To avoid any misunderstandings of what I am going to say here, I am a Jewish American who despises all forms of anti-Semitism. Like most Jews whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents came from Europe, I lost relatives in the Holocaust. I never knew them because they died in the gas chambers before I was born. I can also say that since childhood, I have never believed in the truth of the Jewish religion or any other religion.
As a child, I became fascinated with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, a fascination that’s never ceased. Since childhood, I have been an unconscious dialectical materialist and then a conscious dialectical materialist from early adulthood onward. I have never understood those trends in Western Marxism that reject the dialectic of nature and “diamat” (dialectical materialism), as the more I study the natural sciences, such as biology, physics, chemistry, and meteorology, the more I find materialist dialects everywhere.
I want to make crystal clear to Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu that if you insist on carrying out genocide in Gaza or anywhere else in Palestine, you won’t do it in my name! Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea!
Palestine, Israel, imperialism, apartheid, genocide, and the nation-state
The Hamas October 7 attack, or if you prefer, the jailbreak by the Hamas resistance organization against their jailers, was fully justified. Israel is a colonial-settler colony created by European and U.S. imperialism smack in the heart of the Arab world. The vast majority of Israelis have, for 75 years and longer, acted as wild animals – this is perhaps an insult to members of different species – in their conduct toward the Arab natives of Palestine that before the arrival of Zionist settlers in their country, never did them any harm.
There are some honorable exceptions to this, but they are all too few. I have never visited Israel, nor do I wish to, but you only have to go online and visit pro-Zionist, pro-Israeli websites to see the truth of what I write. The attitude of the great majority of Israelis will have to change 100 percent if they are to have any future at all in Palestine. Marxists worthy of the name must take the side of the oppressed against their oppressors no matter the leadership of the struggle or ideology.
Using the pretext of the October 7 events, the Israeli government demanded that the people of Gaza leave the northern part of the Gaza Strip and move south within 24 hours. The Israeli government then cut off electricity, food, and water. The northern part of the strip, which includes Gaza City, was then subjected to a carpet bombing campaign aimed at de-populating and physically destroying it. Then Israel bombed the people moving south. Israel’s obvious aim is to drive more than 2 million Arab Palestinians into the Egyptian Sinai while killing a great many in the process.
If this campaign is successful in terms of deaths, it will greatly exceed the scale of the 1948 Nakba, which involved about 750,000 people driven out, while this Nakba involves more than 2 million. It’s aimed at shifting the population of historic Palestine from the current Arab majority to an Israeli majority. The next move will be to drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank into Jordan.
To make things worse, about half the population of Gaza is children under 18 years of age. Most of the population are descendants of refugees of the 1948 Nabka, and many still live in refugee camps 75 years later. The leaders of the Western imperialist countries, especially Corporate Joe Biden (who’s earned a new nickname, Genocide Joe Biden), have expressed solidarity with the Israeli criminals.
Those who understand imperialism and the crimes it commits, while outraged, shouldn’t be surprised. Moral outrage certainly has its place; if you don’t feel it, something is wrong with you. However, moral outrage is best when it’s leavened with scientific understanding. This is where scientific socialism — Marxism — comes in.
This blog doesn’t just stop with moral outrage. Above all, it examines the causes of events, especially the economic ones. If we look back to the turn of the 20th century, we see the increasingly persecuted and impoverished Jews of Eastern Europe who, within a few decades, will face a well-planned and industrially organized campaign of total extermination at the hands of the Nazi German government.
In those days, Eastern Europe’s oppressed Jews could not have imagined making war against the Palestinian people, of whom they knew nothing. Nor could Jews living in North Africa, Iraq, or elsewhere have imagined waging war against the Palestinian people. Something intervened to make the horrors that are unfolding today possible. But what was it? And who are the real criminals?
The current president of the United States, Genocide Joe Biden, isn’t much of a thinker. But in 1986, when he was the Democratic Senator from the state of Delaware, he pointed to the real answer. He said, “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.” (Biden video)
Since then, Biden has repeated this. What Genocide Joe doesn’t say but could add is that indeed, “we invented one.” But who was the “we,” and why and how did this “we” invent the State of Israel?
To answer that, we have to briefly look far back in history to the origin of the Jews. Karl Kautsky, while he was a Marxist (that is, before August 1914), pioneered the Marxist understanding known as the “Jewish question.” (1)
Leaving aside the biblical legends, the Jews first entered history in ancient Palestine about three thousand years ago. For geographical reasons, the Jews became a trading nation much like the Phoenicians, who originated in neighboring Lebanon and to whom the ancient Jews were closely related. By trading nation, I don’t mean that all Jews, or Phoenicians for that matter, were traders, but more people belonging to these nationalities were involved in trade than members of most other nations of the ancient world. (2)
Over many centuries, Jews were transformed from a trading nation into increasingly distantly related trading castes who lived in city-states and in the empires of the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and beyond. Members of these trading castes practiced increasingly divergent forms of Judaism. When and if they ceased to practice some form of Judaism, they were no longer considered to be Jews.
The Jewish religion preceded in time and formed the foundation of Christianity and later Islam. As a religion, Islam remains closer to Judaism than Christianity does. In pre-capitalist societies, merchants that formed the core of pre-modern Jewish communities were considered foreigners even if they’d lived in a country for generations. These circumstances were further reinforced by the fact that the Jews practiced a religion that, though closely related to Christianity and Islam, remained distinct from them.
The trade the Jews were engaged in for thousands of years was based on pre-capitalist economic relations, not capitalism. Before capitalism could arise in the Christian West, it was necessary to develop a specifically Christian merchant class. Christian merchants, unlike Jews, were viewed as full members of the emerging nations of Europe.
The new Christian merchants became known as the “bourgeoisie” — city residents — and began replacing feudal economic relations with capitalist relations. (3) As this happened, the Jews were either massacred, expelled, or forcibly converted to Christianity. Fleeing an increasingly bourgeois Europe, Jews found refuge either in the Muslim world — mostly in North Africa — or in still feudal Eastern Europe.
By the beginning of the 20th century, capitalism was taking hold in the Russian empire, and feudal relations rapidly gave way to capitalism. This process led to the disintegration of the old Jewish trading caste — a thoroughly feudal social formation representing money-commodity relationships within a pre-capitalist feudal society that produced most of its wealth directly as use values rather than commodities.
