Recent issue
No 1297 4th August 2006
Zionism and its US/UK imperialist backers have scored an own-goal of historic proportions by murderously blitzing Lebanon and attempting to strangle Gaza. Hezbollah’s determined guerrilla fighting has humiliated the invaders, showing how anti-imperialist resistance is rising on a world scale. The entire planet is now choking on the monstrous, lying defence of ‘Israel’ - which is a fascist occupation, not a country - and Washington’s lying “war on terror” has been utterly compromised by the stench of collusion with Zionist conquest. Leaders of the fake ‘left’ reformist protests KNOW they are uselessly ‘marching’ round in circles ‘to stop war’ but won’t do the one thing that would help – turn to Leninism, and the struggle for revolution
Zionism’s NAZI blitzkrieg on Lebanon and Gaza is set to be one of fascist imperialism’s greatest military and political disasters. Olmert, Blair and Bush have not so much shot themselves in the foot, as right through a main artery in the thigh.
Washington’s “war on terror” lying garbage of laying waste to Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq in succession in order to scare the world into accepting US global domination (even if the dollar collapsed in the looming world slump, see Marxist economics box p8) has been falling apart enough in the calamatous occupations imposed on the Afghans and the Iraqis.
But backing the mad-dog Zionists to the hilt in their massacre of Lebanon’s children, towns and capital city is tearing apart the last shreds of the world’s credulity in the West’s pretence that its “peace, freedom and democracy” mean anything other than fascist chaos and colonial domination.
Capitalist media commentators on NAZI Zionism’s blitzkrieg on Lebanon are all fearing that this latest assault by the so-called “Israeli” state (only established in 1948 by terror on the Arab population and UN acceptance) will explode in its face.
The entire bourgeois world fears that the bloodletting has strengthened Arab resolve that only an all-out fight to end the Zionist conquest of their lands makes sense. In other words, since this is Hezbollah’s position, even if Hezbollah’s military strength was weakened, something far tougher and politically even more mature would emerge.
It is the only logic of the conflict. Zionism is a colonial outpost of Western imperialism nailed down into land possessed by the Palestinian Arab people for over 1,500 years, and is kept in place only by fascist force of arms, billions of dollars a year in US backing, and the cowardly uselessness of the surrounding bourgeois Arab regimes.
The Zionist abomination can only live by the sword, and cut a bloody path towards genocide of the Arab people.
The Arab victims of this armed cuckoo in the nest can only become clearer and clearer that they have no other choice but to fight.
Washington warmongering may think it is smart giving the Zionist killers depleted uranium “bunker-busting” bombs to drop all over Lebanon but the West’s overt collusion with the savage death and destruction being rained on the population is now kicking away the last political legs of support for the Arab stooge regimes.
The collossal guerrilla warfare resistance of the Lebanese people, led by Hezbollah, has stunned the Zionist stormtroopers, cracked the Western counter-revolutionary alliance, and inspired anti-imperialist forces across the planet, in particular heartening every Arab or Palestinian keen to end the Zionist occupation of their lands.
It shows again that DEFEAT for imperialism should be the watchword of the revolutionary movement, whether in the Middle East or in the metropolitan countries.
It also is living proof that history will occur in REVOLUTIONARY leaps; and that what was considered “impossible” weeks before, can become obviously possible a week later. Zionist and Western reactionary mythology had it that the IDF fascist army was invincible and that it could swat the Hezbollah resistance in “days”. Now, with Zionist warplanes, helicopters, tanks and a warship destroyed, plus relatively large numbers of their NAZI troops shot to pieces, their “master-race” swagger has been dragged through the mud, while Arab confidence that they will one day end ALL Zionist and Western tyranny over their lands is sky high.
The revolutionary molecular changes in the balance of forces have been revealed. Bourgeois pieces are observing how the IDF has become too fat, soft and complacent (after decades of using tanks and planes principally to kill unarmed women and children), and how the Hezbollah have mastered guerrilla warfare tactics and weaponry and combined this expertise with a far greater degree of revolutionary inspiration to be able to give the IDF a bloody comeuppance in the battles of southern Lebanon.
