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No 1648 25th September 2024

Western-backed Zionist genocidal war extension to Lebanon, and British (Labour)-led pressure to spread Ukraine’s Nazi war deeper into Russia are hair-raising escalations tipping the world ever closer to the World War Three “solution” that is monopoly capitalism’s only hope of hanging on to its 800 year old power and supremacy as its system hits an inevitable brick wall of crisis and economic disaster (see Marx). No peace marches, diplomacy, ceasefire calls or hypocrisy about impossible two-state solutions will stop this armageddon plunge – nor can a stable “multi-polar world” be established. Capitalism is in its death throws but all the more deadly in its thrashing agony. But this horrific frenzy of inhuman butchery and vicious terror destruction also signals weakness and defeat of imperialism and its monstrous Zionist stoogery, unable to restore a stable “Israel” let alone total colonial domination and exploitation to sustain the sweet consumerist life in the privileged West. An entire oppressed world is now exploding into revolt everywhere. But crucial Leninist revolutionary science is still missing

Zionism’s sick and depraved “walkie-talkie” mass terror attacks and child-killing warcrime bombing on Lebanon (on top of crimes against humanity in Gaza and the West Bank), and near-Moseleyite Keir Starmer’s desperate Washington visit urging “long-range missile” use against Russia, both reveal the degenerate depths of imperialist desperation as intractable capitalist crisis relentlessly deepens.

These are ruling class moves of utter irresponsibility and grotesque hypocrisy, – both berserker-fascist belligerence that will tip an already war ravaged world into unprecedented hair-raising horrors and danger beyond anything yet seen in a frantic effort to keep the billionaire class on top.

Both are confirmation of the Marxist understanding of the capitalist world as one of permanent contradiction and endless economic crises, now reaching the greatest Catastrophic breakdown in history.

That is the cause and driving engine of the giant revolutionary turmoil erupting everywhere on the planet in all its confusing manifestations, but all adding to the problems facing the ruling class as its system hits the wall.

The whole globe is sliding ever closer to the precipice of all-out Third World War, potentially bigger and more widespread than WW1 and WW2 rolled into one and multiplied by ten.

It has been fomented and inflamed for over two decades starting with the blitzing of Serbia and through Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen and on into the Nato-coordinated nazi-Ukraine war against Russia, all justified by outrageous upside down nazi lies and fabrications declaring the victims to be the aggressors.

Both the explosively escalating Middle East destruction and the deliberately induced Ukraine war (provoked by the West under the lying hypocrisy of “defending plucky Ukraine” – a nest of fascist stoogery in reality) are calculated imperialist strategy to fool the masses and whip up hatred, chauvinism and war fever.

It will not stop – cannot stop – because war destruction of “surplus” capital is imperialism’s only answer to intractable crisis and the economic breakdown of its whole system unravelling for decades but especially from the 2000 dotcom crash and the global bank meltdown in 2009.

It is about tip over the edge of world shattering dollar collapse.

Only revolutionary class war to forever end capitalism itself and replace it with socialism can end this plunge into chaos and destruction.

That has long begun, stirring however confusedly, in the great waves of “jihadism”, “terrorism”, street rebellions and outbreaks of riots and revolt across the world, slowly brewing for over a century of anti-imperialism but erupting particularly in the last two decades as the long developing but inevitable crisis collapse of capitalism has reached rotten ripeness, tipping into a now unstoppable Slump and trade war disaster and bringing war, siege strangulation and blitzkrieg on country after country (Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Russia via Ukraine).

Explosive protest has been breaking out or brewing everywhere – in multiple forms from the 9/11 attacks and through the Arab Spring street revolts to currently in Kenya, New Caledonia, Haïti, Egypt, Peru, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Peru, Ecuador, across the Sahel, and Mozambique, or potentially so but suppressed by ever more fascist repression and open tearing up of “democracy” (even in “advanced” Europe as the little Napoleon Emmanuel Macron has done in France, ignoring the recent “left” electoral victory and imposing a draconian minority right wing for reactionary crackdown).

All this turmoil is coalescing more and more into coordinated anti-imperialist struggles, most obviously in the Middle East eruptions where once crude and despairing intifada suicide bombing has become the astonishingly sophisticated national liberation resistance of the Palestinians in Gaza, and the anti-imperialist anti-Zionists all around; massively organised Hezbollah in Lebanon, the battle-hardened Houthis in Yemen (after beating seven years of feudalist thug attacks by Western armed and backed Saudi Arabia), the Syrian and Iraq militancy, as well as giant Iran’s (possible) interventions.

The dogged resistance of this new phase of the 70 year long national liberation struggle has astoundingly now survived an entire year from its audacious outburst of October 7th last year (not the cause of the misnamed one-sided Gaza “war” as lyingly declared by Zionism/imperialism but a response to decades of previous non-stop fascist repression, blitzing, intimidation, torture and massacres, now piecemeal and now allout, over and over again).

And it continues despite the most brutal, barbaric and inhuman warcrime savagery and butchery thrown at it by the brutal Zionist occupation, using all the foulest criminal dirty tricks of colonialism in collective punishment, kidnap, torture and mass carnage of civilians, with the world’s most high tech and best armed military backed up by all the arms and intelligence resources of the colossal United States imperialist power and its degenerate “allies”, Britain at the forefront.

Even this survival is a staggering defeat for the Zionists’ genocidal “project” which has aimed from its inception (at least from the 1920s) to steal away the whole of Palestine from its indigenous people and build a Greater Israel in its stead, wiping out or ethnically cleansing them (euphemistically called “transferring”) to do so as initially approved by the United Nations “gifting” part of their land to the Jews in 1948.

For the minute it is the militancy of the religious ideology of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Syrians and Iran which has taken the lead.

But increasingly this world of anti-imperialist turmoil must necessarily find its way to the Leninist scientific understanding and clarity which is needed to make conscious the great world rebellion that will eventually topple this out-of-time tyrannical profit system.

That cannot happen without rebuilding the Marxist-Leninist leadership party to constantly study and argue for scientific revolutionary theory, developing in depth a profound philosophical understanding of the history and development of class society and its contradictions.

Through that the world’s masses can orientate and understand the reasons for the great collapse they are facing and what needs to be done about it, while constantly exposing and demolishing the endless brainwashing lies and confusions of the ruling class and its hangers on, and the evasions and misleading opportunism of the fake-“left”, Trot and Revisionist.

But already it is the failure of world imperialism to shut down this ever growing and ever spreading revolt which is driving it into a frenzy.

The counter-revolution is now more and more openly showing its viciousness and brutality, denouncing this great tide of spontaneous rebellion as “nothing but criminal terrorism” and increasingly turning to fascist censorship, state intimidation and violent repression to stop it, under the guise of a “war on terror”.

But that comes at huge cost for its control.

The ruling class is tearing off the mask of “democracy”, “free speech” and “international rules based order”, behind which the real face of capitalism’s dominance is usually hidden and which is the greatest weapon of class control ever devised, hiding the bourgeois dictatorship which really runs things.