As capitalism finally took hold, many Jews became wage workers, mostly in light industry, while others became industrial capitalists, often exploiting their fellow Jews as wage workers. A modern secular Jewish intelligentsia also arose, most of whom leaned to the left, supporting democratic and often socialist ideas. There were a few reactionary Jewish intellectuals as well. However, they were fewer in proportion to the Jewish population than the number of reactionary Christian intellectuals in proportion to the larger Christian population. The most famous left-wing intellectual of Jewish origin was Karl Marx.
The nation-state and Zionism
The origins of Zionism can be traced back to the early 19th century. At that time, Britain had colonized India, and British leaders began to wonder how they could colonize Palestine with Europeans to safeguard their access to their most important colony — India. Palestine was then a province of the declining Ottoman Empire.
It’s no coincidence that at this time, certain British (and U.S.) Christians discovered that it would be a great idea for Jews to “return” to Palestine and rebuild the ancient Jewish Temple, where Jews had once sacrificed animals to the one and only living God. In fact, by the time Christianity emerged as a Jewish sect in the first century CE in Palestine, most Jews were already living outside of Palestine. Christian Zionists, who appeared before Jewish Zionists, sought to persuade European Jews to leave Europe and colonize Palestine as agents of British colonialism.
Ironically, for most of the preceding 2,000 years, Christians had gloated about the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. Christians argued that the fact that God had “allowed” His one and only Temple to be destroyed proved that the Christian religion was the only true religion. God would never have allowed his Temple to be destroyed unless He had turned against the Jews for murdering His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. But as Britain was developing an interest in colonizing Palestine, some British Christians discovered that it was necessary for the Jews to “return” to Palestine and rebuild the Temple to make possible Jesus Christ’s second coming.
A fringe idea in the first half of the 19th century, incipient Zionism gained more traction with the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal. Britain wanted a European settler colony in Palestine to safeguard the canal. But how can a section of the European surplus population be convinced to settle in Palestine when they could settle in the United States, Canada, Australia, and much of Africa?
Starting in the 1880s, this task became easier with the first pogroms against the Jews in the Russian Empire combined with the emergence of modern anti-Semitism in Germany. Modern anti-Semitism combines typical 19th-century style racist white supremacy with traditional Christian anti-Judaism that considers Jews to be God’s former chosen people transformed into a cursed people when they crucified Jesus Christ.
Against this background of rising European anti-Semitism, some Jewish intellectuals believed the solution was for European Jews to leave Europe and colonize elsewhere, perhaps Palestine or some other country in what we call today the Global South. In addition to Christian Zionists, there were now Jewish Zionists. Pioneer Jewish Zionists figured European anti-Semites would get the Jew-free Europe they wanted while acquiring another colony to serve the interests of European colonialism. The Zionists then went around the world trying to get other European powers to support their colonialist project.
The capitalist nation-state
Western Europe is the classical land of the nation-state. Capitalism began in the 14th century in Italy and was based first on city-states such as Venice. As productive forces created by capitalism grew, the city-state proved inadequate. Capitalists needed a larger area without internal trade barriers.
Western Europe’s loosely organized feudal monarchies, through a series of reforms and revolutions in England, France, and later Italy and Germany, were transformed into centralized, unified modern nation-states. These states had common currencies, languages, systems of weights and measures, and domestic free trade.
Before a nation-state can emerge, a nationality must first develop with a common language, religion, and traditions over a territory large enough to form a nation-state. In Europe, this happened with the English nationality, the French nationality, the Italian nationality, and the German nationality.
It did not happen with the Jews. In the early 20th century, large Jewish populations existed in Eastern Europe, North Africa, and Iraq, with smaller ones elsewhere. These communities shared a common religion, Judaism, the common traditions of being Jews, and the legends of the origins of the Jewish people as presented in the Hebrew Bible. But they didn’t share a common language. Eastern European Jews spoke Yiddish, a language based on German, while Jews in North Africa and Iraq spoke Arabic, and other Jewish communities spoke other languages. Over time, different Jewish communities adopted the language of the nationalities they lived alongside. Also, Jews nowhere in the world have a common territory large enough to form even a small nation-state. An Iraqi Jew did not share a common nationality with a Polish Jew, Russian Jew, or German Jew.
It might be objected that even if Jews worldwide weren’t a nation, at least the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe known as the Ashkenazi were. But nowhere in Europe did the Jews form a majority within a geographical area anywhere near large enough to function as a nation-state. This is why no national liberation movement developed among Eastern Europe’s oppressed Jews demanding national self-determination. This has nothing to do with any biological-based inability of Jews to form a nation, as racist anti-Semites claim. It has everything to do with the social, economic nature, and historical development of Jews over their long history. (4)
This doesn’t mean that the national question has no meaning for the Jews. The progressive solution to the Jewish question was and remains that as long as the nation-state survives, Jews be treated as full members of the nations they live in without having to convert to Christianity. Because of the attacks on Jews within the Christian gospels and the long history of Christian persecution, Jews have good reasons to dislike the Christian religion. In 19th-century Europe, democrats and later Marxists, beginning with Karl Marx himself, demanded that Jews be accorded full rights as members of the nation they resided in — for example, Germany — without having to become Christians. Reactionaries of all types opposed this.
Reactionaries who opposed the right of Jews to become full members of the European nations they lived in claimed that Jews as “non-Christians” could not become citizens of Christian nations or that Jews belong to the imaginary Biblical nation of Israel. In reality, the tribal nation of Israel, as described in the Bible, hasn’t existed for thousands of years.
With the rise of modern racial anti-Semitism, it was claimed that Jews were biologically incapable of functioning as loyal members of the nation-state. Today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu uses this same argument against Palestinians. He claims that, unlike Jews, Palestinians have proven incapable of forming a nation-state. Hitler and his Nazis merely took the reactionary opposition to Jews becoming full members of the European nations they lived in to its logical extreme. We can’t allow Mr. Netanyahu and his ilk to do the same thing to the Palestinians.
Nation-states can be created through colonization — the most important example is the United States of America. English colonists, later joined by other Europeans, came to what became the United States and began a war against the native peoples they called “Indians.” The indigenous peoples were exterminated — genocide — or driven onto reservations, a type of apartheid, though the term itself was not yet coined. (5)
Their resistance was crushed, and the English and other European settlers created a nation-state of their own, becoming “Americans.” A similar process occurred in Canada and Australia. In other cases, such as India, the native population was so large the European settlers couldn’t create a new nation by colonization. Instead, they exploited the natives for cheap labor and stole their natural resources, thus enriching themselves in the name of their European homeland.
