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No 1665 17th November 2025

Imperialist fascist frenzy and world war barbarities, already driven to utter depravity, can only get worse as full Catastrophe of capitalism’s economic collapse looms ever closer. Insane investment hysteria around Artificial Intelligence is like pre-Crash year 1929 on steroids, signalling total breakdown now imminent. The only answer the capitalists have is smiting and war destruction in all directions as in Gaza’s fascist horrors due any minute against Venezuela. But fake-“left” complacent opportunism pumps out the same old delusions in “democracy”, “peace struggle” and hostility to the class war necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Social-pacifism and “multipolarity” revisionist nonsense are deadly for the working class. Rebuild Leninism now

A split and fractured British ruling class looks increasingly like the weakling runt in the litter as imperialism’s Catastrophe bites ever harder on all the major powers and their trade war fight for survival.

Outcompeted on almost every front, its servile reactionary Labour government is totally despised and now reduced to a mess of squabbling factions knifing each other in the back; the nasty but useless failed Tory “first team” is even more rent with panicked defections to the even nastier Reform racists, and even they are panicking at the imploding British economy (and imploding parliamentary system); its “prestigious” Royal family is mired in sleazy degeneracy, arrogant entitlement and parasitical uselessness, and not simply around Andrew; and the “world-renowned” propaganda flagship, the Zionist-favouring BBC, is holed beneath the waterline by Trumpite and trillionaire censorship torpedoes and reactionary establishment bullying (and privatisation greed).

And it is all about to get much worse.

When the fearfully deferred Budget finally goes ahead, it will make explicit just how badly the British economy is shot to pieces, its assets long sold off abroad (Thatcher’s “selling the family silver” derided by Harold McMillan) and its venal wide-boy City financiers forced to kowtow ever more to the interest of foreign monopolies (both European and American) and their demands for intensified exploitation.

All it is good for is squeezing worked-out assets dry for profits from privatised industries, water utilities, power companies and banks, with Trumpism, the hedge funds and “private equity” firms all demanding access to ever more “returns”, like the pharma companies and the juicy remains of the NHS steadily being sold off by the craven stooge Labourites, while the deadly threat of a “bond market collapse” is held like a knife at the throat to extract more and more interest from the public debt.

And the “public” debt is just that, paid for by the public, meaning through ratcheted-up taxes on the working class and less-well-off petty bourgeois masses, and by cuts to even basic services and bankrupted local councils, while the rich and their stooges hire accountants to slip their way through a thousand schemes avoiding virtually any tax at all, via the loopholes and international tax haven networks the bourgeoisie has deliberately created for just that purpose.

But even they cannot escape the unfolding Catastrophe.

These British disasters are only a small aspect of the trouble facing the Western imperialist system.

The ruling class everywhere on the planet is in deep trouble because the whole of monopoly capitalism has hit the buffers, doomed to disaster by the contradictions inherent in an anarchic system of production for profit and private gain.

Its only answer is warmongering and intimidation, underway in earnest since the NATO bombing of tiny Serbia (the remains of once-socialist Yugoslavia) in 1998 and blitzing after country after country ever since but solving nothing.

The inbuilt mechanisms of exploitation and alienating profit-making for private gain can only ever bring capitalism repeatedly to a crisis of overproduction, as every capitalist and corporation strives to capture the entire world market – imperative in the cutthroat “free” market or go under to more ruthless competition – saturating the world in surplus product and surplus money capital that can find less and less opportunity to make profit.

It is exactly as Marx explained 150 years ago (see economics box) in his life work Capital teasing apart the hidden workings of the whole system and its inevitable, repeated, unstoppable crises and collapses, spreading bankruptcy, poverty, unemployment, misery and chaos, only now far, far worse and deadly than ever before.

Regular crises have deepened and intensified as the system grew.

The capitalist “winners” left standing after each collapse concentrated their capital holdings into the great monopoly combines of the imperialist finance capital epoch (as Lenin analysed in his Imperialism - the highest stage of capitalism).

Slump downturn and bankruptcy no longer suffice for the destruction needed.

So three times already in history the vicious and brutal struggle of the giant nationally-based agglomerations of capital, to bankrupt and wipe out their rivals and with them wipe out enough capital itself to purge the world of the “excess” stifling the overall rate of profit – thereby making space again for profitable investments - has dragged the world through agonising collapse and slump breakdown into the “logical” endpoint of allout inter-imperialist war.

The embryonic imperialist Franco-Prussian war in 1870 was the first sign of the devastation which came finally in the Great War in 1914-18, the staggering horrors of the trenches imposed on millions as the great powers slugged it out for dominance and control of the colonial exploitation superprofits, feeding their insatiable greed.

It was a war between bandits and thieves, as Lenin’s Bolsheviks said, knocking down all the lies and pretences on all sides about defending “freedom” and the “homeland” from the “aggression and tyranny” of the “enemy” (the Germans, the British, the Russians, the French etc as appropriate) being blamed for the problems which stem from the system itself.

The Second World War resumption in 1939, – after wartime exhaustion and the Russian Revolution (that the war horrors had led to) forced a short pause for 20 years, – was on a scale one hundred times more widespread and destructive (just as the world war unfolding over the last two decades, already threatens to be a magnitude beyond that).

Its inter-imperialist crisis cause and purpose was the same, albeit complicated by the existence of the Soviet Union and the hope by the imperialist powers of first wiping out the new communism (and its ever increasing attraction for the slump-ridden world working class), before they knocked seven bells out of each other.

In fact the huge strength and determination of the Soviet Union triumphed over the Nazi onslaught, with huge revolutionary sacrifice by the working class, inspiring a wave of revolution from Cuba to China and Vietnam.

But even if the imperialists had succeeded in their anti-communist crusade, it would have solved nothing.

The relentless accumulation of capital is unstoppable, always deepening the contradictions. The ever-expanding credit-fed boom is always destined to crash at some point.

In fact the inter-imperialist destruction in 1945, the main purpose of the war, was enough for imperialism, now dominated by new topdog America, to grow once more in a postwar boom unprecedented in history.

But it did soon falter again as Marxist science predicted.

Tragically that basic Marxist understanding of unstoppable return to Catastrophe eventually, was lost sight of by Moscow whose uncorrected revisionist retreats from Leninism had accumulated over decades.

Idiotically it hoped to maintain a permanent peaceful coexistence with imperialism by vigorous “peace struggles” (Stalin 1952, Economic Problems) while the efficiency of the Soviet camp planned economy would out-compete a now hamstrung imperialism (the imbecile “theory” implied), thereby avoiding “unnecessary revolutionary provocations”.

But that was an impossibility. In the post-war conditions a fair socialist system in the Soviet camp, making equal provision for the working class throughout society without exploitation, could never compete in capitalist market terms with the output from imperialism’s ruthless slave-level exploitation and colonialist tyranny.

Despite continuing staggering achievement by the Soviet Union all the way to mid-1980s, the unworkability of this revisionist (and consumerist) notion would lead eventually to the disastrous conclusion by Mikhail Gorbachev that the “free market” was a “more successful” economic method, and his treacherous conclusion to abandon the Soviet workers state and its disciplined defence through the dictatorship of the proletariat in favour of “working together” with the “democratic West”.

The Leninist perspective would have been to hold on to defence of a reasonably successful, steadily growing and socially harmonious if unexciting workers state while constantly developing revolutionary perspectives (and support of anti-imperialist struggles where they occurred - as to some extent it had done around Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria etc) until the inevitable Catastrophic implosion of the imperialist world in a mess of antagonist chauvinist trade war/hot war conflict.

At that point, the world’s masses, prepared with Leninist theory, could take advantage of the defeats and setbacks inflicted on imperialist dominance to build revolutionary struggles.

But it was either not considered, was laughed at (as every sneering revisionist and Trotskyist fake-“left” anti-Catastrophist has done for decades) or even opposed and discouraged in order not to “rock the boat”.

The “peaceful parliamentary road” was advocated in advice and world CP congresses, disarming workers and leading to disastrous consequences such as the vicious 1973 Pinochet coup overturn and slaughter of Salvador Allende in Chile, or the butchery of the Indonesian revolution in 1965.

The Leninist perspective remains unheard to this day, with revisionism from the Western “left” groups, to Russia’s Putin bonapartism and Beijing’s workers state leadership all insisting that a “multipolar world” is possible (i.e. the same old evasion of revolutionary necessity as the foundation for all understanding, leadership and policy).

The (temporary) reverses for world workers struggle from the Soviet liquidation are clear to all, unfortunately compounding the popular anti-theory notions that communism “doesn’t work”, aided by petty bourgeois gloom and defeatism from Trots and revisionists.

But there has not been long to wait historically speaking; even by the 1990s the economic crisis was shaking section after section of the planet with devastating economic disasters from Mexico, Brazil and Argentina to the Asian Tiger currency failures and endless stagnation in Japan.

By 2008’s global credit collapse the great Catastrophe was well and truly underway.

And with it has come the rise of spontaneous anti-imperialist turmoil, “terrorism” and insurgency, confused and even backward at times in its ideology, but shaking the Empire to its core from 9/11 onwards (a huge psychological blow despite its relatively pinprick nature); in the anti-occupation movement in Iraq and the Middle East; in the great upsurges like the mass street movement of the 2011 Arab Spring after the global credit breakdown two years before and especially now in the staggering anti-Zionist resistance in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen; in the spread of “jihadist” revolt (complicated by its religious backwardness and some imperialist attempts to manipulate it, but essentially anti-imperialist) and now by the eruption of “GenZ” rebellion (also prey to manipulation and confusion (Bangladesh, Nepal etc) but also an anti-capitalist response).

The US Empire’s answer has been war in all directions from brutal invasion and destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan and much of the Middle East as well, to suppress the upheaval as well as intimidate allcomers, be it the “terrorist” Third World or its major imperialist rivals and their rising competition, eating great chunks of America’s home and overseas markets, especially German-led Europe and Japan for decades, and now added to by the staggering rise of the Chinese economy, by India and other smaller competitors, Brazil.

But smashing down the rest of the world has been a litany of failure and humiliating defeats; withdrawals have been forced from Somalia early on, from Iraq and Afghanistan without re-establishing any stable compliant stoogery or supposed nation building; or a mess of scorched earth and devastation has been created, without any authority and all at enormous expense financially, militarily and even more politically, drawing nothing but hatred and contempt, while recruiting tens of thousands into the anti-imperialist and jihadist resistance and deepening worldwide hostility.