Once seemingly unthinkable levels of torture, maiming and slaughter are being reached by imperialism’s frantic efforts to remain in charge of a world that its arrogant and tyrannical rule is no longer suited to (because increasingly civilising and technologically advancing humanity can no longer tolerate the humiliation, servitude and oppression of this endless brutal exploitation of the vast majority).

As the EPSR’s Leninist understanding has long warned, capitalism will do anything and go to any lengths of ruthless savagery to preserve its rule as demonstrated in Palestine.

But it will not stop in the Middle East but will draw in the whole world as these perceptive remarks show from a researcher in Gaza, cited by the excellent albeit bourgeois journalist Seymour Hersh:

She acknowledges the shock and horror of Hamas’s attack on Israel last October 7, but sees it in the context of decades of brutal Israeli suppression of life in Gaza.

She has come over the years to know the Palestinian people well and to admire what she calls “their willingness to adjust and accommodate. Let’s put it this way,” she said, “if you had to destroy one particular group of people—what can I tell you? The military campaign in Gaza has opened up a new terrain of violence against civilians. In the next war, whether in Lebanon or another part of the world, systematically targeting hospitals won’t be so shocking because we’ve seen the live raids of hospitals, four or five of them. And targeting journalists won’t be shocking. Multiple images of beheaded babies on a livestream won’t be shocking.

“People don’t understand that what the Israelis are getting away with in Gaza is setting the stage for wars to come—everywhere. And when international organizations fail us in Gaza and UN Security Council resolutions are ignored, they are going to be ignored by everyone going forward.

“People are not that stupid, and they are not going to forget. We knew what was coming in October, and we were screaming at the top of our lungs: stop it! Stop it now! And this is why people are so terrified and enraged. I’m terrified for what is to come, but do not misunderstand me. Why is what is to come going to be any worse than what has just come? This is the most televised genocide in history. We haven’t had a live stream of people as their homes are being bombed, mobilizing TikTok, Snapshot, Twitter, and Instagram—a very young population in Gaza who are well versed technologically, who speak English, and who are telling you in real time as things are happening and also using social media to raise money so they can survive.

“It’s incredible and that’s what sets it apart. The visual element of this war is a part of setting the normalization. It is also part of the difficulty Israel is having in denying that things are happening because we are able to see and we’re able to locate it and to prove it. They are not denying any more that they raided a hospital or that they bombed a school. They’re just saying that it is justified.

“Israel is not unique in this. What is unique is the visual evidence that we have even though we don’t have many international journalists doing their work independently on the ground. And yet it is still continuing, almost a year on. I think that is what’s different about it. And that’s part of the terror many of us are feeling.

“Gaza has collapsed the past and the future. What is the message that Israel is being given by the United States? It is: ‘You can escalate but keep it contained.’ And that is what they are doing. They have been escalating. In the beginning, when we saw a handful of children blown up and shredded into pieces, it was shocking. Now we are seeing it over and over again. When I was in Gaza—I’m not a medical doctor—but the things that were happening to people’s flesh, it was shocking. I thought I was the only one in the room who was shocked. But when I looked around, among doctors who do this daily, heroically, they were as disturbed and traumatized and one hundred times as exhausted and overworked as I was.

“So you don’t think Palestinians are human? Okay, it’s on you but it’s not going to stop there. And we’re already seeing that in the region. And we have a government in Washington that is absolutely incapable of putting any pressure on Israel and the next one will not, either. I don’t have much hope for the Democrats or the Republicans.

“We’re not documenting this only for ourselves now. We’re documenting it for the future. We’re going to look back and try to understand how in the fuck did it get to a point where the main demographics that are being killed and shredded are women and children? Whether it is children being hit by a single sniper rifle shot to the head, which shows intent, or children being flattened by bulldozers, or dying from infections, this is a genocidal intent.

“A woman giving birth in Gaza is in total hell. She has two or three hours to give birth, and the moment she does she is sent home. And being sent home means walking for hours with the new infant in your hands or sitting on a donkey cart, which is horrific—full of animals and it’s dirty. You and your child are going to be infected. Women are a target.

“Another thing I want to share with you is about men, because men are very much understudied in this iteration of the genocide. We have stories of men being humiliated, raped. People need to see the footage of men to see what Israel has been doing to men since October. Multiple doctors have told me of what they’re seeing as a pattern of young men in their twenties being shot by Israeli snipers in the groin area. It prevents their ability to have children.

“Is there some empirical evidence of this?” she asked rhetorically. “I doubt it. I mean, who has statistics?”

[] There was another issue that she found profoundly unsettling—the posts that some Israeli soldiers on leave overseas after a rotation in Gaza, many with dual citizenship, displayed graphically showing what she said were videos of their violations in Gaza. “These soldiers are openly posting and bragging” about their violations of military law “before returning to Gaza,” she told me. “I think we should be going after them.”

And just to underline the point another bourgeois press comment:

Would video evidence of a Palestinian being raped by Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman, a military prison that resembles a torture camp, make any difference? Nah. Judging by the US state department’s response, that’s no biggie. The US, we’ve been told, has asked Israel to investigate itself and we can trust them to do a great job of it.

How about reports from US doctors that Israeli snipers are shooting Palestinian children in the head while they play in the street? This isn’t something that highly trained snipers can accidentally do – it is seemingly deliberate. But again: not a big deal. These reports aren’t serious enough for the Biden administration to stop giving Israel carte blanche to destroy Gaza and annex the West Bank.

How about the videos on social media of Palestinian children with their heads blown to bits by US-made weapons? Or the recent video of a little girl killed by shrapnel while rollerblading in northern Gaza, still wearing her pink rollerblades when pronounced dead? The videos of Israeli soldiers burning copies of the Qur’an and desecrating mosques? Again: nothing here so disturbing that it stops the members of the Biden administration from sleeping at night.

I could go on, but what’s the point? I’ve stopped playing What Would It Take? because the answer is excruciatingly clear: absolutely nothing will prompt the Biden administration to rein Israel in. (And any illusions that Kamala Harris might be any better than Joe Biden on this issue have been shattered by now.) You can see that by the furious response from the US after the UK decided to suspend a tiny portion of arms sales to Israel because of a “clear risk” they could be used in violation of international humanitarian law. This is where we are now: the Biden administration has made it clear that Israel will face no accountability whatsoever. In this regard the Democrats are now way to the right of Ronald Reagan, who restricted military assistance to Israel when appropriate.

Israel enjoys so much impunity that its soldiers regularly share disturbing video content of what look a hell of a lot like war crimes on social media, knowing they will face zero repercussions. Last week MSNBC host Chris Hayes mused on Twitter/X about why Israel allows its soldiers to post this content – which includes numerous videos in which IDF soldiers dress up in the lingerie of displaced Palestinian women.

“To me the thing I continue to not understand, truly deeply, is why the IDF hasn’t cracked down on the absolutely insane sh*t posting of its soldiers, when it is very obviously a PR disaster,” Hayes wrote. “Do they not care? Has command discipline just totally broken down?”

