revolutionary organisation committed to this goal.

US imperialism and the war for the Middle East

1. A militant minority can have a global impact
The most effective way to fight for change, we are told, is to work through the proper channels. If we politely ask the people in power to listen to our concerns, our message will be heard, so don’t do anything radical that might upset the people in charge. 
The Gaza solidarity encampment movement illustrates that the opposite is true. When small numbers of students take action to disrupt the status quo, they can inspire thousands of others to do the same. 
Beginning with small numbers at some of the most elite universities in the United States, the encampments have spread to hundreds of cities across the United States and all across the world: from New York to London, Melbourne to Cairo, Berlin to Beirut.
The student protests have created a political crisis for the establishment by highlighting the deep links that exist between weapons manufacturers, universities and governments, and their complicity in Israel’s genocide. And with wall-to-wall media coverage, they have sent a clear message across the world—that universities must divest from weapons research, that universities and government must break links with Israel and Israel must immediately end its assault on Gaza.
This is how any movement for social change has been initiated, from civil rights to ending the war in Vietnam. It has been small groups that led the charge and inspired others to take up the fight. That is because progress happens in spite of, not because of, the people in power.
2. The ruling class will try to crush you—be prepared to fight back
The encampment movement has brought students into conflict with the institutions that drive support for Israel, the organisations of the capitalist ruling class. These have dealt a blow to universities’ rhetorical commitment to free speech.
In Australia, as elsewhere, the ruling class have tried to stifle criticism of Israel’s genocide by any means necessary. Charges of antisemitism and accusations that they represent a threat to student safety have been hurled at the encampments; students have met physical violence at the hands of Zionists; university administrations have both threatened and carried out the dismantling of a number of camps; and a number of students have been hit with suspension and even expulsion from their universities.
But students have refused to back down in the face of these attacks. Instead, they have provided an example of how to fight back.
“Hundreds of supporters have repeatedly turned up to demonstrations called by the encampments to defend them from physical attacks by Zionist organisations and threats by university administrations to forcibly remove them from campuses”, Madi Curkovic, a Monash Students for Palestine organiser who is currently facing disciplinary action from the university, told Red Flag. “Students have published statements and held press conferences that have defended our decision to set up the encampments. We have repeatedly called out the lies of the people in power and pointed to their complicity in the bloodshed being carried out by Israel in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.”
By standing their ground—against Zionist organisations, university administrations, the media and politicians—the students and their supporters will be remembered as those on the right side of this fight..
3. The strength of any movement is its ability to involve people
Mass movements change people. The act of collectively standing together pushes aside the powerlessness we experience in everyday life, builds our confidence and generates a sense of strength. The encampments offer a glimpse into that process.
“The best thing about the camp has been meeting and involving more people”, El Hall, a Students for Palestine organiser at the University of Adelaide, told Red Flag. “We’ve done this through open organising meetings at the camp to coordinate activities like putting up posters, handing out leaflets, information stalls, regular rallies, as well as teach-ins [public meetings on a number of topics designed to attract more people to the camps]. At our campus and a number of others, students are petitioning for a student general meeting to discuss their demands with the wider student body.”
For many students, this has been their first experience of activism, through which they have learned a variety of new skills, from how to convince others of political arguments (such as the purpose of protest, the reasons why the establishment supports Israel’s genocide and so on) to planning demonstrations and even speaking at rallies for the first time.
This transformative experience lies at the heart of all movements against tyranny and oppression. Protests and activism are not simply a mechanism to achieve demands: they are essential if fundamental social change is to be achieved.
4. Political diversity and cooperation are crucial to success 
Political movements will always be heterogeneous; it is in their nature to inspire and involve people from diverse backgrounds, united in fighting towards a common goal. The encampments illustrate that it is important to learn how to cooperate with others, even if you have significant disagreements with them.