There are other cases of European settlers attempting to create new white nations, but they failed to crush the native peoples — the classic example is South Africa. There, as the European population’s attempts to crush the native peoples ran into resistance, the racist system called apartheid was developed. The apartheid system was a sign that the attempt to establish a white European settler population in South Africa along U.S., Canadian, and Australian lines was failing. With the end of South African apartheid in the 1990s, the failure to establish a white European nation on South African soil was finally acknowledged. For this project to have succeeded, a genocide of the native Africans would have had to be carried out on a scale that was fortunately not possible under late 20th-century conditions.
The Zionists aimed to establish a new white European nation along U.S., Canadian, and Australian lines but instead based on Europe’s mostly East European Jewish population rather than on a white Christian population. Palestine became their target for a variety of reasons. From an ideological-religious angle, the new colonial entity was seen to be a revival of the Biblical ancient Jewish kingdoms. To Christian fundamentalists — important to Christian Zionists — it was presented as the necessary precondition for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
As the Ottoman Empire approached its final end during World War I, colonizing Palestine with European Jews beholden to London and in conflict with the native Arab population was a way to safeguard the Suez Canal and British access to India, its largest colony. This is what’s behind the notorious 1917 Balfour Declaration that stated the British government looked favorably on the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish National Home while, with a forked tongue, promising that the rights of “non-Jews” – Arabs were not mentioned – would be protected. But by then, the English Empire was in decline, and a more powerful imperialist power was emerging that had begun as a white colony of Britain, the United States of America.
Socialism and Zionism before the Holocaust
Zionism found a base of support among oppressed Eastern European Jews with its false promise to restore the imaginary glories of biblical Israel. But here, class was involved. Like other capitalists, Jewish business people opposed labor unions and the broader socialist — later communist — movement. They attempted to convince Jewish workers not to identify with Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian workers as fellow workers united in the struggle against capital but to look to their bosses and exploiters as fellow Jews. Socialist parties, and later the communists, found themselves in conflict with Zionism from the beginning.
The major Jewish Zionist leaders, such as Vienna-based Theodore Herzl, were all round reactionaries who hated socialism. But to win over Eastern European Jewish workers who were attracted to socialism, so-called labor Zionists presented themselves as socialists. They promised Jewish workers they could build a socialist society once they moved to Palestine and revived the glories of ancient Israel. In the meantime, socialist Zionists argued they should work together with their Jewish bosses against workers of other nationalities. Jewish bosses who supported Zionism never believed the Jews would be driven out of Europe, let alone physically exterminated. However, they found Zionism useful as a device to pit Jewish workers against other workers.
Zionism and the Holocaust
The Zionist movement, far from fighting anti-Semitism, believed Jews should not live in the Christian nations of Europe or the United States but should instead create a separate Jewish nation in Palestine. The native Arab Palestinian population would be dealt with much like the native populations of what became the U.S., Canada, and Australia — either driven out or killed off — through a combination of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and apartheid.
The anti-Semitic governments in Europe looked with approval on the Zionist movement. At first, the same was true of the most anti-Semitic European government of all, the German government headed by Adolf Hitler. Within months of coming to power, the Hitler government banned all opposition parties, beginning with the Communist Party, but soon extended the ban to all bourgeois opposition parties as well.
But, Zionist organizations remained legal in the Third Reich. The role of these organizations was to help get German Jews to emigrate to Palestine. The German government even sent an SS officer named Adolf Eichmann to Palestine to help organize this emigration as part of the drive to realize a Jew-free Germany. When the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, Nazi mobs yelled at Jews, “Go back to Palestine!” a slogan fully in accord not only with Nazism but Zionism.
In 1939, Germany invaded Poland and found it had more Jews than ever within its rapidly expanding European Empire. According to Nazi theory, all Jews had to be eliminated from its territory one way or another, just as today, Israel tries to eliminate all Arabs one way or another within Israeli-ruled Palestine.
Where would the Jews go? From the German point of view, Palestine was now out of the question as it was then ruled by Britain, which was at war with Germany. For a while, the idea of shipping off all European Jews to the island of Madagascar off the east coast of Africa was considered. Madagascar was then a colony of France, which under the Vichy government, had surrendered to and was on friendly terms with Nazi Germany. But Britain dominated the seas, so the idea of shipping all European Jews to Madagascar under wartime conditions had to be abandoned.
But Hitler was determined to eliminate all Jews from Europe one way or another. That left the solution Hitler and many of his followers had desired all along but considered impractical — state-organized murder of every Jew in Europe, man, woman, and child. At this point, Hitler dropped his support of Zionism and shifted to his “final solution of the Jewish problem.”
Hitler now posed as a champion of the Arab cause and an opponent of Zionism, just as Japan championed the independence of India even as it was fighting to enslave China, while the U.S. championed China and Vietnam against Japan! Within Europe, it was the communists — not the Zionists — of all European nationalities who fought the Holocaust and destroyed Nazi Germany before the murder of all European Jews could be completed.
Arab bourgeois nationalists foolishly looked to Hitler in their struggle against British imperialism and its Zionist tools, who were already planning to eliminate the Arabs from Palestine. However, Hitler failed to give his Arab “allies” any military aid in the struggle against British colonists and the Zionists. The Fuhrer, as a thoroughgoing white racist, was also a great admirer of the British Empire and hoped that Aryan Britain would become an ally in the struggle against what Hitler saw as the real enemy, the Jewish-Bolsheviks — by which he meant the Soviet Union and the international communist movement.
U.S. imperialism completes the creation of Israel
After World War II, with British power fading, the Zionists found a new patron, the United States of America. The U.S. had little desire to take in displaced European Jews. First, European Jews leaned left politically and were grateful to the Soviet Union for destroying Nazi Germany. The last thing the ruling capitalist class wanted to do was strengthen the left and pro-Soviet sentiment just when it was preparing to launch a global class war — called the Cold War — against the Soviet Union. But there were other reasons as well.
As we’ve seen through our examination of Anwar Shaikh’s criticism of the theory of comparative advantage, the interests of capitalist nation-states are profoundly antagonistic. In the words of Marx, just as one capitalist kills another, one nation-state kills another. Even before the imperialist era, established nation-states opposed the rise of new capitalist nation-states. While the nation-state is an increasingly reactionary factor in the emerging countries of the Global North, it is still a progressive factor among the oppressed countries of the Global South. This is nowhere more true than in the Arab world.