The Ukraine conflict, set in train by imperialism’s deliberate provocations against newly “restored” capitalist Russia, using the Nazi dominated stoogery installed in Kiev by dirty CIA “colour revolution skulduggery, has fared no better.

Putin’s bonarpartist balancing act between the new oligarchs of restored capitalism and the residual sentiment for the old communist ways has proved far more indigestible than anticipated by the reactionary Western NATO coalition had hoped, for all the lying psyops propaganda in the Western media, doggedly insisting that Russia was “losing”, especially from the British ruling class.

London has been playing a lead role in keeping the war going even as the Ukrainian regime implodes from military defeats, horrific casualty numbers, and desertions, all compounded now by open exposure of the vast and cynical corruption which has been syphoning off the costly Western military and financial aid from the very beginning.

The war continues to play a role as a diversion for all the European bourgeoisies in particular, desperate for distractions from, and excuses for the ever worsening economic disaster they all face because of the crisis.

America vacillates however because the main purpose of the war from its vantage point, has been achieved, namely crippling the European competition for American markets by breaking up the cooperation between the cheap gas and oil supply from Russia and highly efficient European, especially German, industrial and commercial output (whose exports has been slaughtering American commerce for decades - Volkswagen, Airbus, Bosch, etc etc ).

Not for nothing was the NordStream gas pipeline sabotage put through early on by the US (possibly with British sidekick naval support) as everyone knew (EPSR No1624 24-02-23).

This key aspect of the war, by far its most important, is missed by all the fake-“left”, namely the inter-imperialist competition which is the most basic of the contradictions driving the world unstoppably into potentially the greatest world war disaster in history.

Certainly there are other aspects, and one wing of the US ruling class at least also that advocated “taking out” Russia, as part of a strategy for encircling China (becoming ever more the main threat to US world dominance) and to ensure that current restored oligarch-mafia capitalism has finally suppressed the historical legacy of soviet times, wanting to see it smashed down completely (as it wants to destroy all communist world influence).

But that takes second place and the Trumpite wing of the ruling class considers further vast expense for the war to be an error, especially given the steady defeat being imposed on the Nazi-tatooed Kiev forces.

Washington is not unhappy to keep the war destruction going, but cutting its losses and imposing the expense onto its European rivals, both directly in NATO expenses and indirectly through the economic damage done to them, thereby killing two birds with one stone.

It has bigger fish to fry, obviously in sustaining the monstrous genocidal Zionists in Gaza and the West Bank, to intimidate and suppress the great waves of anti-imperialist upheaval in the region from Lebanon to Yemen and Iran, and increasingly across Africa.

And it is now lashing out in all other directions, against China and Latin America as the crisis drives the imperium into total bankruptcy, and it turns to raw intimidation to try and keep its system upright, effectively demanding tribute from all at gunpoint – or to be more accurate B1 bomber, F35 fighter and cruise missile point, as being amassed around Venezuela in an act of grotesque fascist intimidation and bullying behind the absurd pretence of a “war on drugs” and “saving the world from drug cartels”, lyingly setting up anti-imperialist president Nicolás Maduro with the same accusations that were pinned on Manuel Noriega in Panama before the murderous military onslaught there in 1989 (and later admitted to have been a deliberate stitch up – ILWP Bulletin (EPSR) No 653 16- 06-92).

It will not stop.

The relentless development of the monopolisation process has now brought the Western capitalist economy to a point of total implosion; the full on collapse into a “financial nuclear winter” which was just about averted in the global bank credit meltdown in 2008-9 by demented levels of additional credit creation (Quantitative Easing electronic dollar “printing”) but which has been lurking just underneath the surface ever since.

As the EPSR has constantly warned, that was not “a crisis” (now a historical event as it is mostly referred to, as if we “got over that”) but a stage in the long unrolling crisis building up for decades, and which would only be intensified by the extra credit.

The great frenzy in America now around the tech companies and Artificial Intelligence hysteria is now the expression of this returning collapse, with the sheer impossibility of any profits being made at the heart of it, as the bourgeois press and economists are nervously setting out as ever larger and ever more concentrated capital holdings – counted in scarcely believable $trillions – reach impossible levels:

But despite the market’s current positivity about AI, questions remain about the sustainability of the tech industry’s outlay.

Four of the biggest players in AI – Amazon, Facebook parent Meta, Google and Microsoft – have increased spending on AI. Over the next two years they are expected to spend more than $750bn on AI-related capital expenditure, meaning non-staff items such as datacentres and the chips and servers inside them.

It is a spending spree that Manning & Napier, a US investment company, describes as “nothing short of incredible”. The Newport site alone will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Last week, the California-based Equinix said it was planning to invest £4bn on a centre in Hertfordshire.

In March, the chair of the Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba, Joe Tsai, warned he was seeing signs of excess in the datacentre market. “I start to see the beginning of some kind of bubble,” he said, pointing to projects raising funds for construction without commitments from potential customers.

There are 11,000 datacentres globally already, up 500% over the past 20 years. And more are coming. How this will be funded is a source of concern.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley, the US investment bank, estimate that global spending on datacentres will reach nearly $3tn between now and 2028, with $1.4tn covered by the cashflow of the big US tech companies – also known as “hyperscalers”.

That means $1.5tn needs to be covered from other sources such as private credit – a growing part of the shadow banking sector that is raising the alarm at the Bank of England and elsewhere. Morgan Stanley believes private credit could plug more than half of the funding gap. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has tapped the private credit market for $29bn of financing for a datacentre expansion in Louisiana.

Gil Luria, the head of technology research at the US investment firm DA Davidson, says the hyperscaler investment is the “healthy” part of the boom – the other part less so, which he describes as “speculative assets without their own customers”.

The debt they are using, he says, could trigger ramifications beyond the tech industry if it goes sour.

“The providers of this debt are so eager to deploy capital into AI, that they may not be properly assessing the risks of investing in a new unproven category supported by very quickly depreciating assets,” he says.

“While we are at the early stages of this influx of debt capital, if it does rise to the level of hundreds of billions of dollars it could end up representing structural risk to the overall global economy.”

Harris Kupperman, a hedge fund founder, said in a blogpost in August that datacentres will depreciate twice as fast as the revenue they generate.

Underpinning this expenditure are some lofty revenue expectations from Morgan Stanley, with revenues from generative AI – chatbots, AI agents, image generators – expected to grow from $45bn last year to $1tn by 2028. Tech companies are relying on businesses, the public sector and individuals to produce enough demand for AI – and to pay for it – to justify those revenue expectations.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the emblematic product of the AI boom, now has 800 million active weekly users, which is a boon for the optimists. But doubts have been raised over business takeup so far. For instance, investor faith in the AI boom was rattled in August when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published research showing that 95% of organisations are getting zero return from their investments in generative AI pilots.

The Uptime Institute, which inspects and rates datacentres, says many projects will not be built – an indicator that some are part of the hype machine and won’t get off the ground.

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“Big Tech” doesn’t cut it any more. Nvidia became the first company to reach a $5tn valuation last Wednesday, thanks to a stock surge driven by optimism about the future sales in China, after Donald Trump and Xi Jinping signed a one-year trade truce.

The chipmaker’s performance also stood out last week amid a mixed bag of earnings for other tech giants.

Just four months ago, Nvidia’s market cap was at $4tn. Now it’s worth more than the German economy and wields a similar amount of geopolitical and market power.

How did it get here? Two decades ago, Nvidia developed specialised graphics cards for video games and was worth about £6bn. By 2020, its value had climbed to $200bn, as its chips became central to a booming data centre industry. But it was the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 that saw the company’s valuation skyrocket, as Nvidia’s graphics processing units became the default engines for training and running generative AI models.

The other factor compounding Nvidia’s rise is the popularity of passive investing, now accounting for half of US equity assets under management. As the company’s market cap grows, index funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) automatically buy more of it, because it now makes up a larger portion of the index. This creates a cycle. Nvidia comprises more than 8% of the S&P 500 and 5% of the MSCI All World Index.

Jason Furman, a professor of economic policy at Harvard, has estimated that spending on data centres, which are filled with Nvidia’s chips, accounted for 92% of US gross domestic product growth in the first half of the year. Without these centres, the US economy would have grown just 0.1% during that period.

On the surface, Nvidia seems invincible. The company accounts for 90% of the chipmaking market and, while competitors, including Google, Amazon and AMD, are developing specialised chips to catch up, none seems close to denting its lead. “Any company faces three risks,” says Russ Mould from AJ Bell, the investment platform. “Competition, customer dissatisfaction, and regulation”.

Nvidia passes the first two tests easily. On regulation, the picture is more complex. For months, chief executive Jensen Huang has been trying to navigate US export controls that locked Nvidia out of China’s AI chip market. At US-China trade talks last week, he said the negotiations were in the hands of Trump and Xi.

Nvidia has extended credit or taken stakes in several other AI companies, drawing comparisons with the “vendor-financing” models that played a role in the dotcom crash.

Meanwhile, many of Nvidia’s biggest customers have bet billions of dollars on the promises of AI without proof that it can generate returns. This year alone OpenAI is reportedly on track for a $5bn operational loss, while Meta expects to spend upwards of $70bn on AI, even though its main source of revenue is still in social media advertising.

Where companies do publicly share their AI revenue, it is growing. The question is whether it is growing fast enough. If returns can’t keep pace with spending growth, these companies could cease orders. In that case, Nvidia’s $5tn valuation has nowhere to go but down.

“Some kind of bubble” hardly does justice to the frenzied levels of market hysteria, which resembles nothing so much as the spring and summer of 1929 just before the Crash in October, the 1930s subsequent Great Depression, the rise of fascism and the World War it became.

And nothing encapsulates it more than the $1 trillion (yes – trillion) pay “package” offered to Elon Musk if the already ludicrous value of the Tesla car company is multiplied by eight times in that period.

As one EPSR participant asked quite simply “who are they going to sell all those cars to?” particularly as wages have effectively not increased in the US (let alone the rest of the world) for the last five decades????

Other signals of disaster are the current echoes of the 2008 banking failure and implosion of the unregulated subprime mortgage loans:

The collapse of two US firms, First Brands and Tricolor, has shone a light on private credit and its growing influence in the global economy.

The failures have led to ballooning losses at traditional banks, and, coupled with worries about the health of US regional banks, have raised concerns about weak lending standards and potential threats from an opaque corner of the so-called shadow banking sector.

Private credit emerged in the 1980s as a relatively niche industry offering private loans to businesses.