“Our camp has involved a number of different clubs and political groups working together: socialists, Muslim students, the Greens, student clubs, activists from the NTEU [National Tertiary Education Union], as well as independent students and staff”, University of Queensland camp organiser Liam Parry-Mills told Red Flag. He emphasises that this has been one of the camp’s greatest strengths. “It has meant we have been able to have consistently large numbers at every one of our campus protests and teach-ins, even during the last week of classes.”
 Most encampments have striven to make decisions openly and democratically through camp meetings made up of any and all participants who wish to attend. And while they have called for university management to meet with them and answer their demands, most camps have refused to meet with them behind closed doors or carry out secret negotiations.
“There have been debates within our camp about whether political groups should be allowed to sell their publications and leaflet students for other activities not immediately related to the camp”, Hall told Red Flag of the experience in Adelaide. “But a number of political groups defended the right to do so because the stifling of political discussion, debate and diversity within our movement can only weaken the effectiveness of our side.”
5. Experience helps when struggle picks up
No-one predicted the impact that the Columbia encampment would have in the United States and around the world. But once it caught people’s imaginations, it was important to act quickly. 
The movement drew in lots of people new to activism, but it was also vital that there were people there who had been involved in similar activities before. This includes both people who know how to get an action off the ground—how to get the word out, formulate demands and make the camps welcoming to people—as well as people who had previously taken a stand for Palestine, and so were familiar with the lies and slander that were likely to be thrown at us and were confident to counter them. 
In situations like this, the day-in, day-out nature of socialist activity really comes to the fore. Not only are socialist students organised through a network of Socialist Alternative clubs around the country that was able to spread the movement quickly all over the country, but socialists are also used to the detailed work that any movement needs to succeed. Whether it’s making posters and leaflets or talking to people about the issues and convincing them to get more involved, socialists have had a lot of experience in struggle. 
Indeed, the fact that Socialist Alternative had years earlier played an important part in creating Students for Palestine clubs meant that we weren’t beginning from scratch when the camps started. There was already a loose network of people interested in the issue of Palestine with a history of organising. 
And perhaps most importantly, socialists have the politics to convince others to support Palestine and oppose Israel’s powerful supporters. Through Red Flag and other publications, socialists can bring ideas and politics to the actions that others can engage with, learn from and perhaps decide they agree with. 
Of course, socialists aren’t the only ones who have this sort of experience. But unlike most other forces, they organise precisely for this reason—to help win the struggles of today and use the experience to strengthen those in the future.

Lessons from the student encampments

Israel and its defenders argue that the bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza are about “destroying Hamas”. But this is not the first time Israel has conducted such a campaign—the history of the Zionist state is one of permanent war against the Palestinians. Israel committed countless assaults on the Palestinians well before the formation of Hamas in 1987.
During the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/nakba-understanding-palestinian-catastrophe">Nakba</a> of 1948 that founded Israel—a process of ethnic cleansing and genocide that forced 1 million Palestinians to flee into the West Bank and Gaza, as well as the neighbouring Arab countries, such as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt—the Zionist paramilitaries were supposedly preventing the barbarity of another Holocaust from taking place. 
Zionist leaders warned of a second Holocaust perpetrated by Palestinians (who were defending themselves from the colonising forces), and Zionist militias were instructed by their superiors to liken Palestinian villagers to Nazis. “[T]his was a deliberate public relations ploy to ensure that, three years after the Holocaust, Jewish soldiers would not lose heart when ordered to cleanse, kill and destroy other human beings”, Israeli-born historian Ilan Pappé writes in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. 
In the lead-up to the 1967 Israeli war against the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the Arab states were presented as a threat to the security of Israel’s borders—an existential crisis that would culminate in Israel’s Jews being “driven into the sea”.
The reality was that the Israeli establishment had always refused to accept the borders established at the end of 1948 (the “Green Line” or the “1967 borders” as they are known today). The Israeli establishment provoked their Arab neighbours into a war they knew Israel would win—providing them cover for further expansion and expelling more Palestinians from their land—defeating their combined armies in six days. 