The Arab world is a large geographical area speaking varieties of modern Arabic with a common religion, Islam, though there are some minority religions. Every educated person can read written Arabic even if the spoken dialectics differ. The region’s geographical continuity over a large area, combined with its rich natural resources, makes the Arab nation a potentially very large, powerful nation-state.
It’s hard to see how U.S. imperialism would survive the emergence of a United Arab Republic that would unite the Arab people even if that republic was capitalist. It’s a key component of U.S. foreign policy to prevent the emergence of a United Arab Republic or, failing that, any strong Arab nation-state. U.S. foreign policy seeks to break up the Arab states that already exist. This is why the U.S. invaded Iraq and attacked and overthrew the government of the North African Arab country of Libya.
On the other hand, Zionist Israel can never become a serious competitor to the United States, partly because of its small population and because it’s entirely dependent on U.S. support against its hostile surroundings. Israel today is little more than a white colony of the United States. Like other traditional white colonies, it has a will of its own but little ability to realize that will without the approval of its U.S. masters.
This is why, as Americans, we have a special duty to demand Biden cut off all aid to Israel. Without U.S. support, Israel can’t carry out its genocide of the Palestinians and will soon cease to exist as a white colony. U.S. leaders oppose the creation of a United Arab Republic or any strong independent Arab state but insist that Israel as a so-called Jewish State must exist, though it can only do so based on the dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Since World War II, every successive Democrat and Republican — Donald Trump and Joseph Biden alike — has considered the Zionist drive to create a Jewish nation where none existed and can only be created by the genocidal destruction of the Palestinian people as a perfectly reasonable project. Once Israel was created by the joint actions of European and then U.S. imperialism, the further existence of the once thriving Jewish communities in North Africa, Iraq, and other Muslim countries became impossible. These Jews were driven out of these countries and into Zionist-occupied Palestine — now dubbed “Israel.” And so on the bones of uncounted millions, in Biden’s words, Israel was created.
Keeping anti-Semitism alive after the Holocaust
The creation of Israel transformed many pro-socialist Jewish workers, who, if they’d moved to the United States, would have strengthened opposition to U.S. imperialism, into reactionary Israelis fighting for U.S. imperialism in West Asia, North Africa (Britain’s Middle East), and elsewhere. For example, U.S. police departments learn from Israeli cops experienced in putting down resistive Arab populations.
This brings us to another reason: imperialism needs to keep anti-Semitism alive after the Holocaust. Israel claims to be the state of the entire Jewish people whether they live in Israel or not, enabling U.S. imperialism to direct the hatred Israel inevitably creates among the Palestinians, other Arabs, as well as peoples throughout the world toward Jews as a whole. This directs that hate away from U.S. imperialism, keeping anti-Semitism alive after the Holocaust. It is, therefore, impossible to fight against anti-Semitism without at the same time fighting against Zionism.
Israel claims to represent the entire Jewish people. If it’s allowed by Genocide Joe to carry out a full-scale genocide against the Palestinian people, all Jewish people will be blamed for it. This makes possible a full-scale revival of Nazi-style anti-Semitism that argues that Hitler was correct about the need to exterminate all Jews. Whether or not they realize it, every Jewish person has a vital stake in the fight to halt the current Palestinian Holocaust being carried out in the name of all Jewish people. It’s a matter of life and death today for the Palestinians but tomorrow for the Jews.
Fortunately, many Jews, especially the youth, are waking up to this reality. The political climate within the so-called State of Israel has become so antithetical to basic democratic and liberal values that have protected today’s Jews that many young Jews are joining their Palestinian cousins in opposition to the U.S. government’s continued support for the genocidal Zionist regime. Increasingly, they are joining the cry, “Palestine Will be Free from the River to the Sea!” In this grim time, this provides a reason for hope.
Problems for Corporate Joe Biden
Before the current crisis erupted, progressives and Arab American voters were going along with the idea that it was necessary to reelect Corporate Joe as the only alternative to the racist, anti-Arab, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, pro-Zionist Donald Trump. But now Arab Americans are finding it impossible to give Genocide Joe any support. How can they vote for a man who supports genocide against their people? In the U.S., the Arab vote, though modest, could be decisive in key swing states like Michigan. While it is necessary to fight Trump and his profoundly anti-democratic and racist MAGA movement, this cannot be done by supporting Biden and his imperialist, genocidal Democratic Party.
The need to form a working-class political party is posed not only because of the current strike wave but even more so by the events in Palestine. During his first term in office, Trump was prevented from realizing his reactionary aims not through the Democratic Party opposition but by a movement in the streets. Instead of trying to reelect Corporate-Genocide Joe, we must fight his support of genocide in Palestine and his imperialist wars elsewhere, as well as resume the fight against Trump in the streets if he returns to the White House in 2025. We prevented Trump from carrying out most of his reactionary program during his last term; we can do it again!
Important events are now unfolding on the economic front. The crash in government bond prices I discussed last month continued. However, the bond market rallied when the U.S. government statistics indicated that employment growth slowed in September. Some of this employment decline is tied to the auto strikes.
The slowdown will likely reverse in October, assuming the members approve the UAW-negotiated contract. But, somewhat, it seems to be tied to a slowing economy. What happens after the auto strikes remains to be seen.
The war currently raging between Russia and Ukraine in the ethnically Russian Donbass hasn’t gone away. What will be the effect on the global economic system if warfare escalates in the months ahead? We’ll examine this as events — political, military, economic, and political — unfold.
In the meantime, here is something I wrote before the events of October 7 brought the Palestinian question to center stage. It’s the background for the posts to come.
The fallacy of the quantity theory of money
According to Ricardo’s quantity theory of money, market prices fluctuate around the cost or price of production. When general price levels fall below production prices, the profit rate in the industry producing the money material — gold — rises both absolutely and relatively to the average profit rate. Soon, money material production picks up once again, causing prices to rise again.
In the Ricardian analysis, however, market prices in gold terms fluctuate around their production prices, but the total level of commodity production as a whole isn’t affected by fluctuations in the general price level. The quantity of money relative to the quantity of non-money commodities, according to Ricardo, governs the general price level, including the price of labor, but does not affect the real economy. According to Ricardo, every individual capitalist has an interest in throwing the money capital that passes through its hands back into circulation as soon as possible since this is the only way to maximize profits. The circulation is always full.
In contrast, Marx, who had decades of statistics on interest rates and prices that Ricardo didn’t have, found that prices are insensitive to fluctuations in the quantity of money. But, interest rates are very sensitive to fluctuations in the quantity of money. This means that if the growth in the quantity of money material lags behind the growth in the total quantity of commodities, interest rates rise while prices remain unaffected. However, interest rates can’t rise indefinitely. If they did, they would swallow up the entire surplus value. Profit would then be interest alone. It would be as profitable to purchase government treasury bills as to carry out more risky industrial investments, destroying the incentive to produce surplus value.