Unlike banks, where loans are backed by customer deposits, private credit firms’ loans are backed by money raised from private investors, including pension funds, insurers and high net worth individuals. But they have become increasingly intertwined with the traditional banking industry, with lenders in Europe and the EU significantly exposed to private credit firms.

The private credit industry boomed after the 2008 financial crisis, when regulators cracked down on traditional banks and forced them to hold more capital – in effect a financial cushion against riskier loans.

The new rules also required banks to do more forensic checks on borrowers, making lending more expensive and slower. This created a gap in the market that private credit was ready to fill.

Meanwhile, private credit firms benefited from ultra-low interest rates after the financial crisis that made it easy to borrow vast sums of money from traditional banks that could further feed their ventures.

The industry falls under the umbrella of non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs), colloquially known as the shadow banking sector, which is dominated by alternative asset managers in the US including Blackstone, Apollo, Ares and KKR that also lead the private equity industry.

However, many insurance companies, pension and investment funds have their own private credit operations.

The private credit boom has created an industry with about $3tn (£2.2tn) in assets, according to a 2024 report by the Alternative Credit Council and EY, and one that is forecast by BlackRock to hit $4.5tn by 2030.

That is still a fraction of the global banking industry, which has assets of $188.7tn according to the Financial Stability Board. But private credit’s rapid growth, and banks’ growing exposure to the burgeoning sector, has caught the attention of global regulators.

What are the risks and benefits of private credit?

Critics, including some banks, claim private credit’s success has hinged on “regulatory arbitrage”, meaning they are gaining a competitive edge and stealing business as a result of weaker regulation.

Unlike banks, private credit firms do not have to build up capital that can absorb losses when loans sour, or even disclose the risk on their books. They face far less scrutiny and expense as a result, meaning they can issue loans faster and to a wider range of businesses, with potential to reap greater financial rewards than heavily regulated banks.

The US dominates the private credit market, making it hard for global regulators to implement rules and get a proper view of the possible risks to financial stability. Europe is also struggling to keep up with the boom: one of the continent’s biggest players is the London-headquartered Intermediate Capital Group, which had raised $50bn for its private credit fund as of December, according to tables published by trade publication Private Debt Investor. That compares with Ares Management, whose top private credit fund had raised $116bn.

The growing availability of private credit and equity has also helped hollow out stock markets, meaning less need for companies to list on stock exchanges in pursuit of capital, as well as providing funds to take firms private.

But advocates say the private credit boom is beneficial for both borrowers and investors.

While pension funds and insurers can diversify their portfolios and increase returns for investors long term, businesses can secure bespoke loans much more quickly than through a traditional bank.

Industry lobbyists also say any extra risk is carefully considered by private credit firms. “They are taking on more risk, but they are engaging more closely and more frequently than banks traditionally do,” said Michael Moore, who heads the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, which also represents the private credit industry. “Typically, the private credit provider will be much more engaged, week by week, depending on what business they are working with.”

Why there so much attention on private credit now?

The collapse of two US business, the car parts supplier First Brands and the sub-prime auto lender Tricolor, have raised fears about weak lending standards in some pockets of the unregulated private credit market.

That could spell trouble for the wider financial services sector, given regulated banks have tried to get a slice of the private credit industry by investing or lending to private credit firms themselves.

Jefferies, a mid-sized Wall Street lender that was advising First Brands and lending against its invoices, said last week that it had a $715m exposure to the car parts supplier. It also placed billions of dollars of First Brand loans with other investors.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan disclosed this week that it had taken a $170m loss from Tricolor, which collapsed amid fraud allegations last month.

There are also concerns about a lack of transparency across the sector. “Nobody knows what the true value of assets these guys are holding,” Raghavendra Rau, a professor of finance at the University of Cambridge, said. “They’re opaque loans. We have no idea what’s going on in there, but hopefully the private credit fund is able to monitor these loans properly to make sure there are not too many bad loans.”

The JP Morgan chief executive, Jamie Dimon, said further problems were likely to emerge across the private credit sector. “My antenna goes up when things like that happen. I probably shouldn’t say this but when you see one cockroach, there’s probably more. And so everyone should be forewarned at this point,” Dimon said.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) this week said it was concerned about the financial links between traditional banks and “non-bank financial intermediaries” (NBFIs), a broad umbrella that includes the private credit industry.

The IMF warned that a downturn could have ripple effects across the financial system. “Banks’ growing exposures to NBFIs mean that adverse developments at these institutions – such as downgrades or falling collateral values – could significantly affect banks’ capital ratios,” the IMF said.

It added that the sector should be better regulated.

The IMF’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, said concern about the sector was the “question that keeps me awake every so often at night”.

Capitalist hype is that AI will now save the world with its astounding capacity to carry out even quite intellectually advanced, if tedious tasks, heralding a “new Golden Age” of prosperity.

Quite apart from the devastatingly damaging effect these massive centres have on the environment, feeding global warming, and wreaking havoc on regional and local water supplies and ecosystems, they will not save economies either.

As the most basic part of Marx’s Capital Volume One explained 150 years ago, when new mechanised factories were being heralded as creating a new world, there is no profit to be made from machines however sophisticated.

During production they transfer part of their value to the commodities being produced, as wear and tear gradually brings them to “end of life” in modern jargon.

But no extra value is transferred over and above what it costs to install the machines, and therefore no profit is made from them.

And profit is the only aim of the capitalist.

So why install them? Because the extra productivity means an individual worker can produce more goods in the same time compared to a rival firm, and for a period can therefore the capitalist is able to employ fewer workers and sell cheaper, winning much of the market – until the rivals also install them.

However it is only from workers that extra value is obtained, that which he produces after working the time needed to pay his wages; the remaining hours of work produce the surplus product appropriated by the owner which is the source of profit.

But as these processes drive the capitalist corporations to mechanise more and more, they use fewer and fewer workers for the same production capacity – thus generating less and less surplus value relative to each £ invested and output created.

The effect is masked because at the same time the giant monopolies grow ever huger and their absolute profit grows (and there are other complexities caused by monopoly price gouging, equalising factors in investment, the Byzantine credit system, international trade bullying, and much more, all needing analysis).

But the overall impact is in the tendency to a falling rate of profit, an economic law Marx showed, which eventually stifles the whole system, with ever vaster accumulations of capital sloshing around unable to find any profitable investment opportunity, just as is happening now in America (and everywhere else too).

And such is the desperation that even a fantasy of future potential profit with no basis in real projections and cost analyses (as reported above) is now sufficient to send tens of billions of funds scurrying to be invested, in an ever more volatile market.

The Emperor’s new clothes (or his tastelessly redecorated gold leaf Oval Office) have got nothing on this, for delusion.

The great Catastrophe is unravelling faster than ever before and shortly to plunge over the edge completely of total meltdown into world economic chaos and disintegration on an incomprehensible scale.

Essentially the dollar is collapsing.

This is the driving force for the decades of warmongering and blitzing imposed since the NATO onslaught on hapless little Serbia in 1998, the ever greater horrors of imperialist blitzing of country after country since the turn towards all out fascist aggression now personified by the Trump presidency (but an aspect of all imperialism in crisis rather than being some special or different).

It has solved nothing and nor can it.

One “answer” (of long standing) is for the capitalists to escalate the rate of exploitation, cutting wages, cutting conditions, extending the working day, and using as much intimidation and pressure as needed to get compliance.

But they have already been doing just that for decades, especially internationally, driving the tyrannically exploited Global South into ever greater penury in the sweat shops and plantations; most nations under the imperialist cosh are now so tightly bound with international debt that can see more than half their national output simply paid over to the rapacious imperialist banking and finance system.

And it does not come automatically without any consequences – just the opposite, it can only generate ever greater resistance and hostility from the great mass of humanity not least because they have been fooled so many times before with the promises of improvements and democratic reforms, taking them steadily towards a better world.

That is exactly what the history of the class struggle is about, including the great waves of revolutionary upheaval throughout the last century.

And it is exactly what the great rise in mass turmoil is about now from GenZ demonstrations across the world to the “terrorist” struggles of the Middle East, the African “jihadism” and the growing contempt of the working class and petty bourgeois intelligentsia everywhere for the whole lying “democracy” racket, exposed more gruesomely than ever by the monstrous cynical cold-blooded inhumanity of the Zionist occupation and the outright class-based backing it has received in the West.

Only bringing an end to the entire stinking foetid profit system and its grotesque inequality by revolutionary struggle can solve anything for humanity now, ending this disastrous and vile system for good.

But the world struggle will not succeed in the great fight to overturn the disgusting depravity and ruthless greed of the ruling class, willing to drag the world to war and ecological destruction rather than give up its privileges and power, without rebuilding a scientific revolutionary leadership, founded on the great achievements of the great founding figures of Marx, Engels and Lenin and the developments in the understanding of the world struggle.

One of increasing importance is obviously the Chinese workers state which for all its revisionists flaws has been going from strength to strength, demonstrating to the world the enormous advantages of maintaining a centralised planned economy under the control of the working class.

Its rapid development over just 40 years, using an extensive application of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which advocated the temporary use of capitalist methods within the new Soviet state, to pull the economy along from the primitive backwardness of feudal near-serf society, has given it an enormous strength to stand up to the increasingly belligerent bullying of Trump’s White House.

Xi Jinping’s recent summit meeting with Donald Trump made the point with the US tariff war intimidation forced to back down, not least because of the long term strategy by Beijing to control rate earth production. It has also demonstrated significant power in retaliating with a blockage on the US farming sector, refusing to buy soy beans which are a mainstay of the US MidWest farming sector, a major support base for Trump and now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy:

Mr Trump’s usual trade approach – shout loudly and wave a big stick – faltered when Beijing raised its own bludgeon. No tribute of gold crowns or Nobel nomination pledges were on offer from Mr Xi. The US president blinked first – but, predictably, attempted to repackage the underwhelming result as a great success.

In fact, it was a necessary de-escalation that essentially turned the clock back. Mr Trump – who once announced tariffs of 145% on China – agreed to cut the average rate to 45% and suspended the tightening of tech-related export controls. China has said that it will buy US soya beans and – most importantly – is holding off on draconian curbs to rare earth exports, which it threatened as a countermeasure. It’s still unclear whether China will get access to Nvidia’s powerful Blackwell chip. Experts say that would dramatically shrink the US advantage in AI, with obvious economic and security implications.

This is a year-long deal and may be no more than a pause. [...]Beneath this administration’s shortcomings lie longer-term failings. China has been strategically mapping and tackling economic vulnerabilities; this truce buys it time to continue that work. The US is late to this game. It has just cut a critical minerals deal with Australia, but reducing dependence on Chinese rare earths will be a very long process – as Japan’s experience has shown.