Hayes is one of the best journalists on US cable news and seems like a very decent person. So it isn’t a personal attack when I say … seriously? You’re a journalist and you’re seriously asking this question? Let me spell it out: the reason the IDF doesn’t care about these videos is because they know that they very obviously aren’t a PR disaster. For them to be a PR disaster the likes of the New York Times and MSNBC would have to properly cover them. And they’re far too busy covering pro-Palestinian protesters and smearing them as violent agents of Iran to do that. The reason these videos aren’t PR disasters is because they’ve been very sparingly covered by the western media.

You know what else should be far more of a PR disaster than it is? The fact that two Israelis who run an English-language podcast called Two Nice Jewish Boys recently put out an episode in which they fantasize about genocide. I’m not exaggerating here. I’d urge you to go and listen to it yourself but it seems that the video has been made private after backlash online. So, a few of the highlights from hosts Naor Meningher and Eytan Weinstein:

“If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow. I would press it in a second.”

“No one actually gives a shit [about the genocide in Gaza]. Zero people in Israel … Do you care if this baby in Gaza gets polio? They’ll be like, ‘I don’t’ [indistinguishable]. There will be like 20 people who care … Fuck them.”

“You can’t help but think that it’s nice to know that you are dancing in a concert while hundreds of thousands of Gazans are homeless … It makes it even better … more enjoyable concert … ”

Now it would be unfair to say that these guys represent everyone in Israel, so I’m not going to say that. They said it themselves. In the podcast they note that: “This is how Israelis feel … People enjoy knowing that [Palestinians] are suffering.”

In an attempt to curb online criticism of the podcast, pro-Israel voices have dismissed Meningher and Weinstein as a couple of losers nobody has ever heard of. But that’s not entirely true. Meningher’s website boasts that he “worked with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on both his 2019 campaigns, as well as on his 2020, 2021 and 2022 campaigns, doing chatbots, digital data projects and viral video creation. I was also responsible of managing all the digital channels of the Prime Minister.”

The podcast is also apparently prominent enough to have had some famous guests including Avi Issacharoff, co-creator of the Netflix series Fauda, and Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the US.

Perhaps more importantly, what Meningher and Weinstein say on their podcast is not materially different from what the politicians in Israel’s far-right government are saying themselves. There is a database containing hundreds of statements from state leaders, politicians, and public figures salivating about genocidal destruction. .. “They are embodied in state policy.”

And the Biden administration has made it very clear that it is embodied in state policy that the US will do whatever it takes to allow these utterances to become reality.

This piece and Hersh’s witness still only see a tenth of the real disaster facing mankind, as is made clear by the declaration that she is

all for mobilizing students at universities worldwide to put political pressure on the United States and other nations in Western Europe to stop supplying Israel with bombs and other weapons.

By all means let the world’s disgust and dismay be expressed but no “pressure” or social/pacifist marches are going to change anything – the shifting and intensifying crisis is on a path to total armageddon more universal and world shattering than either of the twentieth century Slump and World War eruptions.

Any “restraint” pressured from the bourgeois order is nothing but ruling class ducking and diving to keep the masses fooled and quiescent, still tapping the 100-year-long brainwashed saturation of the working class, and petty bourgeoisie, in the “democracy” fraud and away from grasping just where this is going – the greatest disintegration and revolutionary explosion in all mankind’s constantly developing and advancing history.

Marxist-Leninist understanding explains why, very straightforwardly, albeit full of infinite dialectical complexity (ignored by the shallow “occupy now” or “revolution now” activist philistinism of the fake-“left” and its decades of ridicule for and contemptuous dismissal of “old-hat” “Marxist doom-mongering” or the need for deeply studied and fought for theory).

And what it says is that the class-based profit driven system can only ever plunge into Catastrophic economic collapse, (however long it sustains a credit-fuelled inflationary boom) because it is riddled with unresolvable and intractable contradictions which will always force it into a great crisis of overproduction (see box) exactly as first explained by the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx’s titanic three volumes and notes of Capital, and elaborated and advanced for the imperialist era by Lenin and the Bolshevik party in multiple volumes of revolutionary economic and political analysis).

The crisis erupting as cutthroat trade war, and international hatred and hostility, reflects a barely comprehensible impasse and paralysis in human society’s historical development as relentless monopolisation reaches astounding levels of concentrated wealth and power on one side (billionaires and the middle class who service them) and incredible poverty and agony for the huge majority.

The colossal contradiction cannot be overcome within existing class society boundaries (as fake-“left” reformism and revisionism still advocates even if tacking on a “revolution” phrase or two “ultimately”).

Only when the whole framework of the capitalist system itself is overturned in a necessarily colossal upheaval and destruction of its rigid class structure, to be replaced by a completely new socialist planned way of doing things under the very firm control of the working class,) will humanity be able to move forwards again (steadily heading to a classless and rational society).

Until then the insane ruling class “logic” of a world cultural and economic system built on the pursuit of profit at the expense of all else is going to relentlessly drag humanity into the greatest Slump, war and ecological destruction Catastrophe of all time, guided by a bourgeoisie that is not just blind to the glaring and obvious disaster unfolding but wilfully so, dismissing even its own one-sided mechanical science (which carried it by revolution out of the superstitious feudal epoch) now screaming out warnings and alarms in all directions on all subjects from the environment to nuclear war.

The world has to wake up to the reality that this drive into an armageddon of military, economic and ecological devastation is not going to stop.

There will be no long-term “ceasefires”, no new world balance between “multipolar” powers, no “stability” and certainly no fairness, justice and “democratic freedom” while the insanity of capitalist profit hunting dominates and distorts all human and planetary existence, pushing it to the edge of total extinction.

And this horrifying spiral into a vortex of destruction, barbarity and all-out fascist terror is necessarily coming for everyone, exactly as the Gaza witness says.

In the last great Depression, the ruling class built up the German-Japanese axis to lead its belligerence, (tapping the resentments of their “underdog” status in the imperial order) but this time the topdog power itself is heading down the fascist path – Iran, Afghanistan, Libya etc – or using its proxies and rottweiler stooges like the Saudi Arabians in Yemen, Kiev Nazis against Russia and especially the Zionists):

In the 1930s, German imperialism was deliberately set up to lead the way back to war as the world economy continued to stutter because of uncompleted inter-imperialist business rivalry and market-domination conflict for raw materials, etc.

Using the ‘excuse’ of powers like Germany, Japan, and Italy, – still searching for their colonial place in the sun to rival what Britain and France had already carved out, plus some added venom against an “international Jewish-Bolshevik terrorist conspiracy”, etc, the overproduction Great Depression could be militarily battered until sufficient destruction had made capitalism’s unparalleled rapid-expansion capacities a prized phenomenon once again.

Those ‘excuses’ would not go down well today, and so US-led imperialist propaganda is obliged to make an unconvincing fuss about a global “war on terror” and about non-existent “axes of evil” who are supposedly “threatening the world with weapons of mass destruction”, etc.

American imperialism’s “pre-emptive strike doctrine” amounts to a declaration of war against the whole world, plus a declaration that the United Nations is finished.