What Ricardo didn’t realize is that because money represents social wealth as such, if we have a capitalist with a lot of money capital but no industrial capital and another with a lot of real industrial capital but no money capital, the second capitalist is at the mercy of the first. To set industrial capital into motion, an industrial capitalist first has to purchase labor power and can only do so only with money. Industrial capital without money capital can produce no surplus value.
Second, an industrial capitalist must purchase raw materials with money or credit (that must be paid back in money) and auxiliary materials such as electricity to set capital in motion and produce surplus value. Therefore, the capitalist with money exercises power over one with real industrial capital but with an insufficient quantity of money. Contrary to Ricardo, industrial and commercial capitalists must take care to keep a portion of their capital in the form of money. However, during economic boom periods, the pressure of competition pushes them to allow the portion of their capital in money form to fall to dangerously low levels. The falling of the portion of the social capital in the money capital form to low levels is the precondition for a general economic crisis of overproduction.
Once a crisis breaks out, the competition for money capital sharpens and becomes a matter of life and death for capitalists. For the capitalist, the key to survival during a money famine — a crisis — isn’t the amount of capital they own or control in general but the amount of money capital they either own or have access to. During the crisis, normal methods of converting real capital into money capital through selling commodities or obtaining money through loans are restricted. Economists may complain about a shortage of capital during a crisis, but it’s a shortage not of capital in general but only of money capital. During the crisis, there is too much real capital relative to money capital. Therefore, money, as boom gives way to crisis, is anything but neutral.
Watching the Fed and the demand for money
In the financial press, there’s endless speculation of what “the Fed” will do next. There are “Fed watchers” who specialize in analyzing what Fed officials “really mean” by their comments and what the Fed will do next. If the Fed really could create non-commodity money, this would be justified.
Since a crisis is a money famine, a crisis could be prevented by simply having the Fed create the necessary amount of money. For economists, including many academic Marxists, belief in “non-commodity” money makes the Fed and central banks appear more powerful than they are. In reality, if non-commodity money were possible under capitalism, then watching the Fed would be quite boring because the Fed would simply match the growth rate in the money supply with the expanding capitalist economy’s need for additional money, as Milton Friedman advocated. Perhaps the central bankers would make some mistakes, especially in the event of a sizable outside shock like the COVID pandemic, but then any mistakes could and would be quickly corrected.
The Fed has an answer to its watchers. They say we cannot tell you where the federal funds rate and interest rates will go because our policies are data-driven. If the growth in GDP and the labor market holds up, the Fed explains, we’ll nudge our target for federal funds higher to prevent the overheating of the economy and the inflation rate from accelerating. If the economy stabilizes with sustainable GDP growth, full employment (but not over employment) causing wage inflation and prices rising at around a 2% rate, we’ll keep the federal funds rate where it is. If GDP growth slows too much or goes negative, or price increases fall below 2%, and unemployment rises above the ideal full employment level, we’ll lower our target for the federal funds rate. The Fed’s answer to its watchers is: “Your guess is as good as ours.”
Most Fed watchers, the lay public, stock market speculators, professional economists, and even academic Marxists who believe modern money is non-commodity money assume when the Fed says their policies are data-driven, they’re playing a game of deception with the public and the markets. They believe the Fed holds all the cards and can create any amount of money they desire, but play their cards close to their chests for unknown reasons.
The members of the open market committee controlling the policies of the Federal Reserve System know that while they’re sitting at the pivot of the credit system, they don’t determine the rate of expansion or contraction to the credit system or the quantity of money or rate(s) of interest — if we define the quantity of money especially if by the quantity we mean the total purchasing power of the money supply, not its quantity measured in the arbitrary unit called dollars. Professional economists have trouble answering when asked to define money because they’re not sure. Indeed, many neoclassical mathematical models abstract the existence of money altogether!
Is money the green dollar bills (and the now almost worthless coins) you carry in your pocket? Or is it bank deposits that can be transferred by traditional checks or electronically to make purchases or payments? If it’s bank deposits, which ones are considered money? Should it be only deposits that can be used for purchases or payments? Or should it include deposits that can be exchanged (sometimes with financial penalties) into deposits used to make purchases and payments? Depending on your definition of money, you get different quantities of money and different rates of change, sometimes even different directions of change, in the quantity of money.
The demand for money and the rates of interest
In addition to money quantity, there’s money demand. Money has different functions, and there can be different demands for money for different functions. The demand for money for different functions can increase to different degrees and even move in opposite directions.
First, there’s money demand as a means of circulation expressed in the general circulation formula C-M-C. The owner of one use value, C, desires another use value, also C. To obtain the second C, the owner of C must obtain M but only to immediately exchange M for the second C. In addition to the circulation formula, there’s the formula for capital: M-C-M’. The capital formula contains C-M-C within itself.
An industrial capitalist carries out the operation M-C..P..C’-M’. Here money serves as a means of circulation. Capital appears only monetarily as M but immediately takes on the form C again. Money is demanded not for itself but is the general form of wealth that can be converted into commodities whose different use values make up real capital. Industrial capitalists produce surplus value that takes the form of commodities that must once again take on the form of money — M plus profit M’ — that again must be exchanged for commodities in an unending spiral.
But money doesn’t only function as a means of circulation — it also functions as a means of accumulation. This is what the miser does when he accumulates gold in a strong box. M acts here as the abstract form of wealth that can be converted in the future into a particular form of wealth in the form of the particular use values of all other commodities.
In addition to accumulating wealth in particular forms or non-money commodities, capitalist society must also accumulate wealth in the abstract general form — the money commodity. Side by side with the accumulation of real capital, a portion of the society’s total capital must take the form of the accumulation of an ever greater pile of money material. Unlike other commodity use values, the money material has a use value that lasts forever – by the measure of the total lifetime of capitalism and beyond. This is one of the reasons why gold makes such good money. It has a chemical element that reacts with few other elements and, therefore, does not corrode. Unlike other commodities’ use value, it retains its use value over time.
This makes gold an ideal means of accumulating wealth. Between money’s role as a means of circulation and accumulation, there’s money’s role as a means of payment. When demand for paying debts rises as a result of a money famine, so does the demand for money as a means of paying these debts, and this happens during every crisis. After acting as a means of payment, it then falls out of circulation and is used to build up hoards, or in more regular business language, balance sheets are rebuilt.