During this time Israel seized the West Bank of the Jordan River, including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, Syria’s Golan Heights and the Sinai Desert up to the Suez Canal. They also forced another 325,000 of the 900,000 Palestinians in the West Bank to flee into Jordan. 
Throughout the 1970s, “defending Israel against terrorism” was the main justification given for a whole series of atrocities committed in the West Bank, Gaza and the Palestinian refugee camps of the surrounding countries, such as Jordan and Lebanon, where the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and large parts of the Palestinian diaspora were located. 
Before Hamas, the PLO was the declared target of these campaigns against “terrorism” because of its commitment to armed struggle to liberate Palestine. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas’ predecessor organisation) was promoted by the Israeli establishment as a moderate alternative to the PLO. 
During the Jordanian civil war of 1970-71, Israel supplied the Jordanian armed forces with ammunition and other supplies used to massacre more than 3,000 Palestinians in the refugee camps under the pretext of fighting the PLO.
During the Lebanese civil war, the Israeli army invaded Lebanon several times in campaigns it said were about wiping out the PLO. Its third invasion in 1982 involved the wholesale destruction of West Beirut, in which 19,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed and more than 30,000 civilians were wounded. This included the massacre of between 3,000 and 3,500 Palestinians in the refugee camp of Sabra and Shatila, carried out by the Lebanese Phalange (a fascist paramilitary organisation) under the supervision of the Israeli army.
Then there is Israel’s supposed commitment to “peace” from the early 1990s to the present day. The “peace process” involved the PLO <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/palestinian-authority-complicit-occupied-west-bank">renouncing</a> its commitment to armed struggle to liberate Palestine in return for a Palestinian mini-state in the occupied territories. In reality, the peace process was a continuation of war and occupation by other means. 
During this time, Israel has maintained a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/israels-permanent-war-gaza">permanent siege</a> on Gaza and used the pretext of Hamas’ retaliations to carry out repeated offensives against the enclave. Israel also expanded the illegal settlements in the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/how-israel-colonised-west-bank">occupied West Bank</a> in a slow-motion war of land dispossession and ethnic cleansing. The invasion of <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/israel-ethnically-cleansing-gaza-strip">Gaza</a> and the ramping up of terror in the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/israel-ramps-west-bank-terror">West Bank</a> are an acceleration of these processes of ethnic cleansing and dispossession under the cover of “destroying Hamas”. 
Israel has had many different names for the targets of its campaigns: Holocaust supporters, terrorists, the PLO, Hamas. But there has only ever been one target: the whole of Palestinian society.

This war is not about Hamas

The struggle against Israeli apartheid in the West Bank faces its greatest obstacle in the people who claim to be its legitimate representatives: the Palestinian Authority (PA). Through the so-called peace process that created the PA—the Oslo Accords signed by Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin between 1993 and 1995—the nationalist project of constructing an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories was transformed into a new means of Palestinian oppression.
Under the Accords, Arafat and the PLO agreed to recognise Israel, guarantee its security and renounce the armed struggle for Palestinian liberation with which the PLO had long been identified. In return, the PLO would be granted a bifurcated Palestinian mini-state alongside Israel: the so-called two-state solution. 
Critics were quick to point out that the PA was neither Palestinian nor an authority: Israel had control over security, borders, trade and a host of other functions typically carried out by a state, and much of the new body’s revenue was dependent on international donors in the West and throughout the Arab world.
The PA retains full civilian and security control over just 18 percent of the West Bank (a section of the territory called Area A); Israel maintains security control over 22 percent (Area B) in which the PA administers education, health and the economy. Sixty percent of the West Bank (Area C) remains under Israeli control.
Arafat and the PLO justified the creation of the PA as an interim governing body until an independent Palestinian state could be established. In reality, the PA has provided a more efficient way for Israel to achieve its strategic goal of controlling the occupied Palestinian territories.