Yet Beijing’s decision to wield access to rare earths as a weapon has increased concerns about China outside the US too. The G7 summit in Canada is expected to launch an alliance pushing back against China’s dominance on Friday.

China has agreed to stand down on enforcing some of its recent limits on exports of critical minerals, but apparently not all of them.

China made no public commitment to retreat from earlier limits, which it imposed in the spring and last winter, and which continue to snarl global supply chains.

The October orders were, in the words of U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, “a bazooka at the supply chains and the industrial base of the entire free world.” They included a halt to any further export of technology or equipment that might help other countries develop their own rare earth mines, refineries and magnet factories, except with permission from China’s commerce ministry.

Mr. Trump said Thursday after his meeting with Mr. Xi, held in Busan, South Korea, that he expected the yearlong suspension would be extended before it expired.

The April rules halted exports from China of seven kinds of rare earth metals and rare earth magnets made from them, except with licenses issued by the ministry. The December rules imposed similar requirements on two metallic elements vital for making certain semiconductors and two other elements needed for military ammunition.

European and American business leaders and officials say that only half their requests for export licenses for rare earth magnets are being approved by the ministry. Many factories are barely receiving enough shipments from China to stay open, and some have had brief closures.

Factories that need the magnets to make products like brakes and car seats have been unable to replace their usual inventories. Companies had to run down their stocks when the ministry approved very few licenses for the first two months after issuing the April regulations, while the ministry was setting up licensing procedures.

Shortages have sent the cost of rare earths skyward.

A further worry is whether China will actually allow exports of rare earth processing equipment to help the West set up its own supply chains

************

For two decades, China has systematically pursued economic self-reliance. China has been able to establish choke points to pressure the U.S. economy, while making it harder for Washington to block China.

Beijing has combined the vast scale of its manufacturing operations with considerable state direction. Only a handful of business sectors are left in which American and European industries still lead the world, notably commercial aircraft and a few of the most advanced semiconductors.

Self-reliance has been a cornerstone of Chinese policymaking not just under Xi Jinping, the country’s top leader since 2012, but also under his predecessor, Hu Jintao.

It took a prominent place at an annual gathering of the Communist Party’s Central Committee last month, when the country’s top officials laid out a sketch of China’s next five-year plan.

Faced with restrictions on China’s supply of rare earths, Mr. Trump last week accepted a compromise with Mr. Xi.

Their agreement left this year’s new U.S. tariffs for China similar to those for countries in Southeast Asia and lower than the tariffs for countries like India and Brazil, with which the United States has traditionally maintained closer relations.

China’s threat to put extremely tight controls on its rare-earth exports also helped persuade the Trump administration to suspend a policy it adopted in September to expand the number of military-related Chinese companies that Americans are not allowed to do business with.

China has gained other choke points through its policies of manufacturing self-reliance. It is the world’s dominant producer of the ingredients needed to make antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals. It is also the main producer of a lot of electrical equipment, low-end computer chips and much more.

The United States has been left with fewer options when it needs to fight back. When Washington wanted to pressure Beijing to back down on rare-earth export controls, the Trump administration threatened to restrict some of the last categories of crucial American exports that China still needs, like aircraft parts.

When China joined the World Trade Organization at the end of 2001, it depended on imports for a wide range of goods. The cars, telecommunications gear, power generation equipment and other manufactured goods that China made then were inferior to imports, prompting many Chinese companies and consumers to prefer imports.

Since then, China has made enormous strides in the quality and quantity of these and many other goods.

Last month’s Central Committee gathering, or plenum, ordered that China would, starting next year, double down on its emphasis on advanced manufacturing. The plenum document ordered government and business to “work faster to boost China’s strength in manufacturing, product quality, aerospace, transportation and cyberspace.”

Despite more than a decade of heavy public investment, China lags in making the fastest semiconductors, needed for artificial intelligence and the latest military technologies. But Chinese companies have proved adept at buying and smuggling Nvidia microchips.

The state-controlled banking system has lent heavily at low interest rates to manufacturers of electric cars and solar panels, and China has become the largest exporter of these goods.

China has also forced the US to back off from massive tariffs on Chinese built ships (now 60% of the world fleets).

It also sent the European Union reeling because of a dirty Dutch move to take over control of Chinese owned chipmaker Nexperian, using the excuse of “national security”. Instead of guaranteeing European control, this backfired – China blocked the firm’s supplies from Chinese factories which has hammered the European car industry, which uses millions of its low level chips for multiple car components:

Prof David Bailey from Birmingham University’s business school told the BBC’s Today programme that the actions of China were a “wake-up call” for the motor industry.

“The Dutch government may well have had good reasons to try and take control but it hadn’t thought through the implications of that,” he said. “The retaliation from China was swift and it was brutal.”

He said there was a need to find alternative processing sites, “maybe in south east Asia, or Europe”, and for the industry to keep bigger stocks of its products in case of shortages.

These developments indicate significant resolve in the Chinese workers state and not only the determination but the strength not to be pushed around by imperialist crisis pressure and bullying.

Its recent military parades and show of technology underlined its doggedness.

But what would be a much more important and powerful weapon would be some indication that Beijing had a deeper grasp of the crisis developments (as outlined above) and willingness to take a lead in the world for the working class on what that means - unstoppable plunge to war and the revolution that alone can change things.

The comments made by the Chinese in the wake of Xi Jinping’s summit with Trump, insisting that China and America can work together and that

We have no intention to challenge or supplant anyone. Our focus has always been on managing China’s own affairs well, improving ourselves, and sharing development opportunities with all countries across the world.

are appropriate peaceful coexistence diplomacy, but far short of what needs to be understood, which is that imperialism is a system of crisis and war. There is no stopping its plunge into totally devastating world war except by revolutionary overturn to finally rid the world of the sick insanity of this historically out of time ruling class, doomed but dementedly nasty.

And the humiliation of its failure to bully and intimidate Beijing will only add to its vengeful hate filled frenzy.

The most crucial element of the summit was the “off the cuff remark” made by Trump even before his Airforce One arrived that America would now be resuming nuclear testing programmes.

The “Nobel Peace Prize” seeking Trump and his fascist minded regime is actually presiding over the most dementedly vicious and barbaric escalation of war destruction in history from the utterly inhuman holocaust its Zionist stoogery has carried out – and continues – in Gaza, to the military ordered murders of more than 80 in small boats off Latin America, and potentially any minute the most barbaric onslaught on Venezuela.

Its people will fight but they are hampered by great vacuum in the world of Leninist revolutionary understanding. Alan Moss

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As capitalist crisis bears down ever harder on the working class the fake-“left” steps up its “revolutionary” playacting, to head off the growing dismay and anti-capitalist sentiment. The Trots are loud among them pumping out their poisonous anti-Sovietism and hostility for proletarian dictatorship – with the long discredited “political revolution” “theory” revived all over again around total lies about the 1980 CIA-run/Vatican-funded Solidarnosc bogus “trade union” stunt in Poland

Like dogs returning to their vomit, the Trotskyist wing of the fake-“left” has started reviving its long discredited “political revolution” theory, to undermine the increasingly vital understanding of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, the only way forwards for mankind as imperialist collapse hurtles into a world war abyss.

At least two groups have made this explicit, the “Socialist Appeal” ex-Militant, Labour entryists, recently renamed the “Revolutionary Communist Party” following expulsion by ever more reactionary Blairite/Starmerism, and the slick sophistic Spartacists. Doubtless other Trots will be in synch.

The former are trying to re-write the history of the CIA-backed and heavily Vatican-funded Solidarnosc movement, whose bogus “trade union” attempted to overturn the Polish workers state in 1980-81, a counter-revolution under the guise of “fighting the bureaucracy” and overturning it with a “political revolution”, supposedly different to a “social revolution”.

It failed initially but eventually succeeded after a decade of disruption, merging into the craven liquidation of the Soviet Union by deluded Gorbachevism, finally tipping the class-collaborating weakness of revisionism into the counter-revolutionary endpoint.

In a long, distorted “history and analysis” the Trots pretend the initial Polish events for the first 16 months or so, were a “spontaneous workers uprising” which only later was “sold out” (by its main instigator Lech Walesa and the reactionary Catholic Vatican, allegedly!!).

Under cover of their newly-minted RCP “revolutionary” labelling (after decades of entryism bolstering the always reactionary Labour Party) they are smuggling their counter-revolutionary “Stalinist caste” poison into the growing left shift in world mass sentiment, underway in even the “richest” countries, as capitalism’s Catastrophe bites ever harder, heading into total world war devastation and terror.

These petty-bourgeois academics and frauds hope to coopt the great wave of potential revolutionaries being pushed forwards by the austerity, horrors and degeneracy of imperialism’s crisis, to make sure their minds are bent against the titanic history of the Soviet Union (and the later East European workers states), and its gigantic achievements.

Understanding and appreciating the USSR as a great history changing advance, assessed for all its successes and failures, is critical for building any kind of anti-imperialist anti-capitalist movement – and until this question is tackled there can be no sound basis for any Marxist revolutionary leadership and theory.

In its 73 years, (bar the faltering of the last 2-3 under Gorbachev), the USSR demonstrated for all time the potential for rational communal society, freed from the tyranny of capitalist exploitation, antagonism and degradation – whose historic impact, despite appalling philosophical retreats by the leadership, can never be reversed.

The Sparts meanwhile, one of the few groups that have never fully abandoned the twisted nonsense of “overthrowing the bureaucracy” – (though ironically trying to preserve its “communist pro-Soviet” image by lying that it always “saw through” Solidarnosc (when it in fact supported it for most of the first year, and only later denounced it)), – has been re-applying its own sour fantasy of a “political” revolution “while supporting the workers”, to try undermine the rapidly increasing prestige and influence of China, now American and Western imperialism’s biggest problem and world competition.

That giant country is still a workers state despite its extensive use of capitalist methods in parts of its economy (under overall state political control) and excessive embrace of sometime mindless consumerism.

It has nevertheless become a huge example to world of the advantages of a planned economy, transforming life for getting on a billion of its people lifted out of poverty in just a few decades, (compared to the five centuries needed for capitalism’s rise in the “advanced democratic” countries, which has kept most of the world in tyrannised exploitation and both relative and absolute poverty, and which is now driving down as well the reformist class-collaborators domestically who benefited during the post-war “boom”).

The Chinese are now imperialism’s greatest challenge twice over.