Money takes three different forms. The oldest form is in the form of the use value of the money commodity itself. If you plan to use money material as a means of accumulation, the ideal form of money is a gold bar of a certain weight or an uncirculated gold coin of a certain weight. If you want money as a means of circulation, the ideal is a coin, a paper banknote, or a bank check. However, the history of coinage (currency) is the history of the devaluation and depreciation of currency.
In past centuries the devaluation of coins took the form of reducing the precious metal of coins of a given denomination. Today, the depreciation of the U.S. dollar takes the form of the rising dollar price of gold. As late as 1970, the dollar price of gold on the open market was $35.00 a troy ounce. Today, it hovers just under $2000 an ounce. Green dollar bills are a lousy form of accumulating wealth over long periods – just compare what a dollar could buy in 1970 and what it can buy today.
But dollar bills are reasonably convenient as a means to buy next week’s groceries. The bills will probably buy just about the same amount of groceries this coming Friday as they bought last Friday, so they’re still a good means of circulation. Nowadays, however, they’re being pushed aside by debit and credit cards — and smartphones.
That brings us to credit money. Credit money combines credit with some functions of money. One legal person — generally a bank — owes another a sum of money on demand. The credit claim on a bank can be transferred from one person to another either by check or, today, electronically. Modern credit money is convertible on demand into legal tender token currencies such as dollar bills.
True dollar bills are subject to loss in value. However, unless the U.S. dollar goes the way of the German Reichsmark in the early 1920s, it’ll retain its value over short periods. Credit money isn’t as secure as dollar bills. For example, before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was established if a commercial bank failed, it was possible that a check drawn on a deposit in a commercial bank could lose its convertibility into legal tender money for a long time, even permanently. Today, that possibility is eliminated unless a run on the banks occurs on such a scale that it bankrupts the FDIC. This would again freeze, if not destroy, the convertibility of bank deposits into legal tender cash. This may happen one day, but the odds are it won’t happen tomorrow or next week.
Over short periods, credit money drawn on insured commercial banks is almost as secure as legal tender dollar bills and can be used in place of dollars. In the past, dollars, pound notes, etc., were legally convertible into gold (or silver) in the form of gold coins or bars. This made paper currency a form of credit money rather than token money that represents a variable amount of the money commodity on the open market as it is today.
But even then, the convertibility of legal tender currency into gold bullion or fixed-weight coins was only a policy that could be changed at any time. In the days of the gold standard, dollar bills or pound notes were a better means of accumulating wealth than now. However, the British pound failed to maintain its convertibility into gold at a fixed rate for even a century (1821-1914). The U.S. dollar only maintained its convertibility between 1879 and 1933. If you’re going to use money as a means of accumulation over long periods, there’s no substitute for money in the form of gold bullion.
The movement of money and real capital
Neither legal tender token money nor credit is a good way to hoard wealth over long periods. Because of this, capitalist society has to accumulate a certain amount of capital in the form of gold, however wasteful and environmentally disastrous this is. As a rule, when the accumulation of gold exceeds the accumulation of real capital, interest rates fall, and the money market relaxes.
When the accumulation of real capital exceeds the rate of the accumulation of gold, the interest rate rises, and the money market tightens. Keynes and other economists consider it irrational to use gold this way. If money must be used as a means of accumulation, it should be money created by the monetary authorities whose growth rate can be adjusted to the changing and generally growing demand for money in its various forms. This sounds more rational, but as we’ve seen, it’s not possible under the capitalist mode of production.
Let’s see how recent economic history illustrates the operation of these laws and how they govern Federal Reserve System policy. The economic crisis of 2007-09 was followed by an unusually weak economic recovery in the United States and worldwide. At the same time, we saw the rise in the dollar price of gold from around $625 an ounce at the beginning of 2007 before the crisis began to around $1100 an ounce by the beginning of 2010. By then, the general crisis had run its course, and large quantities of money dropped out of circulation to form hoards in the banking system. This, combined with a low level of dollar inflation, meant commodity prices in gold terms dropped. The result was a rise in the profit rate of gold mining and refining relative to other industries.
The global decline in gold production that began in 2001 as a result of the depletion of South African gold mines was reversed as new profitable mines were opened in Russia, China, Australia, the United States, and other countries, making up for the depletion of the South African mines. Those mines had dominated the world’s gold production for more than a century.
Some economists, especially those who support the quantity theory of money, predicted the quantitative easing policies of the Federal Reserve System would lead to runaway inflation. This did not happen. With accelerated gold production, though the dollar and the paper currencies linked to it continued to lose value against gold, it was at a more moderate pace than during the 1970s. The scale of the currencies’ loss of gold value was more like the deprecations of the 1930s, not the 1970s.
The Fed leadership hoped its rapid expansion of the quantity of dollar-denominated currency — that under the dollar system makes possible the expansion of the money supply in other countries and the associated expansion of bank reserves — would fuel a rapid economic revival with only moderate price rises in the capitalist world. But that didn’t happen. Instead, after the 2007-09 economic crisis, banks and industrial and commercial corporations concentrated on rebuilding their balance sheets — they increased the items representing cash or near cash relative to other items on the assets side of their balances.
Globally, accelerated gold production levels combined with a historically slow increase in the quantity of non-money commodities (in contrast to the accelerated production of gold) meant capitalism’s global balance sheet was being rebuilt.
As a result, the interest rates fell to the lowest levels in the history of capitalism. There was even talk of negative interest rates. In the wake of the 2007-09 economic crisis, capitalist industry found itself with high levels of excess capacity. This excess capacity became an obstacle to new capitalist investment.
Capitalist expanded reproduction proceeded at a low rate, resulting in years of high unemployment levels. This very stagnation was creating the conditions for a period of accelerated expanded capitalist reproduction. These conditions were the increase in the reserve of idle money capital in the banks, the resulting low interest rates, combined with low rates of the creation of new real capital, and the continued destruction of the surplus productive forces.
Simultaneously, the high unemployment rate created the conditions for an increased production of surplus value. But for the time being, the favorable conditions for producing surplus value were combined with unfavorable conditions for realizing surplus value. This process was extended over many years, during which there was no new general global economic crisis, though there were local crises in some countries.
During this time, the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee found it could expand the monetary base at a rapid rate without sending the dollar price of gold soaring as in the 1970s. However, because capitalist banks and enterprises were rebuilding their individual balance sheets, there was little acceleration of economic growth. The interest rate on the ten-year U.S. government bond is a good proxy for the long-term interest rate. Its movement illustrates the working of these economic laws.