The PA has maintained, courtesy of international aid from the US and the EU, one of the largest per capita police forces in the world to suppress the Palestinians on behalf of Israel. (The PA receives approximately $US400 million annually from the US alone, much of which goes toward supporting its 83,000 security personnel.) Through this police state, the PA has carried out the systematic surveillance, imprisonment, torture and targeted assassination of any forces deemed a threat to Israeli security. 
“We have had to kill Palestinians to establish one authority, one gun and the rule of law”, PA chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told US deputy Middle East envoy David Hale in 2009. “We continue to perform our obligations. We have invested time and effort and killed our own people to maintain order and the rule of law.”
The PA has facilitated the creation of a narrow layer of Palestinian capitalists who have grown rich in the Gulf states and across the Arab world. Through the monopolisation of government contracts for goods such as cement, steel, petrol, flour and cigarettes, as well as exclusive import permits and custom exemptions, sole rights to distribute goods in the West Bank and distributing government-owned land below its value, this Palestinian capitalist class has been the main beneficiary of the state-assisted “aid” funded by foreign donors. 
Under Arafat’s successor, multimillionaire and hand-picked stooge of US imperialism Mahmoud Abbas, the PA has worked with Israel and the West to crush its main rival, Hamas. This has included a partially successful coup, backed by Israel, the US and the EU, to overturn the 2006 election results, when Hamas won unexpected control of most urban councils and a substantial majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Abbas seized power in the West Bank, but Hamas regained control of the Gaza strip through force. Abbas, whose mandate expired in 2009, has since then dismantled all elected bodies and now rules by decree.
The Fatah leadership of the PA has also collaborated with Israel in the collective punishment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The “Palestine Papers”—a collection of classified documents about the “peace process” leaked to Al Jazeera and published in 2011—reveal that PA officials were informed in advance of the 2008-9 Israeli invasion of Gaza, which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians. 
PA officials several times urged the Israelis to tighten their grip on the strip, which has subjected more than 2 million Palestinians to hunger and misery. In response to the revelations, a Hamas spokesman remarked at the time: “The men of Fatah who created the Palestinian Authority represent nothing but a betrayal of the interests of the Palestinian people”.
But the signing of Oslo and the establishment of the PA were not merely a case of Fatah and the PLO “selling out”. It expressed the limitations of their political strategy for Palestinian liberation.
While the PLO (founded by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s in an effort to contain and control Palestinian political activity under the banner of the unification of the Arab world) and Fatah (which became the dominant faction in the PLO after the defeat of Nasser in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war) initially championed the liberation of the entirety of historic Palestine, their politics were always class-collaborationist and substituted armed struggle for mass mobilisation. Fatah and the PLO looked to the Arab ruling classes, and not the working classes, as the forces that could be enlisted in the struggle to liberate Palestine.
The PLO conducted operations within Arab countries whose ruling classes were suspicious of, and often hostile to, the revolutionary potential of the Palestinian struggle—in particular the effect it could have on their own working classes. This meant adopting a strategy that argued the liberation of Palestine did not require changes in the economic, social and political structures of the Arab world, and limiting demands to what the Arab ruling classes deemed acceptable. But the reactionary oil-producing Gulf states, from which the PLO received funding, together with Jordan, where the PLO was based until 1970, were just as much a part of the Western-backed regional order as their counterparts in Israel. 
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Israel exploited this policy of “non-interference” in the internal affairs of Arab states and inflicted a series of devastating defeats on the PLO. The result was Fatah and the PLO’s abandonment of the goal of the liberation of all of Palestine and the limitation of its demands to a Palestinian mini-state in the occupied territories.
Today, a security wall and a system of road networks, checkpoints and a plethora of other obstacles restricting the movement of Palestinians have carved up the West Bank’s towns and villages into an archipelago of non-contiguous Bantustans. 
This has been combined with an intensification of settler violence and military raids under Netanyahu’s far-right government. According to United Nations figures, 218 Palestinians in Area C have been forcibly displaced as a result of demolitions since the beginning of this year, and a further 200 have had their homes demolished in East Jerusalem. This has taken place alongside an increase in violence committed by the Israeli military—34 Palestinian youths were murdered in the West Bank in the first several months of 2023, according to Human Rights Watch.
