Welcome to Hell: The G20 & Revolutionary Necessity

Nino Brown
Jul 22, 2017 · 14 min read

On July 7th and 8th anti-capitalist protesters descended upon Hamburg, Germany in opposition to the G20 Summit. “Welcome to Hell” was their slogan to greet the leaders of 20 of the world’s leading economies. The G20 Summit is a gathering of the world’s 20 leading economies, and their subsequent heads of state. The nations include: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, France, Indonesia, India, Italy, Mexico, Japan, Russia Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Republic of Korea, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, EU and Commission. It should be remembered that within the G20 is the G7, of which Russia was suspended from for role in the Crimea and the Ukraine of which the U.S. and Western imperialist forces are fully supporting neo-Nazi forces and far right wing reactionary groupings.

The slogan “Welcome to Hell” was directed at the G20 leaders and their reactionary policies. As protest organizer Andreas Bleschmidt claims “it’s a combative message…but it’s also meant to symbolize that the G20 policies worldwide are responsible for hellish conditions like hunger, war and the climate disaster.”

G20 & the slow collapse of Unipolarity

A few days before the G20 “Welcome to Hell” protests in Hamburg, Germany, Donald Trump made the statement in Warsaw that: “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.

Trump’s statement was not made in a political vacuum. With the rise of ultra right nationalist and fascistic trends in the Western political establishments, his questioning whether “the West” (the imperialists) has the “will” to survive, is just dog whistle plea meant to stoke Western imperial chauvinism. In the same speech he goes on posing the questions “Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”

So called “Western values” are profit at the expense of the rest of humanity; they are imperialist values which Trump is trying to tap into. But make no mistake, the world is being “subverted” and there are groups out to “destroy” it, but they are not the imaginary bogeys which Trump is trying to conjure. The enemy itself is the West, it is the primary contradiction of our era: imperialism and national oppression. The justifications churned out that supported capitalist imperialist “globalization” are cracking and the rise of far right wing ostensibly “anti-establishment” politics rest on the backdrop of an actually decaying social order. Global capitalism is in rapid decline, the planet is at stake and all life on it; the rise of the right must be challenged by the global anti-capitalist/imperialist and anti-colonial forces.

The liberal establishment, represented by the Democratic party in the United States and the ruling parties of Europe do not have the backbone nor framework for successfully challenging Trump let alone the decaying society they sit atop of. The rise of terrorism and the scapegoating of Muslims as the “enemies of the West” is a sign of the decadence of Western “civilization.” The fact that the so called “War on Terrorism” has only increased terrorist attacks and destroyed entire nations causing mass migration and subsequent super exploitation of oppressed nations. But, this is the foundation of Western “civilization” so what is Trump really carping about?

What “civilization” maintains a trillion dollar plus military industrial complex that supports neo-Nazis in Ukraine, clerical religious fascists in Syria, and Israeli settler colonial genocide of Palestine, and Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war on Yemen. These are a few examples but they speak to the real values of this system and its political representatives. Trump’s talk about defending Western values “at any cost” mean increased police and security state powers and expanding it as a repressive apparatus of the state. Let’s not forget that despite all the talk about “free trade” and “big government” or better yet inefficient “regulation” the era of neoliberal capitalism actually strengthens the state not diminish it. It is the state that clears the path — quite violently — for new rounds of capitalist accumulation.

The “will” that would be necessary to hold together this decaying state of affairs on the part of the people would be no will at all, but just generalized political apathy and a disorganized and divided working class movement. On the part of our oppressors, their “will” is evident in the policies they implement towards refugees fleeing nations caught in the webs of neocolonialism. Their “will” is evident in the repressive security policies they implement and the austerity measures they take that exacerbate poverty and social antagonisms within the working class.

The “Western civilization” Trump talks about is not worth saving. It is the problem itself. As anti-colonial writer Aime Cesaire pointed out decades ago with regard to a faltering European power “A civilization that proves itself incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization. The fact is that so-called European civilization — “Western” civilization — as it had been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems of the proletariat to which it has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem.”