The Zionists have been shaken to their monstrous foundations. The plan agreed by the conspiracy between US imperialism and its Zionist attack dog was that, with the US bogged down militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington would reassert its global domination by launching a blitzkrieg on Iran or Syria.
To pave the way, the Zionists would seize on the slightest Arab act of violence against “the state of Israel” (which constantly provokes acts of violence against itself because it is a murderous boot on the neck of the Palestinian people) to aid Washington’s onslaught by slaughtering Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance.
US global war plans here coincided with Zionism’s permanent existential necessity of wrecking economic and political development in surrounding countries as much as it can, for example stoking the civil war in Lebanon in the 1980s, and invading it as far as Beirut in 1982.
Now both fascist reactionary strategies have been banjaxed.
Now the only reason Tel Aviv doesn’t want a ceasefire is the desperate hope it can inflict enough damage on Hezbollah to be able to claim some sort of satisfactory “victory” over the Lebanese militia, whereas before it was because it wanted time to butcher as many guerrillas as it could, kill as many Arab civilians as it could get away with and flatten as much of Lebanon as it could.
Instead, all Zionist apologists are now scared stupid that a watershed moment has been reached where the world’s sympathies have turned dramatically to the Lebanese and Arab peoples, and have been thoroughly revolted by the inhuman NAZI brutality of the Zionist colonialists.
Far from assisting Washington’s planned course of action, its collusion with the Zionists – and the abject failure of their murderous efforts to crush Arab resistance – has vastly weakened Western imperialism’s grip on the Middle East, and possibly holed several stinking Arab stooge-despotisms below the waterline.
It will now be harder than ever for the Bush warmongers to launch bombing blitzes on Iran or Syria in order to cover up failure in Iraq and Afghanistan and instill fear in Washington’s Western “allies”, ie. Germany, France, Japan and the UK.
The Arab bourgeois regimes are walking a tightrope of pathetic inaction over Iraq and Palestine, and striking unlikely figures as “nationalist” defenders of their peoples that can put them at odds with their Washington paymasters.
And in the same week as the collapse of the world trade talks, the splits in the Western camp over the handling of the Zionist massacre of Lebanon show how Washington’s “US first” (the only consideration!) is dispelling illusions in the the West as “democratic, peaceful, and united”.
The UK middle-class has been bitterly humiliated by the “live microphone” exposure of Blair’s ghastly subservience to Bush. In the class war in Britain, it will knock some of the stuffing out of fag-end British imperialist posturing by the right-wing petty bourgeoisie.
The prime minister of the mother of parliaments crawls to the US president – after being greeted, “Yo, Blair!” like a cowering flunkey – “Let me fly to the Middle East for talks because I can just talk”, rather than despatching US foreign minister Condoleezza Rice, because that might imply something more than prevarication in the face of the Zionist butchery of Lebanese civilians.
Despite these monumental exhibitions of the revolutionary nature of the world we live in, the fake “left” (SWP Trots, etc) are falling over themselves to put out reportage articles on the events and historic “explainers” (like the lying capitalist press) but are failing completely to warn workers that only WAR lies in store, and thrashing around by all imperialism all the way to World War Three, because of the iron laws governing the global capitalist economy. The mountains of capital accumulated in long years of vast credit expansion since the devastation of WW2 are choking off profitable capitalist production in sector after sector around the planet, wrecking whole economies, and it is the realisation that even the biggest economies of all will face social upheaval because of this that is driving the US ruling class to attempt to reassert its global domination by sheer force of arms – the neo-cons Project for a New American Century writ large in the destruction of Yugoslavia, the blitzing of Serbia, the seizing on of the Bin-Laden (Saudi) vengeance attack on the US to slaughter Afghanistan and replace the Taliban’s national-clerical (and majority Pashtun) order with the barbaric anarchy of the northern Afghan drug lords, and then bloodily invade Iraq (on totally spurious grounds).
Far worse is to come. And it is sheer reformist anti-communism not to alert Western workers to the global war crisis that is looming.