Israel’s war on Gaza is accelerating these processes: more than 100 Palestinians have been killed, mostly in altercations with the Israeli military, since the start of the war. This has included a number of raids, such as that which took place at the Nour Shams refugee camp and resulted in the deaths of 13 Palestinians, including five children under the age of 15. More than 1,500 Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli security forces in the West Bank since 7 October. 
In recent years, the PA has also faced resistance from public sector workers, in particular teachers, over wages. During the previous school year, teachers led a 57-day strike that ended with an agreement signed by PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, in which he agreed to raise teacher salaries by 15 percent and establish an independent and democratic teachers’ committee. (Neither has yet come to fruition.) Palestinian public teachers’ protests since 2016 have been described as Palestine’s most significant social movement in decades. Currently, some 54,000 Palestinian teachers work in the public education sector.
These strikes have taken place against the backdrop of a severe economic crisis caused in no small part by Israel’s punitive measures against the PA. Chief among these is a law passed in 2018 to withhold half a billion shekels (around $140 million) each year from the taxes Israel collects and transfers to the PA in compliance with the Oslo Accords, due to the PA’s financial support for the families of those held in Israeli prisons. Earlier this year, Netanyahu’s far-right government further crippled the authority when it decided to deduct an additional 50 million shekels (more than $US14 million) each month from the tax revenues it collects on the Palestinians’ behalf, among other punitive measures.
Israel’s war in Gaza has also intensified the crisis of legitimacy facing the PA. After the Israeli bombing of Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, protests erupted throughout cities across the PA-controlled West Bank, including Nablus, Tubas and Jenin, a northern city that was the focus of extensive Israeli military operations earlier this year. In Ramallah (the administrative centre of the PA) crowds threw rocks at police cars near Manara square and chanted the slogan of the Arab Spring: “The people want the fall of the regime!”
The response of the PA has been to mobilise the armed forces at its disposal, firing tear gas, stun grenades, rubber bullets and live ammunition at protests. In Jenin, a 12-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl was killed when PA security forces used live ammunition to crush the protests. 
Any serious challenge to Israeli apartheid in the West Bank will require standing up to, and ultimately overthrowing, the Palestinian Authority. And that will mean breaking with the class-collaborationist politics of the PLO and Fatah that led the Palestinian struggle into this disaster.

Palestinian Authority complicit in the occupied West Bank

Millions of people across the Arab world have joined demonstrations against Israel’s war on Gaza. Mass demonstrations have taken place in Iran, Iraq, Tunisia, Yemen and Qatar. In Damascus, Syria, Palestinians from the Yarmouk camp rallied in support of their compatriots in Gaza.
Outside both the <a href="https://twitter.com/LaCadutaDiRoma/status/1714414990310920495">French</a> and US Embassies in Tunis (Tunisia’s capital) thousands demonstrated as part of calls for national mobilisations by most of the country’s political parties and trade unions. (Many cite these as the <a href="https://twitter.com/ASE/status/1714682816682701131">largest</a> demonstration in the country since the 2011 uprising that toppled dictator Ben Ali.) Protesters held signs pointing to US lies that justified the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, chanting: “No one of is free until Palestine is free!”
In <a href="https://twitter.com/thatdayin1992/status/1715693477667684397">Yemen</a> an estimated 1.5 million people took part in demonstrations against the war. In many countries, such as <a href="https://twitter.com/muslim/status/1713628462643122336?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">Morocco</a> and Bahrain, protesters have demanded a reversal of their government’s “normalisation” with Israel—the act of recognising and establishing diplomatic ties with the Zionist state—and collaboration with Western powers.
Hundreds of demonstrators <a href="https://twitter.com/chrisllayne2/status/1714694825511973009?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">clashed</a> with Lebanese armed forces outside the US Embassy in Beirut, the capital, after Hezbollah called for a “day of unprecedented rage”.