Trump and his ilk are mad that the unipolar era is cracking. The rise of formerly oppressed nations like Brazil, India, Russia, China, and South Africa threatens U.S. monopoly finance capital. Nations like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or “North Korea” remain defiantly opposed to U.S. imperialism by building its capacity to defend themselves, socialist Cuba refuses to bow to bullying from the U.S. and asserts their sovereignty and independence (they still hold our sister comrade Assata Shakur safe!), and Trump’s refusal to sign the Paris Agreements have isolated the U.S. on a global scale amidst these shifting relations of power in the global class struggle.

The G20 and U.S. Isolation

The G-20 consists of the finance ministers of 19 economically “significant” nations, as well as financial representatives from the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These officials gather one to two times per year to discuss the world economy and make joint decisions affecting finance. On the surface, this seems to be a harmless — even positive — thing, considering the most recent worldwide financial crisis in 2008.

Since the last crisis the U.S. economy has never truly “recovered,” nor can it. Capitalist economic “recovery” has brought in worse jobs than left with longer hours, less control over working hours, lower wages, increased costs of living, more incessant war on oppressed nations, and more state violence from the prisons and cops.

It is an iron law of capitalism in its imperialist stage that the rate of profit will drop and imperialist nations will be forced to go to war in order to kickstart the capital accumulation process through cracking the remaining “closed” economies of China, DPRK, Cuba, Iran, and others. Like a vulture, the imperialist system continues to prey on oppressed nations, but the turning of the tides in repelling imperialist plots in Syria and the subsequent realignment of emerging nations is the writing on the wall. Imperialism is not invincible, it’s armor is cracking before our very eyes.

Behind all of the diplomatic wheeling and dealing wars rage on in the global South, with the flames of violence fanned by the domination of capital over labor and nation over nation.

The rise of nations like Russia and China threaten the global unipolar economic order because the long reign of U.S. monopoly finance capital rooted hegemony is slipping away. Underdeveloped nations are turning to China and Russia for favorable trade deals as well as for diplomatic relationships to questions such as terrorism and security.

G20 Protesters Expose Neoliberal Crackdown on Civil Liberties

Those who gathered from June 6th-9th numbering around 100,000 people in Hamburg, Germany to protest to G20 Summit emphatically stated their broadly anti-capitalist and pro-democracy views. A statement by the NoG20 group which helped organize the mass demonstrations said “The politics of neoliberalism and war is decided in the heart of our cities, closed off to citizens, protected by a militarized police force and backed up by the suspension of political rights. This shutting-down of democracy has one purpose only: to defend the indefensible. Our demonstrations speak for and of a different world.” “…we call for the defence of basic civil and political liberties currently being denied: the right to protest, the freedom of assembly, the freedom of movement” reads the statement released by the NoG20 group. In the wake of recent terror attacks in the U.K. the ruling class elites in the West have used this as an opportunity to bolster the repressive arms of the state in the name of “counter-terrorism.”

History has shown us that under the guise of “defending our rights” from some dangerous “other” political space opened up for the capitalist ruling class to crack down on the people’s movements and our democratic civil rights. Revolutionaries must be opposed to the draconian policies that are on the way following both terrorism and scapegoating of “Black Bloc” types or anarchists. While we obviously disagree with either means of struggle as Marxists have already pointed out particularly Russian Revolutionary V.I. Lenin and Huey P. Newton.

While we must continue to struggle to hold on to, and extend, our basic civil rights and liberties, we must not limit ourselves to this. In addition, it is right to rebel against capitalism, but it is better to make revolution, so our struggles will have to take on the form that has historically been able to guide the working classes and oppressed to challenge and defeat the bourgeoisie: the communist party.

Another World is Still Possible, it is Absolutely Necessary!