First they are a powerful example of the potential for communism (despite dire revisionist and nationalist shortcomings in Beijing’s leadership) and secondly, for the moment at least, as a straightforward economic competitor that not only holds its own but is “doing capitalism” better than the capitalists, more and more outstripping even the giant superpower of US imperialism in production and technological advances, from ecologically sustainable energy and construction to high-speed railways, space programmes, computers and military hardware.

Both these Trot groups are part of the great slew of petty bourgeois fake-“lefts” which have played a crucial role for the last 100+ years in reinforcing imperialism’s non-stop hate-filled rubbishing of the achievements and advances made by the working class revolutionary movement following the Bolshevik toppling of Tsarism and then capitalism in 1917, and the subsequent building of workers states, firstly the Soviet Union making titanic gains for the working class over 70 years of its existence and China and others like Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba continuing to this day.

Their “left” version of anti-Sovietism, originating in Leon Trotsky’s self-regarding subjective idealist individualism, has helped fool the working class and petty bourgeoisie in the West particularly, with a century-long brainwashing crusade ever since Lenin’s death in 1924 on the supposed “horrors” of communist life - one of the greatest black-is-white inversions of all time.

Under cover of wanting to “improve” the workers states, they have joined the greatest sustained propaganda onslaught in history against both the USSR and then the huge post-WW2 extension of the Soviet camp, against other workers states worldwide inspired by the soviet advance and against the tidal wave of anti-imperialist struggles after 1945 overturning direct colonialism nearly everywhere (albeit continuing to suffer the neo-colonialist exploitation of monopoly capitalist financial domination).

Now that the historically bankrupt bourgeois system has inevitably hit the buffers as the longest boom in history implodes (exactly as Marx’s Capital analysis predicts is the unstoppable fate for contradiction ridden monopoly capitalism) its hatred is reaching demented proportions.

Psyops lies and propaganda are poured out against China and Russia (the latter no longer a workers state but with enough historic legacy from the Soviet period to still attract imperialist hatred and fear of its potential to “revert”) especially and against all those which have fought and thrown out imperialism like Cuba and North Korea and those nationalisms adopting an anti-imperialist stance like Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Algeria, or erratically forced there like Syria.

Lurid exaggerations and fabrications are non-stop about cyber-warfare and “spying rings” (both invented by and actually stock in trade for the West’s aggression from the CIA, MI6 and NSA downwards) as well as utterly deranged accusations of “drone swarms attacking our airports” and “a campaign of sabotage and arson across Europe” with virtually every random incident or accident now routinely attributed to foreign, usually Russian, “agents” without any evidence at all save the “expert opinion of the intelligence services” (who gave you the dodgy dossier on alleged WMD missiles in Iraq, and hundreds of other “Reichstag fire” type lies and provocations and who specialise in disinformation psyops).

What they want to prevent of course is any positive assessment of the workers states and especially any understanding of the class dictatorship which was their core and the basis on which they were able to transform society, by suppressing and eventually eliminating the foul tyranny of capitalist exploitation and domination, using the class strength of the proletariat, mostly the working class and a large part of the poor peasantry (the farm labourers who made up the majority of Russia’s population at the time, and China’s too).

Such class war firmness contradictorily is the only path towards a truly democratic society as violent bourgeois suppression and intimidation was removed from the masses for the first time ever.

The individualism of the petty bourgeoisie who make up the Trot groups hates this Bolshevik leadership dictatorship in the collective interests of the great majority, the only way the world will be changed, whatever trumpeting they might do about their supposed Marxism and “fighting for revolution”.

It reflects Trotsky’s own petty bourgeois subjectivism and conceit, whose undoubted cleverness and analytical capacity was always distorted and corrupted by his refusal to work with the leadership discipline and organisation established by Lenin’s Bolshevik party over two decades before the 1917 revolutions, and in the new Soviet state.

Only at the very last minute in 1917 did he see the way the wind was blowing – towards the overturn of the bourgeois rule in October 1917 – and join the winning side, accepting Bolshevik leadership.

But within a couple of years he took advantage of the flaws, philosophical weaknesses and fears of the leadership of the Soviet Union which had to carry on the struggle to build an entirely new form of rational collective human society in the wake of Lenin’s premature death, a relatively tiny Bolshevik party valiantly leading the mass struggle to transform the backward and primitive country and culture left by reactionary feudal Tsarism, wrecked by world war defeats and then the hostility and military interventions of world imperialism, followed by three years of civil war by Russia’s White aristocracy and bourgeoisie.

Never quite matching Lenin’s historic genius, the Bolsheviks, and their general-secretary Joseph Stalin, nevertheless pulled the peasant and worker masses through with the vital discipline of the proletarian dictatorship, suppressing the old bourgeois class and its exploitation and disruptive domination to start building a completely new form of society which soon began to demonstrate its capacity to catch up with and in some sectors to overtake monopoly capitalism.

But Trotsky was sniping and carping in short order, and not with criticism and polemics made constructively to grasp and understand the huge contradictory complexities of the world crisis, the balance of class forces and the revolutionary struggle within it (the very essence of Leninist party theoretical development).

Instead he was increasingly arrogantly disruptive, so much so that Lenin was obliged to intervene against his high-handedness at the Tenth Party Congress in 1920, imposing a ban on factionalising (but not debate) which threatened to destroy the new state’s unity when it was heavily under encircling imperialist threat.

But Trotsky’s criticisms were able to get some purchase precisely because the leadership after Lenin, did slide into greater and greater theoretical retreats, apparent early on for example in advice given to the British communists to tailend the treacherous class-collaborating TUC in the 1926 British General Strike and to the Chinese where the new communist party was over trusting of the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang, which treacherously turned on the proletariat in 1927 with massive butchery in the cities.

Those (correctable) errors were an embryo of the later disastrous Popular Front policy in Spain’s 1936-9 civil war where heroic and sacrificing efforts by the hard-pressed Soviet Union to support the anti-Franco republican forces with substantial arms deliveries and volunteer fighters, (Russian and international), were undermined by telling the working class to put its faith in the “democracy” of the petty bourgeois republican parliament.

Merging into an “anti-fascist” front, was a mistake that hampered world understanding when Leninist strategy would be to fight alongside the republicans as far as they would go, but staying separate politically, making clear all the time the need for workers to overthrow the capitalist state as the only answer to fascist-degenerate imperialism.

Such errors and retreats, and the paranoid cover-ups and crimes which only worsened things, then deepened ever further after the staggering 1945 Red Army victory over Nazism.

Contradictorily that mass-supported revolutionary triumph, (on a par with the original 1917-20 struggle) so well established the Soviet world position that it created a complacency in the Stalinist leadership, reinforcing its theoretical nonsenses, now declaring imperialism to be permanently hamstrung and containable by “peace struggle” to hold back its aggressive tendencies.

Lenin’s temporary peaceful coexistence tactic (to give the hard-pressed new Soviet state a breathing space to develop and build its strength early on) was distorted into a strategy for completing the world socialist transformation without “revolutionary provocations” – the steady growth of the Soviet camp economy supposedly outcompeting a declining West until in some unspecified way it fizzled out.

Capitalism’s ruthless world exploitation of virtual slave labour in the Third World under monopoly finance domination (and as much military intervention or backing for local fascist stoogery as needed) was always going to outpace the fairness and equity of a socialist economy in the short term (“short” lasting decades) until the economic crashes of the dotcom and 2008’s global bank implosion exposed this disastrous revisionist nonsense.

But while the strongest theoretical challenge, was needed against these Stalinist retreats, the workers states and their gains needed defending unconditionally, not relentlessly attacking as Trotsky did and his inheritors even more crudely, as the EPSR has fought to explain since its foundation:

No Trot grouping has ever had anything but a sneer on its face for every single achievement of the Soviet workers state.

Lenin famously characterised Trotsky’s defeatism about collective Bolshevik government as the “everything is rotten” attitude, just months before Trotsky declared his outright hostility to the Soviet communist dictatorship in 1922 in ‘The New Course’ and began working henceforth to try to undermine Soviet workers’ confidence in their socialist state, freely predicting its early collapse [see EPSR Book Vol 5 Against Trotsky and subsequently Vol 29 and 30 Trotskyism exposed].

No Trot since has ever had anything but utter contempt for what the USSR did brilliantly manage to achieve up to 1986.

Never once could any Trot, – Sparts no exception, – sincerely and seriously support unconditional solidarity with the Soviet workers state.

That means backing the USSR and the socialist camp first and foremost whenever imperialism’s anti-communist hysteria campaigns reached a crescendo, such as over the fascist Arrow-Cross/Catholic Church/CIA ‘revolution’ against the Hungarian workers state in 1956 (and correctly put down by Kruschev, incidentally); or over the 1968 petty-bourgeois liquidationist ‘Prague Spring’, or over the 1980 beginnings of the Solidarnosc fascist/Vatican/CIA counter-revolution in Poland.

But on these and countless more examples, the petty-bourgeois Spart perfectionists could not resist an anti-communist swipe or two of their own, thus utterly destroying their own credibility for all time with any self-respecting communist workers throughout the world.

Spart and other Trot ‘principled support’ for the Soviet workers state was always nothing but the most treacherous and devious political fraud, – covered up by the bogus ‘Marxism’ of the call for ‘political’ revolution but not ‘social’ revolution.

This counter-revolutionary hostility to the one and only actual Soviet workers state, warts and all, finally helped bourgeois reaction to bring about the inevitable result in the absence of any strong worldwide Leninist movement any more, – the complete collapse of the entire Soviet workers state, the only alternative outcome to seriously supporting the sole real Soviet workers state.

The USSR did not have to collapse. A renewed world Leninist movement could have helped the revival of its original international socialist perspectives and eventually defeat the Stalinist revisionist degeneracy.

But purist idealism’s pursuit of the ‘perfect’ revolution in the form of subverting the USSR with demands for an anti-CPSU ‘political’ revolution could only ever possibly encourage outright petty-bourgeois counter-revolution.

And so it inevitably proved.

But now without a single eyeblink of shame, embarrassment, or explanation, the Sparts have simply silently abandoned a 60-year diatribe for the ‘political’ revolution without another word on the subject. Now they casually demand another socialist revolution in Russia, just like that. How simple to be a middle-class ‘revolutionary’ Trot dilettante, – and how infinitely treacherous for genuine communist workers are such creatures (EPSR No710 27-07-93)

 

The paradox of all this is that the whole East European problem for Trotskyism since 1917, – hatred of which has been the sole explanation for the remarkable success of these Trot ‘communists’ in the West since then, – has become even worse for their twisted ideology now that the revisionist regimes in the workers states have collapsed, at last fulfilling Trotskyism’s lifelong ambition to ‘overthrow Stalinism’.