Striking “pacifist” poses or “protesting against war” or declaring “we must stop war” are all utterly futile bits of reformism. Amazingly, the “lefts” appalling, shallow theatrical nonsenses are still phrased as “we must tell Blair to stop supporting Bush”, or “we must tell Bush to stop making war”. It is this protest politics as Western guilt-salving that must stop. It is a million miles from the genuine solidarity with the Arab and Iraqi peoples of calling for the DEFEAT of the murderous Western intervention in their countries. The DEFEAT of Western imperialism is the crying necessity now, for civilisation to be able to set the stage for the overthrow of the warmongering and intolerable capitalist system of global exploitation.
Leaders of the anti-Marxist “left” from the SWP to Tariq Ali refuse to present this perspective, and cling to their useless reformist “protesting” (for its own sake) as if haranguing Bush, Blair, congress or parliament would make a blind bit of difference.
They can’t build cadres to stand up for the need for socialist revolution because their sectarian politics are sick with anti-communism, and a cynical, petty bourgeois capitulation to the entire Western outlook of hatred for ending capitalism (so-called “parliamentary democracy”) with Leninist proletarian dictatorship.
But the labour movement has to break with this ghastly backwardness – because hating Soviet-type KGB revolutionary firmness, or Castro’s Cuban revolution, or the Viet Cong war to kick out US rule is the same thing as hating Arab and Iraqi resistance for not being “democratic socialist” or “perfect” in some other way too. Falling for Western propaganda in any such way is a lethal deathtrap for the working class, because it leaves the proletariat trapped in reformist-imperialism’s clutches – and the US Empire, backed by Blair’s insane poodledom, is dragging the world towards World War Three.
The illusions in total lying Western bullshit about its “peace, freedom and democracy” versus the “Red menace” of socialist revolution have got to stop – and are really now breaking down.
In massacre after massacre of Lebanese children AND in growing admiration of the resistance’s ability to battle the Zionist onslaught, the world is getting an education in how the US Empire and its Middle East attack dog are totally out-of-control fascist MONSTROSITIES and can be DEFEATED.
And right across the Arab, Afghan, Iraqi and wider Islamic world – and deep into the consciousness of all the world’s masses – is a rising understanding that the entire Goebbels-level lying farce of monopoly-ruling class “democracy” HAS to be defeated.
Build Leninism.
Chris Barratt
Capitalist press clippings show how badly the warmongering is going for the Zionists and Western imperialism. The myth of IDF invincibility is being demolished more effectively than by its former repulsion from Lebanon in 2002, the Zionists’ so-called “Vietnam”. And Blair and the Labour government’s total complicity in war crimes for the US Empire show exactly what all “reformism” will only ever amount to:
Growing evidence that the ground battle in Lebanon will be far tougher than Israel had expected emerged yesterday after firefights against Hizbullah in two border villages left Israeli troops counting their highest death toll in a single day since the conflict began.
Up to 13 Israeli soldiers were killed and many more wounded yesterday in the southern Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil during the fiercest battle so far in the Middle East conflict. Nearby, in the village of Maroun el-Ras, which troops had entered at the weekend, an Israeli officer was reported killed.
Last night the city of Tyre was hit in a major Israeli air strike. Sixteen people, including six children, were injured when a seven-storey building that had been used as a Hizbullah community centre collapsed.
In Bint Jbeil, Israeli troops ran into large numbers of heavily armed Hizbullah fighters when they tried to sweep through the town, just two and a half miles from the Israeli border.
“We have got very intense fighting, house to house, room to room,” a spokesman for the Israeli military said last night. He refused to give full casualty figures but said there were “many seriously injured Israelis”. Reports put the number of dead and injured at 30.
All the claimed ‘liberal’ writers who want to defend Israel find it excruciating, even while using the bogus fascist argument that a resistance movement or revolutionary movement has to stand in the open to be slaughtered by its imperialist enemy, armed to the teeth by billions of dollars worth of hi-tech Western weaponry:
As anyone with eyes in his head can see, this war has been a calamity for Lebanon. In three weeks, the south of the country has been shredded, roads and bridges pummelled, power plants and airports ripped apart, whole villages razed; even Beirut’s famed seashore is now black and slick with oil. A nation lovingly reconstructed after decades of warfare has been smashed. Above all, Lebanon has lost hundreds of people, most of them civilians, including child after child after child. People spoke of “Lebanon’s tragedy” in the 1970s and 1980s – and now, in the 21st century, we must speak of it again.