In Istanbul, Turkey, 80,000 people massed outside the Israeli consulate, including some who attempted to storm the building armed with stones, sticks, torches and fireworks, forcing Israel to withdraw its diplomats from the country. 
In Jordan, <a href="https://twitter.com/JeffreyGuterman/status/1715414923881152525?s=20">mass demonstrations</a> have taken place in the capital, Amman, as well as the cities of Irbid and Zarqa. Protesters <a href="https://twitter.com/thewakeninq/status/1714510979894022343?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">demanded</a> the <a href="https://twitter.com/mylordbebo/status/1714382007709438105?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">expulsion</a> of the <a href="https://twitter.com/arsenze1/status/1715140868494020882?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">Israeli ambassador</a>, the end of the 1994 peace treaty with Israel, and the nullification of an agreement to buy natural gas from Israel, which Jordan signed in 2016. Protesters have also demanded the <a href="https://twitter.com/sprinter99800/status/1714401764722495794?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">opening</a> of Jordan’s border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank (there are an <a href="https://minorityrights.org/minorities/palestinians-2/">estimated</a> 3 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan) and many <a href="https://twitter.com/doamuslims/status/1712747865443828171">descended</a> on the border and even attempted to <a href="https://twitter.com/epsa_media/status/1712808811184914901?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">scale</a> its walls.
After the Israeli bombing of Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, Jordanian officials were forced to cancel a summit that was to host US president Joe Biden, Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. Meanwhile, hundreds of young people tried <a href="https://twitter.com/leandro_ptbr/status/1714884341820440866?s=20">storming</a> the Israeli Embassy building in the capital, shouting: “No Zionist embassy on Arab land!” 
Sisi, who seized power in a 2013 coup, and his regime, which plays an important role maintaining the siege on Gaza, have also become targets of demonstrations, with protesters demanding the closure of the Israeli embassy and the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador. They also called for the peace treaties between Egypt and Israel to be scrapped.
<a href="https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1714612622614561010">Protests</a> have taken place at several <a href="https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1714619569245921633">university</a> campuses, in Alexandria’s Port Said, as well as at the Rafah Crossing linking Gaza and Egypt. Protests have also erupted at Cairo’s <a href="https://twitter.com/arsenze1/status/1715319036475514900?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">Al-Azhar mosque</a>, as worshippers took part in unplanned demonstrations after Friday prayers. 
For the first time since the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/remembering-egyptian-revolution-hossam-el-hamalawy">Egyptian revolution of 2011-13</a>, protesters <a href="https://twitter.com/ahmedanglian/status/1715365146434945463?s=46&amp;t=_a9i2HK3aoV5xNCdbVLCww">broke</a> through police lines into Tahrir Square, the historic centre of the 2011 uprising that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak. Protesters chanted, “The people want the fall of Israel!”, modifying a common <a href="https://twitter.com/ThomasVLinge/status/1715357397332463853">chant</a> from the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/ten-years-great-arab-revolutions">Arab Spring</a>: “The people want the fall of the regime”.
The mobilisations are significant not only for the solidarity they express with Palestinians facing occupation, war and genocide—they are a potential nightmare for Israel, the West and the complicit Arab regimes. 
Because there is no substantial Palestinian working class or urban population that can strike decisive blows against Israel, any serious challenge to Israeli apartheid will require standing up to, and ultimately toppling, the Arab ruling classes that help normalise the Zionist state. 
Throughout the Middle East there are areas in which concentrations of workers are endowed with immense potential power: oil and transport workers, including dock workers, who can disrupt the flow of profits to the ruling classes and who can restrict the movement of goods in and out of Israel; and white-collar workers in the government sector who have the power to cripple the state apparatuses.

Protests in the Arab world

Two years after seizing power in a coup, Min Aung Hlaing’s junta in Myanmar continues to be ensnared in a civil war that shows no signs of abating. 