This was always just a cover for petty-bourgeois individualist hatred of the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, – (extending Trotsky’s lifelong middle-class hatred of having to accept better and wiser leadership than he himself could provide).

Fishing in the muddy waters of every anti-Soviet and anti-communist stunt of the relentless Cold War on the USSR ever since 1917, the Trotskyite fake-‘left’ mentality had to dream up the sick ‘Marxist’ invention of the ‘political revolution’.

This would allegedly be able to take advantage of all communism’s imagined ‘difficulties’ (as chronicled or invented by the capitalist press and as fanatically recycled by the bourgeois Trots), in order to ‘overthrow Stalinism’ but without jeopardising the survival of the ‘degenerated’ workers state (or the ‘deformed’ workers state in the case of East Europe and China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc, according to the near-religious and totally demented Trotskyite litany).

But this ‘political revolution’ cant was always a complete fraud, revelling as the Trots did in every scrap of anti-communist propaganda in the West which could only ever lead to counter-revolution gaining strength again throughout the world, helping further to demoralise Moscow revisionism towards total liquidation, and ensuring the triumph of reaction on the final debris of the workers states.

This is exactly as the ILWP [EPSR - ed] alone explained would happen when challenging the entire Trotskyite fake-‘left’ (from the ‘Leninist’ to the RCG and the Sparts) for refusing to support Polish workers-state proletarian dictatorship against Solidarnosc fascist-nationalism in 1980, – and it is exactly as it has turned out.

The Trots’ problem is that they now cannot escape the plain historical evidence of their actions, – that what in fact they have been backing is “Better no workers state at all rather than a degenerated or deformed workers state”.

In other words, either any workers, in revolt anywhere, come up with a perfect socialist state straightaway, or else the Trots will help Western anti-communist propaganda to destroy it.

It requires no brains at all to realise that such ‘support for revolution’ can only operate inside the ‘permanent’ closed minds of petty-bourgeois intellectuals (and their handfuls of deranged supporters) whose ‘perfect’ armchair-socialist strategies never go far beyond the ivory-tower comfort of their pampered Western middle-class existence.

For the forces of real proletarian struggle trying against phenomenal odds and against all kinds of weaknesses and disabilities to grind out some kind of socialist-state victory over imperialist reaction anywhere round the world from Angola to Vietnam, from China to Cuba, from East Europe to Ethiopia, etc, – Trotskyism will only offer a further Western spit in the eye.

But now these petty-bourgeois anti-communist ‘revolutionaries’ are embarrassed by all of the enormous turmoil caused by the collapse of the revisionist regimes in what were supposed to be only joke workers states, where there was no ‘real socialism’, and where in fact workers were not only ‘just as badly exploited as in the West’ but on top of that were forced to live under ‘utterly-inhuman tyranny’, etc. (EPSR No720 05-10-93)

 

The ILWP actively agitated on these questions from birth. It totally rejected and bitterly fought the false ‘communist’ friends of the Soviet Union and the workers states who (like the CPGB) unprincipledly drifted from blind petty-bourgeois hero-worship of the Moscow bureaucracy to cynical indifference and eventual abandonment.

It totally rejected and bitterly fought the false Trotskyite sectarians who pretended unconditional solidarity with the workers states but in practice who never missed an opportunity to stab them in the back with the latest anti-communist propaganda stunt manufactured by the international imperialist counter-revolutionary circles like the CIA.

Not a single Trot sect or ex-Stalinist grouping proved capable of genuinely defending the advance of workers-state power against imperialist world domination while at the same time genuinely criticising the crippling ideological weaknesses of those regimes, both in their domestic and international effects.

Superficial public opinion is wrong in thinking that the socialist states were swept aside easily. They were not, and the main history of the 20th century is the heroic story of how the Soviet Union, and subsequently China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc, and the whole socialist camp fought brilliantly on every front to frustrate the endless onslaught by internationally-organised imperialist counter-revolution, and economic and propaganda sabotage, from 1917 onwards.

These were real workers states at one time governing more than a quarter of the world’s population, and doing it in ways (as the above capitalist press cuttings testify) which now in retrospect seem a model of restrained and civilised good order (compared to the open barbarism now rampaging across most of those territories, and across even larger swaythes of the rest of the earth now, such as in Rwanda, Sudan, Kenya, Algeria, Turkey, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Burma, Egypt, Occupied Palestine, Occupied Ireland, Mexico, Colombia, etc) (EPSR No760 19-07-94)

 

 

But genuine Marxist science obviously cannot possibly survive and develop unless it constantly gives a full account of its own mistakes and what pricelessly has been learned from them.

The whole of Trotskyism, for example, simply refuses to answer for its lifelong counter-revolutionary posturing that far from wanting the overthrow of the Soviet workers state which its non-stop vilification of the USSR would cause people to imagine, the Trots really wanted to strengthen the Soviet Union via “the political revolution”.

This ‘political revolution’ was always a completely imaginary ‘Marxist’ concept without an iota of scientific reality, – a totally specious anti-communist nonsense posturing as “the next great stage of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary understanding”.

Soviet leadership could always have been improved upon with better grasp of the international balance of class forces and the next detailed directions history was heading in, naturally. But the dictatorship of the proletariat could not have been improved upon, – only reversed into capitalist restoration by any new ‘revolution’, which could only have been a counter-revolution.

So it proved in reality. Trot anti-communist hysteria eventually had its way, and the Stalinist bureaucracies tumbled, mostly self-liquidated by their own revisionist stupidity. But not one workers state or planned socialism was improved upon, even where there had been the greatest volume of Trot-backed ‘rank-and-file-socialism’ – posturing such as around Solidarnosc in Poland, – the Vatican’s very own counter-revolution, organised by the CIA.

In every single case, counter-revolution and the vilest capitalist restoration triumphed the moment that the dictatorship of the proletariat was undermined.

The Trots now simply ignore this monumental exposure of their one great ‘theory’ as completely bankrupt nonsense. Except with the extreme anti-communist Trot nutters, the once world-renowned ‘political revolution’ theory has been laid quietly to rest, and hidden away.

Current Trot provocative sects occasionally still try their arm at giving leadership to the working class by analysing actual events so as to say where the international balance of class forces is heading next, and what intervention the working class can and should make into the present class-war struggle worldwide.

And just as always, when their ‘theory’ proves bankrupt, the Trots make no attempt to assess their mistake so as to learn lessons from it, but simply turn their back on their mistake, ignore it, and hope that everyone else will soon have forgotten about it too. Nothing is heard now about ‘Solidarnosc, the future of socialism’; ‘Gorbachev, the realisation of the political revolution for building real socialism’; ‘Militant Marxist entryism into Labour, the way to the socialist revolution’; or ‘political revolution, – the only way for the workers state to survive or flourish in China, Cuba, etc’, – all prominent Trot ‘theories’ of the immediate past.

The classic exposure of these fake-‘lefts’ was their perpetual support throughout the 20th century of every wretched anti-communist stunt that Western imperialism’s intelligence agencies could manufacture, cheering on every Soviet and East European ‘dissident’ and such CIA and Vatican-financed rackets as the Solidarnosc ‘trade-union’, a counter-revolutionary movement which ended up putting in the near-fascist Walesa as president; destroying the Polish workers state and all its tremendous social services and welfare reforms; and handing the country over to mass unemployment, capitalist exploitation, mafia- and corruption- domination, and Catholic obscurantism which has even abolished a woman’s right to abortion if it is needed.

Having rubbished the socialist achievements of the USSR and East Europe nonstop since the early 1920s, these phony ‘communist’ Trotskyites then washed their hands of their part in Western subversion’s responsibility for using the idiot Gorbachev regime for bringing down the entire achievements of the Soviet workers state.

Nothing is heard anymore about the famous ‘political revolution’ of Trotskyite fantasy which was supposedly going to bring ‘perfect socialism’ provided that the ‘Stalinist’ USSR was slandered, sabotaged, and ridiculed enough to bring it down.(EPSR No945 07-04-98)

 

To this day, the entire fake-‘left’ in Britain, Trot and Revisionist alike, has not really moved on from that shameful Communist Party position of just being useless ‘left reformist’ adherents to the utterly reactionary Labour Party, the architects of the Cold War nuclear encirclement of the workers states, and the chief stooge still of US imperialism’s fascist-aggression masterplan to some day rid the world totally of any socialist or anti-imperialist revolt at all, via total repressive reaction.

Tragically, the opposition to Stalinism’s Revisionist weakness was dominated from early on by the even worse opportunist theoretical nonsense of the Trotskyites, which rapidly degenerated everywhere into Labour entryist anti-communism which found its classic Cold War expression supporting the Solidarnosc fake-‘left’ stunt, financed and masterminded by the CIA and the Vatican, which put the neo-fascist nationalist Walesa on the map, eventually guaranteeing capitalist restoration in Poland and undermining all of the workers states in the process.

The only way that total catastrophe for the world from warmongering crisis can now be avoided, and rational progress for civilisation resumed, is by going back to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and working within the workers states for steady improvement.

The pro-Soviet world anti-imperialist movement offered the only serious alternative there has ever been to international domination by regularly recurring crises of warmongering monopoly-imperialist aggression.

Only a new wave of Bolshevik Revolutions and powerful workers states, organised on anti-capitalist consciousness as before, will halt this new era of out-of-control warmongering fascist aggression by the monopoly imperialist system in crisis. Build Leninism. EPSR supporters. (EPSR No1135 07-05-02).

Except, seemingly, the Solidarnosc counter-revolution stunt is being “heard some more” – presumably the Trot toxin in the workers movement now considering that enough time has elapsed perhaps to repeat it all again, to a generation that has not been through these historic exposures.

As the sheer degeneracy and foulness of the declining and doom-ridden capitalist order becomes ever more obvious, it becomes more necessary for the vicious ruling class to wield its greatest weapon of all, anti-communist confusion, with its petty bourgeois colluders at the forefront to disrupt the understanding and enthusiasm of a new generation dismayed and disgusted by the foulness and cynical trampling across all pretences about “freedom and justice” by the monopoly bourgeoisie, now openly imposing its vicious genocidal dictatorship reality.