In a “Against G20 Hamburg” video created in the run up to the protests the October Revolution of Russia is commemorated as this year will be it’s 100th anniversary. Unfortunately it takes anti-communist swipes at the Soviet Union claiming that the revolution did not fulfill its promises due to “Stalin’s terror” destroying the revolution. While Soviet Union was not destroyed because of Stalin, but from imperialist powers working to sabotage the revolution since day one and do as Winston Churchill said of strangling the “Bolshevik baby in the crib.” The decades of attack, sabotage, espionage, sanctioning, and even supporting fascist and ultra-right Nazis and terrorists, were all primary contradictions the Soviet Union had to deal with. These objective conditions wore the Soviet Union down and facilitated its downfall. It is no accident that after the Soviet Union fell there was a sharp rise in far right wing activity and hate crimes.

The video goes on to speak about the reality that we are not strong enough to overthrow the government but we should still fight them because “their power ends where our revolt begins” and proceeds to declare that “a better world already exists.” It also states that there are no governments to support, implying that all governments and states are the same, lumping the governments of oppressed nations with those of the oppressor. What it ignores it that there are workers states left in the world, and they do deserve full solidarity in this age of decaying imperialism. These states are flawed and are not “worker’s utopias” but they are the living breathing remnants of revolutions that shook global politics in the 20th century.

In the statement released by the group NoG20 they say “…we call for the defence of basic civil and political liberties currently being denied: the right to protest, the freedom of assembly, the freedom of movement.” In the wake of recent terror attacks in the U.K. the ruling class elites in the West have used this as an opportunity to bolster the repressive arms of the state in the name of “counter-terrorism.” They claim this is being done to protect us from so called Islamic terrorists and mystify the problem in various ways such as liberal narratives centering “tolerance” and neoconservative Islamophobic “battle of civilizations” mentalities. The reality is however though, that the U.S. “tolerates” supporting neo-Nazi junta groups in the Ukraine, Al-Qaeda offshoots in Syria and Libya, and has a long history of “tolerance” to repressive dictatorships that carry out its neo-colonial and neoliberal economic policies.

The character of the protest as laid out further in the statement was promising in showing that there is a consciousness that is focused on system change. The statement reads: “Our demonstrations speak for and of a different world: One, which is not driven by the logics of racism, misogyny, homophobia and the fear of difference, a world that takes the huge climate changes caused by human action seriously while meeting health, educational and social needs today. We reject a world in which a sports shoe can cross the Mediterranean while people drown. We speak for different cities: Cities, which are not hollowed out by real-estate speculation and the privatisation of public services, cities, which are lively and diverse, where people can disagree freely and express their own hopes for a better world, cities like the Hamburg we know and love.”

The rise of anti-capitalist consciousness particularly with an attention to special oppressions is absolutely necessary to transform the existing repugnant social relations under imperialism.

G20 Contradictions in the Enemy Camp

Not all was well within the G20 camp of the bourgeois leaders of imperialist nations. Germany’s Angela Merkel disagreed sharply with Donald Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreements. His decision is isolating the U.S. on a global level and with the rise of Russia and China in addition to the variegated ways the global working class is struggling for a socialist world from the Philippines to Cuba and Venezuela to Argentina. Socialism is beginning to re-gather it’s global momentum as an alternative to neoliberal capitalism in the era of globalization.

Russia and China are moving into closer alignment than anytime since the Sino-Soviet split and this alliance coupled with the frictions between the Trump led U.S. imperialism and the G-19 nations that did sign the Paris Agreement is an opportunity for the revolutionary socialist movement to create a pole for an alternative system. We are still living in non-revolutionary times and the crisis of capitalism — it’s anarchy in production subsequent political chaos — needs to be met with the necessary revolutionary forces. As we saw in the Occupy movement, the Egyptian Revolution, and let’s go back to the 1999 Battle of Seattle an event that landmarks this nebulous anti-globalization and anti-partyism. These political crises were not met with the proper forms to make inroads on state power and thus contend or challenge power. We should never let a good crisis go to waste. The G20 shows the unity and disunity among these so called global leaders. The contradictions that disunite them should be pressed upon and we can do this through building and organized and disciplined revolutionary organization that can confront monopoly finance capitalism — imperialism- in a deconstructive but also constructive way.