Since the military crushed the mass strikes that emerged in opposition to the coup, tens of thousands of armed youth, small farmers and workers (people’s defence forces, or PDFs), alongside ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) have clashed with the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military, in parts of Chin, Shan, Karen and Kachin states, across the Sagaing region and throughout the Irrawaddy delta.
The Tatmadaw is reportedly suffering from a lack of resources and morale problems that are undermining its ability to fight. As many as 8,000 soldiers and police are thought to have been killed by opposition groups, while an estimated 10,000 have defected to the opposition. By contrast, EAO and PDF forces in Chin, Karen and Kachin states are now advancing into previously junta-controlled territory and setting up interim local governments as they secure control over the newly won territories.
The junta has waged an ongoing campaign of terror against its opponents. More than 16,500 people have been arrested since the coup and more than 13,000 of them remain in prison, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. The AAPP estimates that more than 2,500 people have been killed since the junta took power.
Junta-run courts have imposed the death penalty on 138 people, including 41 in absentia. In July, four political prisoners accused of carrying out “terror acts” against the military government were hanged. The executions are the first to be carried out in Myanmar since the late 1980s. In November, seven Dagon University students were sentenced to death on similar charges. It is unclear when the students will be executed.
“The junta is targeting students and young people because we have been at the forefront of resistance to the regime”, Min,* a student activist and member of the University of Yangon Students’ Union, tells Red Flag from Myanmar. “The purpose of the trials and executions is to strike fear in the hearts of those who wish to resist the regime.”
But Min says it is the regime that lives in fear. “The junta is terrified by the prospect of young people leading a revolution against the regime. The junta is despised and hated by the majority of people in Myanmar. The junta may be in power, but they are not in control.”
Min has been on the run from the Tatmadaw since early April 2021, after arrest warrants were issued for him and other student activists on the charge of inciting mutiny in the armed forces. Since then, Min has been based in the “liberated areas”—territory in the borderlands that is controlled by EAOs and no longer under the control of the Tatmadaw. He has recently returned to the central lowlands but remains in hiding.
“Because of the terror, student activist networks are scattered and isolated all throughout the countryside”, Min says. “And the situation in the major cities makes it impossible to organise protests that won’t be violently crushed by the security forces.”
It is a similar story in Yangon’s industrial zones. “The factory managers attempt to rule through fear and terror”, Ko Maung,* an independent researcher and labour activist, tells Red Flag. “If workers have grievances, there is the threat that if they protest, the managers will call in the military. The fear has a huge impact on the confidence of workers to organise and resist.”
Ko Maung and many labour activists were forced to flee to the Thailand-Myanmar border after the junta outlawed a number of trade unions and issued arrest warrants for trade union leaders associated with the illegal unions. But in an attempt to legitimise the post-coup arrangement, the junta maintains that unions, unionisation and collective bargaining remain legal, which means that a number of trade unions remain legal. It has provided limited space through which workers have continued to organise collectively for improved wages and conditions.
In garment factories across Yangon’s industrial zones, where factory-level unions maintain strength and cohesion, Ko Maung says that the threat of strike action is enough to ward off attacks from factory managers and force concessions. “The bosses don’t dare force these workers to do overtime”, he says. “Because workers respond by saying: ‘If you call overtime, we will go on strike!’”
The residual class confidence that Ko Maung points to is the legacy of more than a decade of union organising that took place under civilian-military rule. The expansion of the rights to strike and form a trade union created space for activists to create hundreds of new unions during this period. And unlike countries in which trade unions are well established, with entrenched bureaucracies and passive leaders, many of these unions were established through wildcat strikes and riots.
The period of civilian-military rule also created a combative environment among students, who fought to re-establish student unions, which had been banned under the previous junta. This activism led to the creation of political associations in which students could discuss and debate political topics openly for the first time in more than five decades.
