RUTHLESS CRITICISM

“If we have no business with the construction of the future or with organizing it for all time, there can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: the ruthless criticism of the existing order, ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor from conflict with the powers that be.” — Karl Marx

July 2025

A “common sense revolution” on the world market

Trump’s tariff offensive

According to Donald Trump, the greatest victim of the American world order is his own country, which has been exploited by friend and foe alike for decades.

This is now ending, and in order to finally make America first again, the president has decided to launch a tariff offensive, which the public is receiving with interested astonishment: The US president’s erratic maneuvers fly in the face of any economic sense, hurt the global growth on which America in particular ultimately depends, and burden the already tight budgets of his own voter base – isn’t Trump ultimately hurting himself?!

The American president makes no secret of what this is all about: Economic measures which should ensure, as political levers, that the rest of the world finally accepts that its all-important trade with America is a privilege that can no longer be had for free.

Trump is updating the American position that global competition between nations for power and money was set up by America for America.


Trump’s America vs. Iran

Trump is determined to prevent Iran from “getting the bomb,” a view he shares with all his predecessors in the office of US President. They have always viewed the prospect of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon as an unacceptable threat to the USA. Not in the sense that their sacred American territory would be vulnerable to an Iranian nuclear weapon, but in the sense that it would diminish their imperial control over relations of sovereignty and violence in the Middle East, including America’s freedom to deal with this avowed enemy of America’s global and regional hegemony.

Trump wants to force Iran to face the choice of either agreeing to a deal that meets his need for a guarantee that Iran will not arm itself with nuclear weapons for all eternity or reckoning with Trump having to blow up everything that his military experts identify as part of an existing or future Iranian nuclear program. He leaves no doubt about the relationship between the two options: He repeatedly emphasizes that he is making the threat of destruction so massive and so credible in order to spare America from carrying it out and using the double weapon of sanctions and the threat of war to push Iran’s leadership to give up its nuclear program – or any part of it that he defines as intolerable.

Trump wants to victoriously end America’s enmity against Iran, with emphasis on “victoriously” and “end.” In his capacity as a real estate mogul, he is certain that Iran will ultimately have no choice but to surrender, given the contrast between “the world’s tallest skyscrapers in Riyadh and Dubai” and Tehran’s buildings that are “collapsing into rubble and dust.” (Address to the Saudi-US Investment Forum, May 13, 2025) And in his capacity as supreme commander of the US dollar and military power, he knows that he has all the means at his disposal to inflict, if necessary, the damage that America’s military can’t possibly want on the recalcitrant Tehran leadership with sanctions – “maximum pressure” – and with the constant Israeli threat of war, which America’s war powers freely calculate with and is unpredictable to anyone else.

Recommended readings:

Notes on a new type of asymmetric war (2020)

Comments on D. Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran (2018)

Why and how the United States wants to get Iran to give up its nuclear program (2012)


January 2025:

What can be learned from Trump
about democracy and the discontent with it

The political and journalistic guardians of democracy are astonished at the openness with which Trump touts his authoritarianism as not just the style, but as the very substance of his presidency. And above all – especially after his election victory – by the success with which Trump advertised his campaign. Are American voters not taking him seriously? Or don’t they care? Or is that what they want? The election doesn’t provide a clear answer to these questions. But the media has come to the conclusion, supported by the opinion polls, that the voters see things the way Trump wants them to: a critical mass of voters not only don’t see Trump as a threat to democracy, but as its savior. Namely, from the very politicians who upheld the defense of democracy as the only issue on which they thought, until the end, they could be sure of a majority. And now this: a proto-fascist as the savior of democracy – how can that be?

Recommended readings:

Trump’s perfect first days:
Consolidating power, unleashing the nation’s will and ability to win –
Biden’s successful farewell:
A message of love to the world power of democratic affections

Why Americans need strong leadership:
The issues of the American election campaign

What must an American president be able to do and be

The Capitol attack: The last battle (for now) in the “Fight for America’s soul”

America in election year 2020: Chronicle of a “Fight for America’s soul”

Populism: Six remarks on an alternative way of exercising democratic rule

Trump praises the proletariat!

Trump’s struggle against the establishment media and for the establishment of a new one

‘Honesty first!’: Trump renovates the moral standards of democratic rule

Donald Trump and the World

Donald Trump and his nation — united in the pursuit of happiness


Dissenting views on the Israel-Hamas war

New (March 2025):
Accompanied by humanitarianism, judged from a legal point of view, disputed on moral grounds:
Israel’s Gaza war — a challenge to the powers and moralists of the imperialist world

October 2023

Once again Hamas strikes Israel, and this time succeeds in a bloody attack on its heartland, which is otherwise successfully shielded from Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, on a somewhat unusual scale. The first profound analyses range from “completely unprovoked terror!” to “it was bound to happen eventually!”, supplemented with anxious to hopeful expectations of an overwhelming Israeli counterattack and questions about the “prospects for a rapprochement between Israel and the Arab states,” which the Palestinian question has been so thoroughly erased from. There is, of course, no room for the question of why the “Palestinian cause” exists in this way and only in this way: as periodic terrorism against Israel. The explanation for this can be found here:

Gaza War 2014: Israel’s Struggle for the One State Solution

Operation “Cast Lead” in the Gaza Strip

And in this latest edition of the orgy of violence in the Middle East, the media, despite all the orchestrated horror, proves its astonishing ability to distinguish between this act of violence and that act of violence, these victims and those victims, these and those perpetrators of violence... The nasty, nonspecific logic that sorts the violence of war in other countries into moral categories, its relation to the actually valid political standpoint that the state power here takes to the violence in the Middle East and the people there, and the specific position taken by the Free World under the “indispensable” (Biden) leadership of the USA toward Israel and its enemies, about which the slogan “we stand with Israel!” says it all, is criticized in this article:

Notes on the general relation of war, war morality and war publicity

In addition, some basic knowledge about Israel’s unique reason of state:

An exemplary imperialist democracy with a Zionist mission

And on Israel’s most recent progress with regard to the de facto settlement of the Palestinian question and the period of state crisis shortly before the outbreak of the current war:

Turmoil in the home of the Jewish people:
Remarks on how Israel’s state crisis is connected with the success of its no-state solution for Palestine

Criticism — what’s that?

Shouldn’t criticism be constructive, helping to improve what it criticizes? Do we just want to be negative? It is not our program to contribute well-intentioned suggestions for the success of what we criticize:

These are not unfortunate side effects, “problems” that our politicians must continue to work on. The causes are also not:

All these are inevitable consequences of an economic system, the so-called free market economy, which aims at nothing as trivial as providing for human needs, but only and exclusively the accumulation of capital.

Because one cannot make this system better – on the contrary, it already functions too well! – we have no suggestions for improvement. We insist that these problems exist because of the system.

contact: ruthless_criticism@yahoo.com