Announcing that no state will ever be allowed to rival the USA in military might, and that any which approach that level of economic and technological power will be attacked, is WORSE than the Hitler doctrine.

And whereas the Nazis merely abandoned the League of Nations in the late 1930s in rejecting its strictures against aggression, these US imperialists around Bush are actually threatening to put the UN under house arrest to stop it inspecting Iraq’s weaponry on terms which Washington consider not belligerent enough.

All round, the US position amounts to the most arrogant statement of bullying imperialist hypocrisy and fascist militarism in all history (EPSR No1153 24-09-02).

The Zionists are not “getting away” with anything as petty bourgeois liberals complain – they are being deliberately pushed, armed and encouraged by the topdog American imperialist power (and its sidekick powers, especially Britain) to fulfil the role imperialism always intended from the moment it allowed this out-of-time cuckoo to insert itself into the Middle East, stealing the land and nationhood of another people in an act of colonialist barbarity and genocidal occupation on a par with the great savageries of the early feudal and capitalist colonial empires, wiping out entire peoples across the world from the Incas, Aztecs, multiple Native American nations, and Australian aborigines to the Arabs and the Zulus and others across Africa.

In one sense imperialism does not care about the Zionists’ fanatical aims, which has its own reactionary agenda founded in the risible claims of a 3000 year-old mythology about an omniscient “god” with no more validity than Greek or Roman Olympus or Viking Valhalla fantasies, now being used to bolster a very modern landtheft occupation of another people’s country, to which there is sound and clear historical evidence they have inhabited for over 1500 if not 2000 years (far longer than the modern British or other Europeans have inhabited their territories as nations).

But leaving aside the fact that to some extent imperialism does also share the Zionists’ specific interests, if only because the modern Jewish bourgeois freemasonry is thoroughly intertwined with the rest of monopoly finance imperialism’s freemasonries and their world exploitation, and thereby influences and helps shape its policies (a different matter altogether from saying it “runs” them as crude anti-semitism has done), the “Israeli state” serves a vital general purpose for all imperialist domination and power.

That is to be forever a giant dagger into the heart of the Middle East, to smash down and smite any glimmer of revolt by the 300 million strong Arab nation and the other peoples of the region, from Turkey, the Horn of Africa, and Persia as well as keeping a tight grip on one of the most vital trading and military nexuses on the planet, to block and control all rival interests in the great trade war/anti-imperialist challenges to its world hegemony (and notably the not faraway Soviet Union pre-1991 and its lingering influences even now despite Putin).

That is a strategic purpose going far beyond the obvious “plundering” of oil which much of the “left” portentously still insists is the explanatory factor for the Middle East turmoil.

It was a wrong emphasis before and is an argument thoroughly undermined in the last period by America’s use of new oil discoveries as well as fracking and oil-shale processing which now put US imperialism (and sidekick Canada) at the top of the list of world oil producers and gas exporters. As predicted by the EPSR it would change nothing essential about the great Catastrophe:

Oil supplies are undoubtedly a key specific immediate issue materially driving the US monopoly bourgeoisie towards its warmongering neo-colonial frenzy; but oil as such is purely incidental. And any other materially-driving greed would be purely incidental too.

If magic discoveries from seawater could tomorrow solve ALL American imperialism’s needs, would the global imperialist system still be facing total political-economic crisis??? Of course it would. (EPSR No1146 30-07-02).

Nothing has changed except the crisis and war has massively intensified.

But blitzing Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and Palestine etc has not gone well in cowing the world to reestablish a New American Century of uncontested dominance.

Far from staying on top, Zionism, imperialism and rest of the West will achieve exactly the opposite with these Nazi horrors and barbarities, stirring ever greater hatred and hostility to its tyrannical barbarism (than already seething after already 20 years of war), while simultaneously exposing decades of craven “left” ceasefire and “No to war” useless pacifism, reformism and revisionist class collaboration which has helped leave its rule intact long past its “sell-by” date.

These latest frenzied moves are symptoms of the desperate weakness of the imperialist order, increasingly forced into ever grosser contortions to continue pretending its vaunted “rules based order” and “democratic freedom” is anything but the most cynical humbug and hoodwinking hypocrisy. That is already clear from the Zionists, on a path of fascist brutality even more gleefully demented now than imposed for the last seventy years in massacre after massacre, blitzing, bombing and non-stop torture and atrocities that have appalled the world (like the Shabra and Shatila refugee camp butchery in 1982 to the repeated onslaughts on Gaza and the West Bank even since).

It is leaving even some of its most ardent supporters in the “liberal” Israeli wing and the Jewish diaspora dismayed, stunned or exposed for their reactionary smugness including a slew of “liberal” Zionist journalists such as Jonathan Freedland, Hadley Freeman, and former Stalinist David Aaronovitch, along with another arch-reactionary liberal, comedian/author David Baddiel.

All are caught out by the gross outright lie culture just exposed at the Jewish Chronicle (they contribute to), drum banger for and echo of the Zionist claimed “right” of Israel to genocidally starve, besiege and blitz Gaza and blow tens of thousands of men, women and especially children into pieces, killing a minimum count of 42,000 so far and more likely heading for 200,000.

They are bothered not by the past year of non-stop pro-blitzing Zionist support so much as the fact they are now trapped by a total scandal (itself a reflection of crisis and setbacks and splits in the Zionist ruling class):

The UK-based Jewish Chronicle published an exclusive report this month citing fake intelligence sources as part of a “pro-Bibi influence campaign,” Israel’s +972 Magazine reported on 11 September.

The Jewish Chronicle report aimed to garner support for Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s plan to maintain an Israeli troop presence along the Gaza–Egypt border.

During his press conference on 4 September, Netanyahu attempted to convince reporters of the necessity of keeping troops along the vital Philadelphi corridor on Gaza’s border with Egypt.

Netanyahu warned during the conference that if the army does not remain stationed along the corridor, Hamas could “easily smuggle hostages out … to the Sinai desert” and then from there to “Iran or … Yemen.”

He added that then they would be “gone forever.”

The Jewish Chronicle released its report the following day, citing “intelligence sources” as saying that Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, intends to smuggle captives to Iran. The report claimed Sinwar himself would attempt to flee to Iran with the prisoners.

“This was reportedly revealed during the interrogation of a captured senior Hamas official, as well as by information obtained from documents seized on Thursday, August 29, the day the six bodies of the murdered hostages were retrieved,” the report claimed.

“To Sinwar, the Philadelphi corridor has turned out to be the only option available to fulfill his plan,” it went on to say.

The story attracted significant attention, with several Israeli media outlets picking it up. Netanyahu’s son even shared the story via social media.

When meeting with the families of Israeli captives, Netanyahu’s wife Sara said: “There is no choice with the Philadelphi Corridor – there are reports that [Hamas] will flee to Iran [with the hostages].”

According to +972, “the story is totally made up.” Hebrew news outlet Channel 12 refuted the report one day after the story was released by the Jewish Chronicle.

Channel 12 said “all of the relevant sources in the security establishment” were completely unaware of the alleged intelligence.