A number of more explicitly radical forums also flourished, including Marxist discussion circles. These groups have become the main organisations on the far left in Myanmar today: the Stalinist-Maoist Leftist Youth Organisation, the Trotskyist group Revolutionary Marxism and the Social Democratic United Front (SDUF). Alongside the militant sections of student and trade unions, these groups were crucial to calling the early demonstrations in opposition to the coup, which in turn acted as the social detonator for the mass strikes that followed.
Aung Maung,* a member of the SDUF, says that political experience meant that the radical left was able to seize the possibilities opened up by the coup. “We knew that if we provide a lead, mass resistance will follow”, he explains. “And if there was mass resistance, we knew there would be a revolution to stop the coup, a revolution to completely abolish the junta, the military clique and the military-bureaucratic capitalism.”
Min Aung Hlaing’s junta represents a wing of the Burmese ruling class: the leading personnel of the Tatmadaw, military-controlled conglomerates, Burmese state capitalists, cronies subservient to state patronage networks and the most reactionary sections of the Buddhist clergy and the far right. 
The dominant perspective on the left in Myanmar is that armed struggle can act as a substitute for the social power of the working class in overthrowing the junta. It is partly informed by the conclusion drawn by many after the collapse of the February and March strike wave: the working class does not have the power to defeat Min Aung Hlaing’s regime; only armed struggle can win.
The important exception is the Trotskyist group Revolutionary Marxism. They argue that the inability of the February and March strike wave to topple the junta was due to the absence of a political leadership that could extend the strike movement into broader sections of the working class, transform the movement into a fight for control over production and promote widespread mutinies within the armed forces. 
The key task for revolutionaries in Myanmar, they argue, must be to build a revolutionary Marxist party that can organise the most advanced workers to lead the mass of workers and draw behind them the broader masses (small farmers and ethnic minorities) in a revolution that not just overturns military rule but smashes the entire Burmese ruling class.
In a polemic with the Trotskyists written for the SDUF’s publication Social Democrat, Lin Htal Aung* argues that, to be successful, the struggle against the junta needs a cross-class alliance: 
“The movement is a national liberation struggle in which the emerging bourgeoisie and some of the revolutionary national bourgeoisie joined forces [with the working class and small farmers] ... It is true that the revolution needs to build working-class leadership. But at the same time, the practical conditions demand that we fight for a form of democracy that is lower than workers’ democracy. Therefore, we are trying to build a revolutionary front that includes all classes.”
Marxists argue that social class divisions are irreconcilable and that political programs that express a desire for unity between workers and capitalists can only strengthen the hand of the ruling class while hamstringing the workers’ movement. But Lin Htal Aung argues that the movement against the junta “cannot have a political view that represents only one class”. This is precisely what he is proposing when he says that elements of the “revolutionary bourgeoisie” (the leading personnel of EAOs and associated parties) have the same interests as the classes that they oppress and exploit. 
Only one class can become dominant in such a movement: either the capitalists, who want a form of democracy in which they can exploit and oppress the other classes, or the working class—leading other oppressed groups—which aims not only to establish democracy, but to overthrow the entire ruling class. 
In an article for the publication The Struggle, Jack,* a member of Revolutionary Marxism, argues that in practice this perspective means abandoning the political independence of the working class: “Presenting reactionary elements to the public as the revolutionary class is a betrayal of the revolution. In other words, the interests of the working class are subsumed under the interests of a section of the bourgeoisie”.
Fighting for a perspective that maintains the political independence of the working class does not mean that an organisation will be able to gain a mass audience. Indeed, the government’s terror makes opposition in urban centres increasingly difficult and dangerous. But the ongoing resistance by workers—combined with ongoing flash mob demonstrations organised by young people—illustrates that there is still space for underground organising in the cities.
This is because the brutality that characterises Min Aung Hlaing’s junta is not only producing misery—it is also producing widespread anger and a desire for an alternative. If the situation shifts, a renewed mass movement in urban centres could develop.
Rahul Kyaw Ko Ko contributed to this article.
* Names changed.

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