Yet the war has been Israel’s calamity, too - morally, militarily, politically. The country set out to destroy, or at least defeat, Hizbullah: not a ragtag bunch of bandits, as some western romantics imagine, but a well-resourced, Iranian- and Syrian-backed proxy army that had mounted attacks across Israel’s internationally recognised northern border. This is the organisation whose leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has said the handy thing about all the Jews gathering in Israel is that “it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide”. So to hit back at Hizbullah was legitimate - but that does not make it wise.
For what has been the result? Hizbullah has not been defeated, but boosted in Lebanon and beyond. Watch the TV interviews with Beirut sophisticates - some Sunni, some Christian, the kind of people who once resented Hizbullah’s cuckoo-in-the-nest takeover of the south of their country. In fluent, US-accented English, they now declare their readiness to “give our blood for Hizbullah”. Watch the once-moderate Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, refuse even to meet Condoleezza Rice after the carnage of Qana, adopting instead Nasrallah’s rhetorical style to denounce Israeli “war crimes”. These are people who could once have been model neighbours for Israel; now they are sworn enemies. And that is to say nothing of the brothers and cousins of those killed in Qana and elsewhere, the young Lebanese who, craving revenge, will be Hizbullah’s next generation.
That is the long term, but even in the short run the Israeli offensive has not worked. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF), which laid waste to three nations’ armies in six days in 1967, have hit Hizbullah for three weeks to little effect. For all Israel’s might, it could not stop the missiles raining down on its cities. Where once it conquered lands to the north, south and east, now it has failed to take even the humble village of Bint Jbeil.
This scares Israel. For over the past 40 years it has known that, even if it has not won the acceptance of its neighbours, it has at least earned their fear. The Lebanon war of 2006 has badly eroded that “deterrence”: now other guerrilla armies will be emboldened to follow Hizbullah’s lead, to see if they too can wound the giant.
Add to that the damage this war has inflicted on Israel’s already battered reputation. There might have been international support for a direct hit, hard, on a target that was unambiguously Hizbullah. But Nasrallah is too smart for that. He embeds his men in villages, next to schools, beside hospitals, close to refugee centres, ensuring that any Hizbullah target is also a civilian target. This is the practice the UN’s Jan Egeland had in mind when he lambasted Hizbullah’s “cowardly blending ... among women and children”. It may be cowardly, but in the new warfare it also makes macabre sense. For this is a propaganda war as much as a shooting one, and in such a conflict to lose civilians on your own side represents a kind of victory. Put another way, while Qana was a propaganda disaster for Israel, it was a boon for Hizbullah.
So Israel has walked straight into the trap laid by its enemy. It has overreacted with force excessive enough to repel the world, but not sharp or focused enough to remove the threat to its own people. No wonder Jack Straw and half the cabinet have been in rebellion against Tony Blair’s refusal to demand an immediate ceasefire - pressure that led to the prime minister’s promise yesterday of a grand rethink of British foreign policy.
And yet it’s a bit rich to hear Straw, of all people, denounce Israel for reacting disproportionately. Wasn’t this the same Jack Straw who loyally served as foreign secretary while Britain joined the US in a war against Iraq that killed civilians, not in their hundreds, as in Lebanon, but in their tens of thousands? Wasn’t this same Straw the spirited defender of Britain’s role in the invasion of Afghanistan, which cost more than 3,000 civilian lives?
Make no mistake, Israel’s current conduct deserves to be deplored. But then, by the same standard, so does the US and British record over the last five years. Indeed Straw and his fellow cabinet rebels should reflect that their government’s actions have been both on a larger scale than Israel’s - the full-blown invasion of two countries - and with much less provocation. The threat Iraq posed to Britain was utterly imaginary. By contrast, Hizbullah’s threat to Israel, in the form of missile attacks, was concrete and right next door.
If, despite that, the carnage in Lebanon feels more immediate and real, that’s probably because it has been played out on live television. That option was not so readily available during the US-British invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq. We did not have Fergal Keane on hand to give us poetic accounts of the suffering caused by our bombs. Instead we had correspondents embedded with those firing the missiles - rather than standing alongside those on whom they landed. The statistics alone confirm that we and the Americans caused many, many Qanas. We just rarely saw them.