Beneath the latest shallow “revolutionary” posturing of the former Militant (Socialist Appeal wing) is all this pustulent hostility spelled out in a long tedious account from its RCI international wing, repeating every lie and calumny about the workers states and the alleged “repression and exploitation” of the working class by a “privileged bureaucracy” supposedly a “new kind of exploitation by an entrenched caste acting against the interests of the working class”.

“Caste” was only ever a sly way for the cunning Trotsky to avoid declaring a new class form existed, knowing full well that no third kind of property relations was ever known to Marxist science – (outside the more ancient feudal or slave society forms overturned by the bourgeoisie’s own revolutions and lingering only in fossilised remnants around the Arab Gulf eg), – which would be necessary to sustain such a class.

It is anyway a total lie that Poland was a horribly exploited and repressed “living hell” as all the Trots have always said about the workers states and as is now repeated by the RCPers.

In fact for all the mistakes and errors that might have been made by its revisionist leadership (and the advice from Moscow backing it up) the society was utterly transformed in Poland after the Second World War, going from one of backward semi-feudal fascist reaction under the monstrous pre-war Josef Pilsudski dictatorship (which had managed to open a concentration camp for Jews even before Hitler’s Nazis got round to it) to one with mass provision of a wide range of social services, from health to education, full employment and a thriving agricultural sector exporting excellent produce (its unadulterated fruit jams were some of the best on the shelves even in British supermarkets eg).

But none of this is spelled out by the bilious nastiness of the Trots who see only an alleged “tyranny” imposed by Stalinism, larded with a repetition of every clichéd misrepresentation of history going from the supposed “treachery” of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 to the “betrayal” of the Warsaw Uprising.

But the first was a clever diplomatic move by the Soviet Union after years of being rebuffed by British and French imperialism during the 1930s over possibilities to form an anti-Nazi alliance, and the subsequent dirty-dealing Munich Agreement in 1938 by those same powers with Hitler, throwing him Czechoslovakia and hoping to turn his war aggression eastwards onto the Soviets. By agreeing a treaty with the German wing of imperialism instead, the industrially smaller USSR (one third German capacity, if that) was able to buy time in 1939-41 to build up its factories, while moving them back to the Urals, out of range of the fascist onslaught which Moscow knew would come eventually.

As for “occupying” Poland, these were lands which Poland itself had expanded into after the First World War, including sections of Belarus and Western Ukraine, taken as part of Poland’s vicious war against the new Bolshevik Soviet Union; the new border was the Curzon line agreed in the Treaty of Versailles by Western powers.

The allegation over the Warsaw Uprising is an even more egregious insult against a Red Army which had fought its way across hundreds of kilometres, if not thousands, in constant deadly battle with the Nazi occupation on a scale never seen before in history, costing hundreds of thousands of lives on all sides, and which had already freed half of Poland.

As even anti-communist bourgeois historians concede, such as Jonathan Dimbleby’s recent book Endgame 1944 the Red Army army was completely exhausted by the time it arrived on the opposite river bank on the Vistula, ill-supplied with ammunition and arms, and badly situated strategically for any kind of immediate offensive. Such aims as it did have needed to fit with the priorities of the whole front line anyway, not a mistimed provocation instigated essentially by the London-exiled reactionary Polish bourgeoisie against all advice with the full intent of heading off the establishment of a communist government already being set up in Lublin.

To declare that the “Nazis were allowed” to slaughter an uprising as if Stalin was in cahoots with Hitler is the foulest of insults, mingled with the completely fanciful ignoring of reality and facts typical of Trotskyist subjective idealism.

All this and more is a grotesque distortion, to try and pretend there was a seething discontent on a par with that in the tyrannised Western colonies which “spontaneously” broke out in a rank-and-file workers’ uprising against a new “ruling order”, with all the usual Trotskyist nonsenses thrown in of a “parasitical bureaucracy” living a life of Riley while workers were in grinding poverty, and one that “prevented all progress” because its “bureaucratic methods could not handle technological development”.

Trotsky himself had to pull back from his own 1923 “everything is rotten” defeatism about Soviet growth by 1936, conceding in his mostly bilious “Revolution Betrayed” that the Soviet Union was clearly surging ahead while the West was floundering in the Great Depression.

Now the RCP is obliged to admit:

The Polish People’s Republic was a de facto one party state led by PZPR, (Polish United Workers Party-ed) with a nationalised economy centrally planned by the party. The planned economy’s superiority over the market economy gave it a genuine base of support in society. The state could prioritise its resources in a more efficient manner, rather than leaving post-war reconstruction to the invisible hand of the market, which is only interested in production as long as it brings profit to the capitalists. The country was rebuilt rapidly after the extreme destruction of WW2. Industry was built up, illiteracy was eliminated and the standard of living of many Poles improved when compared to the pre-war Sanacja regime. It is impressive, for instance, that Poland was able to remove the post-war food rationing system before one of the world’s leading imperialist powers, the United Kingdom. As a result, there was a mass basis of support for PZPR in Polish society at the time, in spite of its totalitarian tendencies.

And all this of course without the huge injections of capital to Britain and West Europe from the American Marshall Plan.

But what is this “in spite of” anyway???? “Totalitarianism” is nothing more than the sniping, sneering term used by the Western bourgeoisie and its reactionary intellectuals like Ayn Rand, to describe the dictatorship of the proletariat, lyingly contrasting it to the monstrous hoodwinking fraud of parliamentary “democracy” and individualist “freedom”.

Bourgeois “democracy” is a total racket – the real “totalitarian” oppression of the actual dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the violent and ruthless class rule which actually runs things behind the mask (and with Trumpism, tearing that off).

The only alternative is working class rule, establishing its own class dictatorship, but this time in the interests of the great majority, building a rational and reasoned society through long determined development.

It is a dictatorship of reason, guided by a scientific dialectical materialist understanding of objective reality, initially through a leadership party founded and structured precisely for the purpose and then more and more by the whole of society as it is educated and more and more of the population is drawn in, defeating all the old class-based nonsense, and reaching a cooperative self-disciplined conscious society in which the welfare of every individual is crucial, and the basis for the welfare of all.

But the entire fake-“left” continues to subscribe to the disarming and fraudulent notions of “democracy” within capitalism, revisionists and Trots alike, and none more so than this RCP, with its failed history of Labour entryism and its great Militant disaster running the Liverpool council.

Idiot meaningless workerist crap is poured out against the Polish workers state, already admitted to be better than capitalism for all its errors:

This state of affairs started to dissipate, however, as the bureaucracy showed its true colours. The main problem faced by the planned economy was the exclusion of the Polish working class from all decision-making in a state which was supposedly run in its interests. All elements of workers’ power were quickly defanged or dissolved.

But this is garbage - the working class was drawn in precisely via the party, which of course controlled decision making nationally and used “one man management” for the factories, within an overall economic plan, not “local workers committees” - exactly as Lenin insisted.

Of course the mistake and errors of the bureaucracy and its Moscow advisors needed to be challenged, but not through this shallow “workers democracy” which is founded in petty bourgeois hostility to the class dictatorship.

The reality of these demands was to disrupt and undermine the workers state, and they were deliberately fostered and encouraged by Western subversion from the beginning, not least through the reactionary Catholic Church and its grip on the Polish population in particular.

The RCP wants to pretend that all that came later, subverting a “genuine spontaneous” movement; it is utter garbage. The character of Solidarnosc, which never had “10 million members” except in Western intelligence propaganda and Trot fantasies, and which was never a “trade union”, was clear from the beginning if examined properly, as the EPSR (ILWP at the time) did, with a stream of non-stop analysis pointing to every reactionary signal and symptom, from the adoption of the pre-war imperial eagle for Solidarnosc’s symbol, to the exodus of its beaten members to apartheid South Africa, in the wake of its initial defeat.

Even the bourgeois press made it clear as in this long account in the American press eventually (the full version in EPSR No 639 10-03-92) and later in the BBC Spying Game series (No 1015 06-10-99) spelling out how hundreds of millions of Vatican dollars were poured in via the corrupt Banco Ambrosio and sinister P2 Lodge freemasonry and mafia connections, behind a Pope who “coincidentally” was the first ever Polish prelate:

The operation was focused on Poland, the most populous of the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe and the birthplace of John Paul II. Both the Pope and the President were convinced that Poland could be broken out of the Soviet orbit if the Vatican and the U.S. committed their resources to destabilizing the Polish government and keeping the outlawed Solidarity movement alive after the declaration of martial law in 1981.

Until Solidarity’s legal status was restored in 1989 it flourished underground, supplied, nurtured and advised largely by the network established under the auspices of Reagan and John Paul II. Tons of equipment—fax machines (the first in Poland), printing presses, transmitters, telephones, shortwave radios, video cameras, photocopiers, telex machines, computers, word processors —were smuggled into Poland via channels established by priests and American agents and representatives of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (afl-cio) and European labor movements. Money for the banned union came from CIA funds, the National Endowment for Democracy, secret accounts in the Vatican and Western trade unions.

Lech Walesa and other leaders of Solidarity received strategic advice—often conveyed by priests or American and European labor experts working undercover in Poland—that reflected the thinking of the Vatican and the Reagan Administration. As the effectiveness of the resistance grew, the stream of information to the West about the internal decisions of the Polish government and the contents of Warsaw’s communications with Moscow became a flood. The details came not only from priests but also from spies within the Polish government. During the first half of 1982, - a five-part strategy emerged that was aimed at bringing about the collapse of the Soviet economy, fraying the ties that bound the USSR to its client states in the Warsaw Pact and forcing reform inside the Soviet empire. Elements of that strategy included:

• The U.S. defense buildup already under way, aimed at making it too costly for the Soviets to compete militarily with the U.S. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative—Star Wars— became a centerpiece of the strategy.

• Covert operations aimed at encouraging reform movements in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

• Financial aid to Warsaw Pact nations calibrated to their willingness to protect human rights and undertake political and free-market reforms.

• Economic isolation of the Soviet Union and the withholding of Western and Japanese technology from Moscow. The Administration focused on denying the U.S.S.R. what it had hoped would be its principal source of hard currency in the 21st century: profits from a transcontinental pipeline to supply natural gas to Western Europe. The 5,800-km long pipeline, stretching from Siberia to France opened on time on Jan 1 1984, but on a far smaller scale than the Soviets had hoped.

• Increased use of Radio Liberty, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe to transmit the U.S. Administration’s messages to the peoples of Eastern Europe.[....]