The generalized anti-capitalist, anti-globalization tendencies marching and demonstrating alongside animal rights activists, peace activists, civil liberties activists, and more show that what Marxists have put forward — all of our struggles against oppression intersect at the capitalist system. It is the capitalist system that is the cause of our oppressions and gives them material force over our lives. It is the global capitalist economic order that is threatening life on earth but also continuing to foster divisions among the working people to distract us from our true enemies are.

Despite the objective conditions worsening, there is still a gap to be filled by a revolutionary subject: the class conscious working class armed with revolutionary theory, party, and mass organizations embedded with the majority of society. The

If in 2003 the demonstrations of some 10 million people in 600 cities across the world could not stop the invasion of Iraq, then what will? Protesting is not enough. It is necessary but not sufficient. Our class, the global working class and oppressed, must unite in our strategic assault against capitalist imperialism. This means principally not simply equating all nation states to be exactly the same — to put the slave on the same pedestal as the slavemaster — but being principally anti-imperialist and not just focus on the domestic negative effects of neoliberal globalization. Imperialism is increasingly omnicidal and environmentally disastrous, revolution is no longer a “possibility” but a dire necessity for the oppressed and exploited peoples of the world.

State Repression

Despite the rhetoric of neoliberal capitalism, that the state’s role in society would shrink and allow for less government intervention, the 2008 crisis and subsequent build up of the rudiments of a police state proved otherwise. It was the U.S. and other European imperialist states, and their lackeys, that bailed out the big banks with public monies and initiated widespread repression of the Occupy Movement and the massive surveillance of activists in the Black Lives Matter movement.

The G20 brought out these contradictions for all the bear witness. The mainstream corporate media focused on the violent clashes between protesters and the police forces, which were corralled from all over Germany (20,000 of them) to suppress activists demanding “a better world” for the many and not the tiny super rich elite.

At the end of the protests of the army of 20,000 police officers 476 were reported to have suffered injuries such as cuts and burns from fireworks and eye damage from laser pointers. In addition, 186 people were arrested and 225 were taken into custody by the police. Allies of the Angela Merkel government have used this opportunity to flap their gums about “violence” and “left wing extremism” when their nation continues to exploit and oppress people in the formerly colonized world such as Syria, Libya, and Yemen. As one protester Stefan Hubert, a 32 year old graphic designer remarked “It’s ridiculous that police say some of us are violent when starting tomorrow the leaders of the world’s largest weapons exporting and importing nations will be arriving in our city (Reuters).

Following the protests German justice minister Heiko Maas, of Angela Merkel’s SPD coalition stated that more money is needed from the federal government to prevent so called “left wing extremism.” Maas described the protesters as “anti-social” and “hard criminals” as well as having “committed serious crimes in Hamburg, including attempted murder.” Like a constant feedback loop the state threatens to and takes steps to tighten its security apparatuses in the wake of such wanton actions.

As Black revolutionary Walter Rodney once asked “by what standard of morality can the violence used by the slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of his slavemaster?” While we may not agree with the tactics employed we reject this false equivalency to terrorism.

Rodney poses a good question for all revolutionary forces to mull over. The widespread damaging of property could hardly be equated to one’s “chains” under capitalist imperialist society. We shed no tears for broken windows or damaged property, but such actions carried out to “welcome” the bourgeoisie “to hell” do nothing of the sort, but just widen the spectre of repression when our class is clearly still not organized on a mass level.

The “hundreds of anti-capitalist militants” that torched cars, looted shops, and threw molotov cocktails are not the main problem, but the lack of a coherent alternative to neoliberalism is. Every year the G20 Summit is opposed by hundreds of thousands if not millions across the world but as one Marxist author points out emphatically as to the hackneyed method of response “this anti-capitalist methodology had already become a caricature itself. The confrontations were echoed as tragedy or farce, there was a tied recognition that nothing would be accomplished, and the militants arrested were guilty only of demanding the right to protest.” It must be realized that it will take more than a weekend of protests, molotov cocktails, and destruction of property to stop the capitalist imperialist death machine.

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