Ynet journalist Ronen Bergman cited several sources from the Israeli intelligence community and the army’s missing persons division as saying that the report is a “wild fabrication,” calling it “100 percent lies” and saying the documents cited in the article do not exist.

Another report this month also cited fake Israeli intelligence, +972 revealed.

German newspaper Bild reported on 6 September about the alleged content of a secret document found in Gaza on what was described as Sinwar’s laptop. It claimed that the document contained Hamas’ strategy for dealing with captives, which it also alleged was approved by Sinwar himself.

Bild said the document proves how Hamas is “manipulating the international community, [psychologically] torturing the hostage families, and seeking to rearm.” The report also said the document proves Hamas is not prioritizing a ceasefire agreement.

Bergman said that the army suspects that whoever is responsible aims to sway public opinion in favor of Netanyahu and his position, which Israeli officials and family members of captives agree is obstructing an exchange deal.

The Zionist “liberals” are exposed not just by the single incident but the entire revealed ethos of the paper which uncritically allowed itself to reproduce reports from an essentially bogus correspondent.

But these petty bourgeois reactionaries, like many others, could equally be caught out by their participation in the mainstream media too, just as bent and twisted in its censorship or downplaying of the atrocities and horrors underway in Gaza (where daily blitzing of schools, hospitals and homes continues killing and maiming dozens daily), of the fascist settler rampaging on the West Bank (illegally occupied even by the completely bent standards of the UN “world community”) and the non-stop bombing and missile raids on Syria, Iraq and Yemen (among others).

Far beyond that, the whole world “justice” and “international rule of law” pretence is shown up for the lying and fraudulent racket it is, as pathetic and plaintive protests emerge from the tame United Nations bureaucracy, as even more useless unenforceable pronouncements are made by the powerless “international courts” system and by the massive General Council votes, while Western politicians mouth platitudes more cynical than Adolf Hitler’s speeches claiming to be “pursuing peace”.

As even the dullest minds can work out, if American imperialism wants a ceasefire as its “diplomats” declare, it has only to stop supplying the bombs, planes, guns and shells without which the Zionists would have to stop tomorrow.

The compliant bourgeois media is just as sick in its repetition of all the Kiev/MI6/CIA black-is-white lies, total news blackouts and fabrications about the Ukraine war (including endless double- and even treble-bluff “disinformation” accusations and lies against Russia, China and others alleging them to be the source of “misleading propaganda”).

Such butter-would-not-melt assertions are gobsmacking – as if the West has never done any such thing nor would dream of it (even while maintaining far tighter censorship – completely blocking RT and other publications and TV for example currently).

It has far bigger propaganda units and deliberate incitement departments itself with a record of imperialist skulduggery and lies going back for over a century – witness the recent revelations of the Singapore-based black-propaganda run by British intelligence in the runup to the overthrow of Indonesia’s Sukarno national movement in 1965 inciting much of the butchery of up to two million communists, nationalists and fellow travellers – and non-stop ever since.

Or witness the censorship and lies which were poured out against the Irish national liberation struggle, its representatives, even those who won elections, ludicrously banned from making statements in their own voices.

And censorship is only part of the story; numerous journalists were deliberately killed during the Gulf War and subsequently, and currently over one hundred have been assassinated in Gaza.

The TV channel al-Jazeera has been blocked in Zionland and now this month expelled even from the occupied West Bank (notionally) under Palestinian control.

All coverage is blocked from the Russian-speaking side of the Ukraine war which is currently the bourgeoisie’s second warmongering front using the carefully built-up image of Moscow’s Vladimir Putin as its demon bogeyman after years of lurid unproven stories about “poison” etc, a relentless campaign of hyping up tiny numbers of pro-Western “dissidents” like the racist fascist-minded Alexander Navalny, allegedly, without any evidence, “killed by Putin” (but much more likely by a Western plot), and the elaborately provoked “invasion” by Russia supposedly oppressing a hapless little victim and in the most laughably hysterical accounts, preparing to “sweep across” Europe etc etc.

This demented story of a new invasion makes no sense at all, and turns on its head the reality of years of Nato buildups in Europe on the very borders of Russia (which obviously would not be tolerated for an instant were it a similar buildup of Russian troops on the US borders in, say, Mexico).

And while Putin’s own ridiculous Greater Russian nationalism, pious Orthodox religiosity, gangster-oligarch pandering and hostility to communism make it vital to eschew any “support” for Moscow as such, (as a few of the fake-“left” declare) this Western provocation can call for only one response from any Marxist understanding; that the warmongering of the West be defeated.

For the minute imperialism has managed to stampede much of Western public opinion behind the war (aided by Trot and revisionist treachery and social-pacifism).

Somehow even many of those petty bourgeoisie who see and oppose the hypocrisies of the Middle East, and the lies and cynicism of imposed slump “austerity” are induced to swallow the absurd idea that the same Boris Johnsons, Sunaks, and Wallaces as well as slimy Labourites like Starmer and David Lammy, twisted reactionaries like Macron in France, or the open fascist Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and endless plummy-voiced generals and MI6 gestapo bosses wheeled-out on the BBC imperialist propaganda machine daily, are nevertheless “deeply concerned” about “freedom” and “democracy” when it comes to Eastern Europe, – and therefore induced to accept spending billions on arms while the pensioners go cold and families suffer foodbank hunger and mould ridden housing (including those rented out by numerous on-the-make Labour MP landlords).

Only decades of revisionist mind-rot could have left minds so addled and incapable of grasping a world picture that they would swallow all these tear jerking stories of “victimhood” for the Ukrainian nationalists and nonsense propaganda about the casualties of the war, repeating unchallenged every lying, unevidenced, unconfirmed and unexamined story poured out from the Kievites’ propaganda division about “civilian targeting” (which is obviously not the case even by the wildly exaggerated death toll numbers, and the obvious glaring contrast with an actual genocide unfolding in Gaza) to push Western support.

But the reality of this war, pursued by a bunch of swastika-toting thugs in Kiev led by the little green croaking fascist toad Volodimir Zelensky, installed by a long planned CIA/MI6 coup in the 2014 Maidan violence, is that it was a deliberate creation of the West instigated by the West precisely to keep world war going even as Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Iraq have faltered, failed and “blown back” into even more hatred for the West.

Ukraine’s function is firstly to be a giant distraction from the total bankruptcy of the Western crisis, and a way to keep the momentum going in the build up for the WW3 “solution”, with Russia a scapegoated finger-pointing blame target on which to pin all the economic breakdowns, inflation, austerity and repression which are unfolding (all in train pre-2014, long before anyone in the West had much thought about Ukraine at all).

But it is also part of the ever more cutthroat inter-imperialist trade-war driven conflict which is becoming increasingly desperate.

While Russia is obviously a war target not least because the most reactionary wing of imperialism cannot tolerate even the residue of the Soviet Union traditions which linger on in fond working class cultural and historical memory, despite three decades of capitalist restoration and oligarch gangsterism (and perhaps because of that too) an even more significant aspect is the Empire’s hostility to the German-led European Union which has been relentlessly outcompeting the US since at least the 1970s.