Less than three weeks before his meeting with the Pope in 1982, the President signed a secret national-security-decision directive (NSDD 32) that authorized a range of economic, diplomatic and covert measures to “neutralize efforts of the U.S.S.R.” to maintain its hold on Eastern Europe. In practical terms, the most important covert operations undertaken were those inside Poland. The primary purposes of NSDD 32 were to destabilize the Polish government through covert operations involving propaganda and organizational aid to Solidarity; the promotion of human rights, particularly those related to the right of worship and the Catholic Church; economic pressure; and diplomatic isolation of the communist regime. The document, citing the need to defend democratic reform efforts throughout the Soviet empire, also called for increasing propaganda and underground broadcasting operations in Eastern Europe, actions that Reagan’s aides and dissidents in Eastern Europe believe were particularly helpful in chipping away at the notion of Soviet invincibility.

As Republican Congressman Henry Hyde, a member of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee from 1985 to 1990, who was apprised of some of the Administration’s covert actions, observes. “In Poland we did all of the things, that are done in countries where you want to destabilize a communist government and strengthen resistance to that. We provided the supplies and technical assistance in terms of clandestine newspapers, broadcasting, propaganda, money, organizational help and advice. And working outward from Poland, the same kind of resistance was organized in the other communist countries of Europe.”

Among those who played a consulting role was Zbigniew Brzezinski, a native of Poland and President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser. “I got along very well with Casey,” recalls Brzezinski. “He was very flexible and very imaginative and not very bureaucratic; if something needed to be done, it was done. To sustain an underground effort takes a lot in terms of supplies, networks, etc, and this is why Solidarity wasn’t crushed.”

On military questions, American intelligence was better than the Vatican’s, but the church excelled in its evaluations of the political situation. And in understanding the mood of the people and communicating with the Solidarity leadership, the church was in an incomparable position. “Our information about Poland was very well founded because the bishops were in continual contact with the Holy See and Solidarnosc,” explains Cardinal Silvestrini, the Vatican’s deputy secretary of state at that time. “They informed us about prisoners, about the activities and needs of Solidarity groups and about the attitude and schisms in the government.” All this information was communicated to the President or Casey.

“If you study the situation of Solidarity, you see they acted very cleverly, without pressing too much at the crucial moments, because they had guidance from the church,” says one of the Pope’s closest aides. “Yes, there were times we restrained Solidarnosc. But Poland was a bomb that could explode—in the heart of communism, bordered by the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. Too much pressure, and the bomb would go off.”

[From press quote in EPSR No 639]

The sinister Catholic “restraining” of Solidarnosc mentioned here was nothing to do with “selling out” the mass movement as the RCP Trotskyists deliberately twist things in their new attempt to pretend the rank-and-file “solid working class” movement can be separated from leadership (both sides, the workers state itself, and then Walesa and his handlers.)

Instead it points to the subtlety and calculation of the imperialist agencies and their feudal religious collaborators, concerned not to push the Warsaw authorities too far beyond their revisionist class-collaborating limitations, and Stalinist illusions in peaceful coexistence, which while it had let Western provoked “mass movement” run for far too long, rather than nipping it in the bud with firm state action early on, might be pushed over the edge.

In fact that is what happened after 18 months when the early turmoil which the West did succeed in stirring up was eventually stopped by martial law, though unfortunately not with the clearest revolutionary explanation for the population (and for the international working class) explaining a Leninist understanding of the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat to assert its authority.

As the above bourgeois press accounts demonstrate, the skulduggery continued all the way to the liquidation of the East European socialist states and then the Soviet Union itself as the revisionist complacency/defeatism capitulated to abandoning the dictatorship under the treacherous Mikhail Gorbachev.

And Poland has been nothing but the sickest of warmongering capitalist entities ever since, laced with primitive reactionary repression, bolstered by vast sums from the European Union’s “Development Funds” to prop up its re-established capitalism (and by huge amounts of repatriated earnings from migrant working accepted by the UK etc without the vicious racism directed at others) and a now leading force in pushing the European NATO war in Ukraine, with non-stop lies and provocations (though ironically tempered by the chauvinism and hatreds that every bourgeoisie cannot help stir up, with poisonous hostility to the defeated Ukrainians now surfacing because of atrocities and massacres carried out by the WW2 Ukrainian Nazi collaborators against Polish occupiers).

This revival of the great Solidarnosc fraud now by the RCPers is nothing but deliberately foul misguidance for the growing anti-capitalist sentiment everywhere, the role always played by the Trots.

The Spartacists are using the same overall “political revolution” garbage to try and undermine the Chinese workers state and its growing prestige, now having a major effect on Western consciousness, in the global south so-called and even into the “metropolitan” working class and petty bourgeoisie.

As will be examined in a later issue, they are claiming this is all done in order to “preserve socialism”.

Meanwhile they get round the obvious problem posed by the Solidarnosc racket, and its eventual central importance in pushing the whole Soviet camp into liquidation, which demonstrated for all time that such an overthrow was not, and could not be, other than counter-revolution, by pretending that they saw through it as a Western stunt from the beginning.

It is a total lie as the EPSR has repeatedly pointed out:

Monstrously, the Sparts go for the Goebbels Big Lie technique. They are most vulnerable over the semi-fascist Solidarnosc counter-revolution in Poland which the Sparts supported for a year before realising what a reactionary nationalist CIA plot they had been attracted to.

So now the Sparts simply rewrite history (in the best Stalinist style) and baldly pretend that they never supported Solidarnosc and were for its defeat from the start!!

Poland was an acid test for the left. Today of course the reactionary policies of Solidarnosc are more than evident, and the fake-“left” goes around claiming that Walesa and Co “betrayed” its original ideals. But by the time of its founding conference in 1981, Solidarnosc had consolidated around a pro-capitalist programme, echoing the CIA call for “free trade unions” and free parliamentary elections, demanding that Poland join the IMF.

The SL called for “Stop Solidarnosc Counter-revolution!” In contradistinction, the fake lefts cheered on the Vatican’s, CIA’s and Thatcher’s favourite union. The SWP sought to deny the close ties between Solidarnosc and clerical reaction:

The whole deception here is based on the sly phrase “but by the time of its founding conference in 1981”.

The carefully unstated implication is that Solidarnosc dramatically changed its line from when it first appeared in August 1980 to its first conference 12 months later, – in spite of the Sparts using this very same accusation of naïveté against rival fake-‘lefts’ as a poor excuse.

There certainly was no change in the whole character and purpose of Solidarnosc at any time, – as any genuine revolutionaries with half a brain could tell from the first moment that Walesa hopped over the wall at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk to back up the strike over the dismissal of the rabid Catholic reactionary Valentynowycz from her crane-driving job for anti-communist agitation.

The Solidarnosc programme was already worked out by the CIA and the Vatican well in advance of Walesa’s well-publicised launching of the ‘trade-union’ stunt in August 1980.

The rest of the ‘left’ is charged with excuse-making that they continued backing Solidarnosc to its fascist-nationalist end only because Walesa had ‘betrayed’ the original rank-and-file Solidarnosc ideals that the ‘left’ had so believed in.

But who is really using this excuse most of all - but keeping quiet about it? The Sparts:

Consider their record. They began by welcoming the counter-revolutionary Solidarity movement in Poland (‘Polish Workers Move’ 5/9/80).

As late as May 1981, 9 months after the Workers Party [*Now the EPSR] had first (and repeatedly) fully exposed the counter-revolutionary essence of Solidarity, the Sparts were still urging workers to join in Reagan’s worldwide anti-communist claque to “bitterly protest a Russian military intervention” in Poland.

Only in October 1981, after 5 months’ licking their wounds after the Workers Party’s denunciation of them, did the Sparts put up the pretence of a begrudging support for the USSR to rout Solidarity’s “counter-revolution” (at last admitted, 15 months late).

But NOT ONE WORD do they say about this dramatic switch in their line, no mention of the fact that they have been forced to completely change their position.

And most of all no mention of the correct criticism made of their dangerous error by the Bulletin.

Lenin correctly said that the decisive test of the revolutionary party was how honestly it could face up to its own mistakes and learn from them.

In May 1981, the Sparts declare (SB 32):

“Genuine proletarian internationalists must bitterly protest a Russian military intervention which would represent a defeat for the cause of socialism.”

But less than 20 weeks later (SB 36), they declare:

“Solidarity’s counter-revolution must be stopped. If the Kremlin Stalinists, in their necessarily brutal stupid way intervene militarily to stop it, we will support this.”

But TOTAL SILENCE to their readers and supporters that the line has been changed.

The least the Sparts are is a bunch of DISHONEST FRAUDS.

But their political position is in fact FAR FAR WORSE.

For 15 months until October 1981, anti-communist Polish reaction, aided by at least $1,000 million from the CIA and the Vatican (see Bulletin 151 on the Vatican’s missing funds scandal), was being screeched on by an unprecedented propaganda campaign from Western political circles (all departments), press, and television to maintain the dual power that Solidarity had established, - with the Sparts either joining in the sneering at the Polish workers state or at best remaining neutral.

Suddenly they discover that this movement, whose suppression the Sparts were going to “bitterly protest”, is in fact a raging counter-revolution.

But NOT THE SLIGHTEST ATTEMPT TO ANALYSE how supposed ‘Marxist revolutionaries’ could have been on the brink of such a fatal mistake of joining in the international bourgeois clamour (CIA orchestrated) to undermine the defence of the Polish workers state.

WORSE STILL, the Sparts totally ignore the correct revolutionary Marxist voices raised in the West against this counter-revolutionary conspiracy, thereby showing an utter contempt for the real interests of the working class and a completely doomed REACTIONARY preoccupation with their own subjective interests.

But much worse than that, the Sparts smugly JUSTIFY their own reactionary analysis, implying that real life was at fault in not conforming to the Sparts bankrupt prejudices, and not vice versa. For at the bottom of their amazingly thick-skinned statement completely changing their international line without a word of explanation, the Sparts guiltily sneak in a little self-consoling paragraph excusing their earlierwrong position by saying:

“As Trotskyists we orientated towards the potential for development of a left opposition from among those Solidarity and Communist Party militants who wanted a genuine ‘socialist renewal’,”

an opposition which “would have” put forward a programme etc.

The only thing wrong with this explanation for supporting counter-revolution for 15 months is that there are no such ‘militants’, there is no such ‘programme’.

The whole thing is a complete figment of the Sparts’ imagination. (ILWP Bulletin [EPSR] No 651 02-06-92)

And so too is its latest fraudulent pretence to be looking out for the interests of the Chinese proletariat (and other nationalities) by calling for the overthrow of the “Beijing bureaucracy”.

To be continued. Don Hoskins

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