Just before the outbreak of the 2007 economic crisis, the yield on the ten-year bond fluctuated around 4.8%. By early 2010, the rate dropped to around 3.8% or lower, and in early 2013, it dropped below 2% and stayed there until later that year. In 2016, the year of Brexit and Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency, the rate on the ten-year bond again dropped below 2% and stayed there until later in the year. In 2018, the yield fell below 2% again and stayed until 2020, when the COVID shutdowns hit.
The effects of COVID
In March 2020, as the extent of the COVID pandemic became apparent, capitalist governments panicked — ordering the shutdown of much of industry and other enterprises. This was an attempt to stamp out the spread of the virus before it radically reduced the size of the working class. For the first time since the mass slaughter of World War II, the question of the continued ability to produce surplus value on an ever-expanding scale – an absolute necessity for the capitalist mode of production – was posed.
This created an economic crisis unlike any other in the history of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalist-expanded reproduction was suddenly incapacitated not by a crisis of overproduction of commodities nor by war (as was the case in World Wars I and II) but by a new pathogenic virus that threatened to reduce the size of the working class and the ability of capitalists to extract ever more surplus value from the working class. Realization of surplus value was hampered as people hunkered down in their homes, fearing contact with the deadly virus when venturing out to purchase needed groceries.
Whenever the capitalist reproduction process is disrupted for whatever reason, money falls out of circulation and accumulates in hoards. As a result of money falling out of circulation and flowing into the hoards maintained by the commercial banks, the interest rate on ten-year bonds fell below 1%, the lowest level in the entire history of capitalism.
Some insights of the banking school
While the quantity theory of money supporters, who became known as the currency school, claimed the general price level adapted itself to the quantity of money, the banking school that grew up in opposition claimed it was the quantity of currency in circulation that adapts to the general price level.
While the currency school believed that circulation is always full, the banking school saw the quantity of money divided into a reserve fund held by the banking system and the money in circulation. In periods of low prices and economic stagnation, a larger than normal percentage of the total money supply is held in the form of bank reserves, while in periods of economic boom and high prices, a larger percentage of the total quantity of money is in active circulation.
Within broad limits, the quantity of money in circulation — currency — can fluctuate as the portion of the sum of the money in active circulation changes relative to the sum of money held by the banking system as reserves. Money in circulation or currency can either be gold coins, legal tender monetary tokens representing gold in circulation, or various forms of credit money redeemable into either gold coins or legal tender token money by banks that issue the credit money.
When circulation is high, a larger-than-average percentage of the money is in circulation. Or the quantity of credit money is large relative to the hard cash in the banks available to redeem it. If the quantity of credit money created rises beyond a certain point relative to the money held in the banking system in reserves, the banking system is close to crisis. Interest rates are higher than average when the quantity of currency is high relative to money held in bank reserves. When interest rates are low, this means that the money held in reserves in the banking system is high relative to the money in circulation.
The socially necessary quantity of currency
The socially necessary quantity of currency is the sum of the prices of commodities in circulation divided by the velocity of circulation of the currency that functions as a means of circulation plus the total quantity of currency that functions as a means of payment divided by the velocity of circulation as money that functions as a means of payment minus the quantity of money that functions successively as both a means of purchase and a means of payment.
This means that if the prices of commodities increase or — assuming that the prices remain unchanged but the quantity of commodities increases — the socially necessary quantity of currency will rise. If the total quantity of commodities falls, prices remain unchanged, and the socially necessary quantity of currency falls. This happened during the COVID shutdowns. If prices rise — assuming the quantity of commodities in circulation remains unchanged — the socially necessary quantity of currency will rise. If prices fall and everything else remains unchanged, the socially necessary quantity of currency will fall.
The correct insight of the banking school is that if the socially necessary quantity of currency rises, the extra currency can be found by drawing some of the reserves of the banking system into circulation or creating additional credit money based on those reserves. If the needs of circulation fall, some of the money in circulation falls out of circulation and instead flows into the banking system’s reserves, or a certain portion of bank-created credit money is retired through the repayment of debts. That happens whenever the quantity of bank debts repaid is greater than the quantity of credit money created through additional loans.
A common mistake is to assume that the actual quantity of money in circulation is automatically determined by the needs of circulation. This reflects the common sense view that currency is ultimately “backed” by commodities as a whole and not gold. This leads to the view that non-commodity money – or Anwar Shaikh’s pure fiat money – is possible under the capitalist mode of production.
If this is true, the total quantity of money defined as the sum of the reserve fund held in the banking system plus the quantity of money hoarded by individuals plus the money in circulation — currency — is determined by the central banking system that by necessity is bound up with the state power.
What is overlooked is that in the short run, there’s no guarantee that the total quantity of currency that can be drawn out of existing bank reserves will be equal to the socially necessary quantity of currency that is necessary to circulate commodities at a given price level. In every crisis, the total quantity of currency falls below the socially necessary quantity needed to circulate commodities and meet payments falling due — hence the crisis. When this happens, commodities pile up unsold because there’s not enough money to purchase them, and bankruptcies occur because there is not enough money to serve as a means of payment. Before every crisis, the size of the reserve fund held in the banking system falls relative to the quantity of money in circulation.
The believers in non-commodity money believe that if the commercial banks’ reserves of money fall relative to the portion of the total money supply that acts as currency, the central bank should simply create new money and rebuild bank reserves. This is the idea behind both Keynesian and Friedmanite economics. If this is the case, it should be possible for the central banks to determine the interest rate as long as they keep the interest rate below the profit rate, allowing a positive profit of enterprise, while avoiding crises that are seen as caused by the quantity of currency falling below the socially necessary quantity of currency.
However, as we’ve explained throughout this blog, non-commodity money is utopian under the capitalist mode of production. The quantity of money can ultimately be reduced to the quantity of the use value of the money commodity measured by a unit appropriate to that use value — for example, metric tons of gold.
What determines the quantity of money material? The law of the value of commodities determines it. Under the capitalist mode of production, where the law of the value of commodities is fully developed, the law of the value of commodities operates through the equalization of the profit rate.
Up to this point, the law of the value of commodities regulates the production of money material in the same way as it regulates the production of every other commodity. However, the law of value regulates the production of money material in a somewhat peculiar way compared to how it regulates the production of other commodities. This is the key to the inevitability in developed capitalism to periodic — but not permanent — crises of general overproduction.