Demonstrating Anglo-Saxon decline currently is the collapse of once world-leading Boeing, not just a pillar of American industrial prestige but a symbol of the “Come fly with me” American good life consumer culture, reduced over decades to total outsold disaster by Europe’s Airbus, with accidents, crashes and mistakes proliferating and now facing a gigantic strike in Seattle and other plants with 20,000 technical workers out because of (relative) pay reduction from austerity.

Even more symbolically, its latest humiliation is in the space race, as the space agency Nasa was forced to leave two astronauts on the (Russian built) space station because Boeing’s new rocket system failed.

So the underlying war agenda is as much about sabotaging Germany as it is to attack Russia, a point made very clear by the blowing up of the NordStream pipelines. Everyone knows that America did it (as Seymour Hersh revealed - see EPSR No 1624) despite recently revived press stories in the Wall Street Journal re-asserting the nonsense that it was a group of semi-professional Ukrainian divers, “patriots” working off a yacht.

The recent salvage rescues of the British luxury yacht sunk off Sicily make a mockery that diversionary story: with full surface support, skilled divers had only five minutes working time for each search they made at 50m depths. The Baltic over the gas pipelines is 80m deep and the task of attaching complex explosives at least as demanding.

Indirectly, just as telling is the damage done to German industry and its economy, sustained for decades by the cheap gas received from Russia. Volkswagen, just as symbolic as Boeing, was already suffering after the 2009 crisis:

‘Earthquake at Volkswagen” ran the stark headline in the Wolfsburger Nachrichten, the newspaper serving the north German city that is synonymous with the carmaker.

The news that the crisis-stricken company was weighing up the closure of factories in Germany for the first time in its history, and prematurely dissolving its 30-year-old employment protection agreement as part of an attempt to save around €10bn (£8.4bn), had barely filtered through to the workers emerging from Gate 17 at VW’s main factory in Wolfsburg on Monday, where a lone reporter had been dispatched to capture reaction at shift’s end.

But they did not express surprise. “The mood has been in the doldrums for some time,” one said. Another spoke of an unusually “high rate of sickness” among workers, who were stressed by the sense of doom looming over the company – and by the mood of uncertainty, evident most recently in cancelled shift work. “We surely knew something was cooking,” said another.

Two days later, company executives and an estimated 15,000 workers – 10,000 who had packed into a large hall at the Wolfsburg plant, the rest, who couldn’t squeeze in, watching on screens outside – faced each other in a tense showdown.

Workers unleashed their collective anger, unfurling banners and chanting protest slogans, among them: “We’re Volkswagen, you are not.” For about 20 minutes, according to eyewitnesses (media were excluded from the hall), the din from the chants and whistles prevented the bosses from speaking. Instead, they stayed behind a long table, stony-faced, looking a little embarrassed. Dressed in open-necked white shirts and dark jackets, their summer tans appeared to have faded in the bright lights and the frosty atmosphere.

“We are short of around 500,000 car sales a year,” VW’s financial chief, Arno Antlitz, reportedly told the hall. That, he said, was the equivalent of production from two factories. “It’s not to do with our product or poor performance. The market is simply not there any more.” He gave the company “one or two years” to turn the situation around. Experts estimate that VW has about 20,000 employees too many.

Oliver Blume, chief executive of Volkswagen Group, might have been a father addressing his family at the dinner table as he told the employees in no uncertain terms that the company had been living beyond its means – drawing an estimated annual €1.5bn from its cashflow for around 15 years – and that things would have to change. He compared the situation to a “family kitty” which “by month’s end is empty”.

Sometimes there is a kindly relative who will step in to pay for extras, such as a new television, he said, before bluntly pointing out that China had in effect been playing that role for years, with sales in the country bankrolling the company.

Blume – a local boy who fully understands the extent to which VW underpins the economy, and by extension the identity, of the state of Lower Saxony – at one point appeared to let his mask slip, displaying his emotions and talking of his wish to “protect the VW family”.

In a sign of the passion which is likely to shape the battle that is to follow, Daniela Cavallo, head of the works council representing the company’s 120,000 employees in Germany, retorted: “We are the VW family, and a family leaves no one behind.” She has promised “bitter resistance” to the company’s austerity mandate, insisting: “We will not tolerate being liquidated.” Strikes – a rare occurrence in the company’s history – cannot be ruled out.

What is at stake for the 87-year-old company – founded under the direction of the Nazi government and propelled by the dream of producing a budget “people’s car” or “Volkswagen” – is not just Wolfsburg, or Lower Saxony, or the six other locations across Germany, from Emden to Zwickau, where VW is deeply established. “A crisis at VW … is a crisis for Germany,” Cavallo said.

The last big setback VW faced – the so-called dieselgate scandal in 2015-16, when the manufacturer was found to have falsified emissions tests that made its vehicles appear more climate-friendly than they were – cost it an estimated €30bn in compensation payments worldwide, as well as taking an untold toll on its reputation as a symbol of German technical prowess and reliability.

[]“The car industry remains the most important sector in Germany and in this branch, VW is the alpha male. When the giant wobbles, then everything wobbles,” Carsten Brzeski, head economist at the Dutch global financial institution ING, told German media. He pointed out that Volkswagen was more important to Europe’s economic powerhouse “than all the foreign trade with Greece”.

Yet the reality is that in Europe 2.5m fewer cars are being produced now than five years ago. The market for electric cars slumped by 69% in August compared with a year earlier, believed to be as a result of waning consumer confidence, and every fifth electric vehicle sold in Europe is produced in China. An affordable entry-level VW electric car, which is in the pipeline and due to go on sale next year, is being produced not in Germany but on the Iberian peninsula.

Despite backing the Nato war in Ukraine, for general imperialist reasons and to avoid direct conflict with the US, Berlin has dragged its feet on arming Kiev and even more so currently, declaring it will not extend arms funding next year.

And discontent with the Ukraine war has seen the Scholz Social-Democrat opportunists take a hammering in recent federal elections from both the rising neo-fascist Alternativ für Deutschland and the “left” Sahra Wagenknecht movement:

The relief felt by Germany’s Social Democrats at having narrowly won a regional election against the far right was tempered on Monday when it became clear they would need the support of hard-left Russophiles in order to form a government.

Olaf Scholz’s centre-left party pulled off an unexpected victory in Brandenburg on Sunday, receiving 31% of the vote after a mass tactical voting drive to exclude the far-right populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

While there was relief at the SPD’s headquarters in Berlin, there was no escaping the fact that Germany’s political landscape has been profoundly shaken by a rise in support for populist extremists of different political shades.

The AfD, touting proposals for mass deportations, achieved its best result in Brandenburg, a state the SPD has governed since reunification. The far-right party came second with 29% of the vote after a wave of youth support.

Three other parties with whom the SPD would usually consider a partnership performed miserably, with the Greens failing to get into parliament at all. The leftist-conservative Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which came in third with 13%, appears crucial to coalition talks.

The SPD now faces negotiations with a party that is demanding a cancellation of plans to station US long-range missiles in Germany and is calling for Berlin to push for peace talks with Moscow rather than supply Ukraine with weapons.

Like the AfD, the BSW is anti-Nato, Kremlin-friendly and anti-migration, skilled at tuning into, as well as stoking, voters’ fears over living costs, immigration and a sense that Scholz’s government is endangering the safety of its own citizens by sending weapons to Ukraine.

Analysts said the Brandenburg results reinforced the notion that extremist parties were increasingly able to set the agenda. The BSW is also the kingmaker in two other eastern states, Thuringia and Saxony, where recent elections resulted in strong showings for the AfD, with which mainstream parties refuse to govern.

In the event, however, three-quarters of SPD voters said they had been motivated by the desire to keep the AfD out of power, rather than a belief in the SPD’s ability to govern. Voter participation was at its highest level ever, at 73%.

The British ruling class, is even worse off, presiding over an economy which is one of the weakest, if not the most, in the imperialist pecking order and facing disaster in trade war, which is why the ossified Empire-nostalgic wing pushed to get out of any alliance with the European Union (and despised German competition) in its Brexit campaign and fully up the...er, into an alliance with American imperialism, the traditional home in crisis.

And as such it is even more desperate than any to keep the Ukraine war on the boil, even as the Nato organised Kiev-nazi war has become a total catastrophe, losing disastrously against the Russians at huge cost for the Ukrainians in money, land, and especially slaughtered soldiers by the tens of thousands.

As various Internet outlets have indicated all the signs suggest that the recent costly and utterly pointless Kursk campaign to “invade Russia” was British instigated and organised via its MI6 and military tie-ups with Kiev (since at least 2014), and made extensive use of British equipment and intelligence, if not also covert special forces troops.

But its vaunted “morale boost” has achieved nothing while seeing thousands of troops killed and injured (never reported in the Western gung-ho reports wildly celebrating the supposed “setback for Moscow”) and the acceleration of Russia’s advances in the east.

So an even more desperate reactionary British military/intelligence establishment has been pressing for the use of long-range missiles into Russia – via their MI6 mouthpiece Zelensky and via the craven Labourites who have eagerly embraced the reactionaries’ agenda to demonstrate their “loyalty” to the imperialist ruling class.

But this is a hair-raising prospect for imperialism which is by no means ready to take the risk of all-out war with Russia this would likely entail.

So Starmer’s instant tour of Europe after taking over, to ostensibly “mend fences post-Brexit” but secretly trying to persuade the other powers to go along with this - in Berlin, at the Olympics with Macron, and in Rome (hugging the outright fascist Meloni while pretending to talk about migrants), have gone down like a more obsolete technology, the lead Zeppelin.

And the subsequent mysterious talks with Joe Biden were, so far, even less successful receiving a flat “no” on lifting the missile restrictions.

American imperialism holds back only for strategic reasons, fearful of escalating the Nato-guided war into all-out conflict with a powerfully armed Russia when it has multiple fish to fry trying to head-off rising revolt and competition world wide from Latin America, across Africa, throughout the Middle East and most of all in giant Asia around the gargantuan growing power of China, still a workers state despite the continuing revisionist weakness of Beijing’s leadership.

And there is a certain mixed-in American disdain too for the arrogance of the feeble and has-been British monarchical ruling class still trying call the shots and berating everyone else for a “lack of audacity” two and a half centuries after being driven out of its first Empire and a century after the rest hit the skids too in the great wave of post-war anti-colonialism.

But while the grovelling Labourite B-team’s apeing of reactionary moth-eaten British Empire arrogance was humiliated by being spurned at the White House, the general escalation of the Nato European war against Russia will almost certainly continue, after already imposing ten years of crippling siege and civilian killing in Donetsk (with thousands of deaths before Putin’s intervention) and aiming for destruction and terror as deadly and degenerate as the Zionists’ war-crimes if it can manage it.

Defeat is staring it in the face raising huge existential questions for the capitalist ruling class.

It is losing but cannot afford to lose and is therefore driven into ever more wild and unstable risks.

What happens next in detail is unclear, and Washington may decide to temporarily withdraw, perhaps through a more isolationist Trump presidency (only to concentrate on greater belligerence against China, still a workers state, unlike Russia, and a bigger trade-war economic threat.)

But there can be no stable settlement in Ukraine and certainly no “denazification” as Putin’s just-as-shallow perspectives present things.

It is imperialism itself which is the warmonger not some “other” fascist variant however much nazi-theatricality is mobilised.

The world is confronted with a system which is heading to utter disaster and cannot stop.

The Labourites are part of it and their conference made it clear all over again that their purpose is to “take tough decisions” which means impose draconian austerity and “discipline”, tearing up the last remnants of the collapsing welfare system (NHS, Housing, education) and forcing Slump conditions on the working class by cutting benefits (just as the McDonald government pre-WW2 was the one that cut the dole).

All the talk about “laying the foundations for growth” is barely concealed cynical bullshit, the same old reformist promises of “jam tomorrow” of all past TUC/Labourism but on steroids.

There is no growth coming and cannot be other than in very transient shallow ways (if at all) perhaps deliberately engineered to keep a small privileged sector of the working class on side, as the railwaymen have just been bought off (winning an instant endorsement for the warmongering pension-cutting government from “militant” RMT union boss Mick Lynch, demonstrating the reactionary reality of the whole TUC class-collaborating philosophy backing Zionism and backing the Ukrainian nazis).

And it certainly will not happen through “mobilising private capital”.

That was the entire fatcat loving strategy of the Blairites who mortgaged the NHS and most public services into the bankruptcy they now face – more dishonestly than the Tories they now blame for a “black-hole” in the finances. There has been a black hole for decades because the imperialist system has been in decline for decades (and becoming obviously so with the advent of Thatcherism, the union-bashing war on the working class (and most of all the miners) and the first turn to international warmongering diversions in the Malvinas (Falklands).

The recent Grenfell inquiry sums up everything about this class-collaborating “regulate and monitor” reformism - it will always be corrupted, evaded, twisted and bent by the profiteers of the bourgeoisie, driven by the imperatives of this out-of-time system which breeds contempt, arrogance and criminality.

Even the managers, controllers and regulators get privatised and those who supervise them too, all caught in the inhuman demands of the private profit system which creates the vicious competitiveness, lies, and cynicism general throughout capitalism which led to appalling fire disaster and its near 80 horrifying deaths, subsequent bereavement and pain, and the fears and costs faced by millions more living in similar buildings as the bourgeois press reports:

Seven years after flames engulfed Grenfell Tower, a public housing block in West London, killing 72 people, a public inquiry on Wednesday blamed unscrupulous manufacturers, a cost-cutting government and reckless deregulation for the disaster, Britain’s worst residential fire since World War II.

The 1,671-page final report laid out a litany of corner-cutting, dishonest sales practices, incompetence and lax regulation that led to the tower being wrapped in low-cost flammable cladding, which, after it caught fire in the early hours of June 14, 2017, quickly turned the building into an inferno.