When a non-money commodity is produced in insufficient quantities, demand for that commodity exceeds supply. As a result, its market price rises above its production price. This causes capital to flow into that line of production, causing it to rise until the shortage is overcome — and turns into overproduction.
As this happens, its market price falls back to and through its production price. Now, the supply of that type of commodity exceeds the demand for it at its production price. With prices below the production price, the profit rate on capital invested in production is now less than the average profit rate. Capital then flows out of that line of production in search of higher profits, and the cycle repeats.
While the principles are the same, it is more complex regarding the money commodity. As we’ve seen before, commodity prices must be measured in terms of the use value of the money commodity. This means that when the general price level of commodities rises, price lists read backward (the closest we can get to the price of the money commodity ) fall. As a result, the profit rate of the capital producing the commodity serving as money falls both absolutely and relatively to other commodities. The longer the boom goes on, the more this will be the case.
Keeping in mind banking school insights, let’s see what happens when the economy booms, as we’ve seen in the post-COVID period. First, the quantity of commodities produced in a given period measured in the unit appropriate for their use values increases. Second, the prices of these commodities rise — as does the socially necessary quantity of currency.
We need more currency (money in circulation) to circulate an increasing quantity of commodities with rising prices. Where does this extra money come from? The banking school answers: from the reserves of money held in the banks. Some money is withdrawn to act as currency, or more credit money is created through bank loans based on the bank’s reserves. In either case, the ratio of money (currency in circulation) rises relative to bank reserves.
What happens to the size of the bank reserve? Ultimately, the ability of the size of total bank reserves to grow is governed by the production of additional money material. Even in today’s world of legal tender paper money, the money material — gold — ultimately lies behind the reserves of the commercial banks. When newly produced gold is liberally flowing out of the gold mines and refiners, the central banks can create new bank reserves in similar liberal quantities without the newly created paper money depreciating against gold and currency-depreciating inflation.
But when the production of new gold slows, the ability of central banks to create new commercial bank reserves without these reserves burning away in currency depreciation inflation declines accordingly.
Now, we get to a crucial point. As the need of capitalist society for increased means of circulation rises, the ability of the central banks to produce these means of circulation declines!
As the commodity prices increase, the profitability of the industry producing the money material — that enables the central banks to create more bank reserves without these reserves burning away in an inflationary storm — declines. It becomes progressively less profitable to produce the money material — gold — which is necessary to prevent the inflationary storm.
Up to a point, the banking school comes to the rescue. Huge quantities of excess reserves accumulated in the banking system during the stagnation preceding the boom. These extra reserves can be drawn into circulation, so there’s no immediate need for extra bank reserves. Instead, the existing bank reserves can be mobilized to create more currency. As the socially necessary quantity of currency rises, so does the quantity of currency. The greater the stagnation proceeding the boom, the greater the quantity of banking system idle reserves, and the stronger – and longer – the boom can be.
As the boom proceeds, the ratio of currency to bank reserves rises. The higher the ratio, the higher the rate(s) of interest. But this has another effect. As we saw last month, all things remaining equal, the higher interest rates are, the lower will be the demand for money material — gold. During the boom, the demand for gold can be held in check by a rise in interest rate(s). From the viewpoint of the central bankers, who we can assume don’t understand the operations of the law of the value of commodities, they must gradually tighten, allow interest rates to rise, and hold inflation in check. The years since 2021 present a classic display of the operation in action.
During a boom, shrinking of the bank reserves relative to currency in circulation causes interest rates to rise. This was especially true during the feverish COVID aftermath boom of 2021-23. Hence the sharp rise in interest rates between 2021-2023. At some point, the quantity of currency in circulation begins to fall short of the socially necessary stock of currency needed to circulate commodities and settle debts coming due. Bankruptcies begin to rise. As the money famine develops, commodities start to pile up unsold in warehouses, and a growing portion of debts falling due cannot be made good. A general crisis of commodity overproduction arrives.
To be continued
(1) The Belgian Trotskyist Abram Leon, who was to die in Auschwitz, also wrote an interesting book, “On the Jewish Question, A Marxist Interpretation,” which can be found on the Marxists Internet Archive. (back)
(2) The Phoneticians called themselves Canaanites. Ancient Canaan included what today is Lebanon and Palestine, as well as parts of Jordan and Syria. The Canaanites spoke a language close to biblical Hebrew. After the crisis of 1200 BCE, south Canaan fell under the rule of the Israelite tribes, which in the north became the Samaritans of later history and the original tribe of Judah from which we derive the word Jew. The Israelites of the north and the Jews of the south lived in what is now the West Bank, while the coastal regions fell under the rule of the Philistines, who came from pre-classical Greece. It is from the Philistines that the modern name Palestine derives, though DNA studies show they form a very minor part of the ancestry of the present-day Palestinians. In the north, the people continued to call themselves Canaanites. A trading nation, the Canaanites played a leading role in Mediterranean trade until their main city, Carthage, located not in Lebanon but in North Africa, was destroyed by Rome in the Punic Wars. The closely related Jews then replaced them as the leading trading nation in the ancient Mediterranean world. (back)
(3) The merchants of the bourgeoisie evolved into industrial capitalists directly employing and exploiting wage labor, thereby replacing feudal relations with the capitalist relations that dominate today. (back)
(4) In an address to the Israelis, Netanyahu mentioned the biblical nation of Amalek. Unlike other nations mentioned in the Bible, there is no evidence outside the Bible that the nation of Amalek ever existed. It seems to be a creation of the biblical authors to represent absolute evil, which could be identified with whatever nation the Israelites or Jews were fighting at the moment. According to the Bible, God demands every member of the nation of Amalek, man, woman, child, and suckling baby be killed along with their cattle. By raising the specter of Amalek, Netanyahu is raising the prospect of the literal murder of every Palestinian man, woman, child, suckling baby, and presumably their animals as well, if they have any. After all, God in the Holy Bible demands nothing less. The only thing standing in the way of Netanyahu’s far-right government doing this to the Palestinian people is the mobilized outrage of the peoples of the world, directed not only against the genocidal Israeli government but its main sponsor, the United States of America, now headed by Genocide Joe Biden. (back)
(5) The Jim Crow system of legal segregation that replaced the system of modern African slavery after the war of the slaveholders’ rebellion – the U.S. Civil War — is today recognized as a form of apartheid. But the system of “Indian” reservations where native peoples of what is now called the United States were forced into also bears resemblances to both South African and Israeli apartheid. (back)
A Critique of Crisis Theory 