Many of the causes laid out in the report were documented in months of testimony before the inquiry, which was called by the prime minister at the time, Theresa May, and chaired over a seven-year period by a retired judge, Martin Moore-Bick.

But the report painted a damning picture of a Conservative-run local council, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, eager to reduce costs, working with contractors who installed combustible cladding panels, purchased from suppliers who knew that they should never have been used in a high-rise building.

The suppliers “engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data, and mislead the market,” the report said. In the case of the flammable foam insulation installed alongside the panels, it said one of the key regulators, the Building Research Establishment, “was complicit in that strategy.”

Among the companies that came under the harshest criticism was Arconic, an American aluminum maker formerly known as Alcoa. It sold the cladding for Grenfell, the report said, but “deliberately concealed from the market the true extent of the danger” of using it in a high-rise structure.

Arconic has previously acknowledged its role in the tragedy as a supplier of building materials.

The publication of the report is a milestone in the aftermath of the Grenfell tragedy, which has haunted Britain since 2017, when images of the burning building and of the desperate efforts to save its trapped residents appalled the British public. In the years since, Grenfell has become a politically charged symbol of the costs of deregulation and of the persistent social inequality in Britain’s capital.

But the inquiry found fault with virtually everyone involved in the 2015 project to refurbish Grenfell Tower, a 24-floor public housing block that was originally constructed in 1972, its Brutalist style a striking landmark near some of London’s most upscale neighborhoods.

“The choice of combustible materials for the cladding of Grenfell Tower resulted from a series of errors caused by the incompetence of the organizations and individuals involved in the refurbishment,” the report said.

Relatives of the victims hope the publication of the report will open the door to prosecution of those involved in the refurbishment, as well as the management and upkeep, of the building. But criminal trials are not expected to begin before 2027, a decade after the disaster.

In 2023, about 900 people settled a civil case against Kensington and Chelsea, as well as French and American companies that sold the cladding and insulation. The settlement, worth 150 million pounds, or $196 million, was mediated by David Neuberger, a former president of Britain’s Supreme Court.

While much of the report focused on suppliers and contractors, it was also critical of local and national governments and regulatory agencies, which it said were well aware of the risks of combustible cladding in high-rise buildings. It said the Department for Communities and Local Government, which has since been reorganized, was dominated by a zeal for deregulation in the years leading up to the fire, disregarding the lessons of a deadly high-rise apartment fire in London in 2009.

“The government’s deregulatory agenda, enthusiastically supported by some junior ministers and the secretary of state, dominated the department’s thinking to such an extent that even matters affecting the safety of life were ignored, delayed or disregarded,” the report said, referring to the housing secretary at the time, Eric Pickles.

The report recommended that the government consolidate the fragmented regulations governing the construction industry under a single regulator.

London’s fire brigade also came in for criticism for not being adequately prepared to respond to a fast-spreading fire in a high-rise residential building. The report said firefighters were overwhelmed by the large number of calls for help, from inside and outside the building.

Grenfell’s tenant management organization was faulted for its antagonistic relationship with those who lived in the tower, some of whom it regarded as “militant troublemakers” when they raised safety concerns.

Many residents regarded the tenant organization as an “uncaring and bullying overlord that belittled and marginalized them, regarded them as a nuisance, or worse, and failed to take their concerns seriously,” the report said.

Still, of all the responsible parties, the inquiry portrayed the contractors and suppliers as the prime culprits.

It said Celotex, which made the plastic foam insulation, “embarked on a dishonest scheme to mislead its customers and the wider market.” Kingspan, an Irish company that supplied a small portion of the insulation, “knowingly created a false market in insulation for use” in high-rise buildings, the report said, by misrepresenting test results to reassure customers that its product was safe in buildings taller than 18 meters, or 59 feet.

The report said the project itself was dogged by cost-cutting, incompetence and a refusal to take responsibility. The landlord pushed the principal contractor, Rydon, to shave costs from its bid. The architecture firm, Studio E, favored using zinc panels, but switched to ones made with cheaper aluminum composite material because they were cheaper, failing to recognize their fire risk.

“Studio E therefore bears a very significant degree of responsibility for the disaster,” the report said.

But it was not alone. The report said all the contractors and designers either disregarded regulations or shifted responsibility for meeting them.

“Everyone involved in the choice of materials to be used in the external wall thought that responsibility for their suitability and safety lay with someone else,” the report concluded.

On Wednesday, relatives of the victims expressed satisfaction that the report had established a chain of culpability for the disaster. But some said they were still frustrated that people had not yet been brought to justice.

Joe Powell, the Labour member of Parliament for Kensington and Bayswater, said in a statement, “The government and police must now do everything in their power to bring those responsible to justice, using the full force of the law.”

“How was it possible in 21st-century London for a reinforced concrete building, itself structurally impervious to fire, to be turned into a death trap that would enable fire to sweep through it an uncontrolled way in a matter of hours, despite what were thought to be effective regulations designed to prevent just such an event?” the authors of the report said in setting out their investigation.

“There is no simple answer,” they concluded.

The report has been hailed for its widerangeing criticisms “sparing no-one”.

But this last comment is precisely the biggest obfuscation of all.

Of course there is a “simple answer”.

It is to end capitalism whose ratrace ethos and “principles” of “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost” dog-eat-dog competition saturate this story at every level of society from the individual’s desperate daily battle for survival to corporate profiteering, government and its regulators, and all the international connections too of giant monopoly combines and the access they have to the “free market”, demanding less and less “regulation”.

Take away capitalism and this situation could be resolved quickly, safely and fairly by a planned socialist society, with community participation and decision making, using all society’s resources.

Multiple further issues are not touched on by this kind of “inquiry” however thorough and principled the chairman.

It goes no further than the property and construction industry for a start (and even there not examining all of it).

But the same factors of alienation, job protection, vicious competition and contemptuously cynical profiteering go right through the Post Office scandal; the NHS scandals of various kinds, including the contaminated transfusion blood purchases; and the outrageous asset sweating profit-milking of the water companies, filling the rivers with shit and leaking water everywhere.

All of these need to be linked together and seen as facets of the same thing; let the march for clean water join with the Grenfell protests, the Hillsborough case, and a dozen others, as well as the pro-Palestine marches and the Ukraine war protests in understanding that nothing will change or can be changed for as long this stinking foul and disgusting system continues.

And start by bringing down the repellent Labour Party, lyingly claimed to have a “landslide” mandate when it was supported by less than 17% of the population in the stitched-up and manipulated elections.

Fatuous demands for government and police to bring those responsible to justice are outrageous diversions in themselves.

The state is there to protect capitalism and bourgeois property and either noone, or a hapless minion or two scapegoats, will “pay the price”.

Nothing will change until the world takes up the struggle for genuine Marxism once again.

But the great fake “left” spectrum is still avoiding the vital revolutionary perspectives that alone can transform this plunge into a vortex of worldwide chaos, war and existential mayhem into the conscious overturn of this entire historic epoch of piratical entrepreneurial capitalism, colonialism and monopoly capitalist imperialism.

Build Leninism

Alan Moss

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