For now, Israel is keeping up the offensive, promising to resume the air assault today. That decision is a function of failure, not success: Ehud Olmert’s government is desperate to get something that looks like a win before the ceasefire is declared.
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Extracts from EPSR no 1146 30 July 2002 outlining that the perspective is slump and US Empire warmongering until it is defeated, and ended by revolution
It is a complete misunderstanding of Marxism to imply that the imperialist system is in crisis, focused on the Middle East in particular (“all the burning questions of war and peace in this area”) because of territorial oil-pipeline frustrations, or whatever.
US warmongering is on the march (in the Middle East and everywhere) because its global economic system (and therefore political control) is falling apart due to an insane “overproduction” crisis of collapsing profits.
It is the total productive basis of the capitalist class system of society which is in trouble, and not its oil-supplies at all, or any other particular problem or requirement.
Such a major global industry as oil will of course always be a significant incidental detailed feature of some of the actual workings of the imperialist crisis, - but it lets CAPITALISM ITSELF off the hook entirely, and is a COMPLETE TRAVESTY of Marxism, to pointlessly pretend that oil as such “unlocks the door to an understanding of all the burning questions of war and peace in this area”.
And it is well worth pedantically insisting on this point when the wretched reason for this fake-’left’ oil industry concentration is so as to distract attention from the insoluble HUMAN political disaster in Palestine, which much more graphically and interestingly reveals the revolutionary future of the world to mankind, & which much more requires a history of rotten imperialist/Revisionist-era PHILOSOPHY as its deeper explanation rather than oil (which directly does not motivate the Palestinian REVOLUTION one bit, the key to the only real SOLUTION to “all the burning questions of war and peace in this area” by pointing the way to the DEFEAT of imperialist warmongering).
If there really is a need for aphoristic shorthand to sum up the Middle East focal point of imperialist crisis, which is key to the world imperialist crisis, that word would be PALESTINIAN REVOLUTION, and not oil.
And one of the main ingredients making this so is, once again, not oil but something even more permanent, and timeless, and material, - - namely the unalterable political-philosophy of colonial-imperialism, - the essential political-economic human relationship of capitalist production (a key to civilisation for the last 800 years, much longer than oil) which incurably imposes the ‘kill-or-be-killed’ class-war material imperative on (ultimately) the whole character of the whole of society or else it can no longer remain capitalism (class-war and national-war domination).
This irresistible material imperative forces the Zionist ruling class to keep its boot on the neck of its exploited Palestinian subjects (and their exploited lands) or else ‘Israel’ will be no more.
It will be claimed that such stark ‘clever sounding’ theory does not get reflected in the typical fudge and mudge of class-compromising confused reality.
Just the opposite. If it is insisted that a capitalist ‘Israel’ remain a reality, then it can be incontrovertibly deduced that as night follows day, the persecution of the Palestinians can NEVER come to an end.
Minus any philosophical deductions, the capitalist press’s own ‘reports’ of the region invariably agree with this conclusion, or point to it.
...the human problem in the Middle East (...will not go away (oil or no oil) and will not go away from any other part of the world either (oil or no oil), -- the MATERIAL problem of the human ingredients which make up 800 years of capitalism simply being no longer compatible. REVOLUTION is inevitable.
...and on the useless anti-communist cynicism of the ‘left’ swamp:
The ‘left’ world continues to pay lipservice to Marxism but shows it does not even respect the ABC of the science by useless reactions to the colossal international crisis of the imperialist system.
The Middle East focal point of capitalism’s turmoil is variously blamed on the West’s “unfairness” to the Palestinians; or America’s “ruthless greed for oil”; or on the “diversionary persecution” of Iraq for its supposed weapons of mass destruction; or on the “put-up job on Sept 11 by the CIA to pretend that Islamic terrorism was a threat to the world”; etc.
And some of these detailed charges are indeed partly true, or at least imply some tiny portion of the total truth about US imperialism’s bullying, provocation-filled, manipulation of world developments in order to suit the USA’s prearranged plans for “global military domination”, etc, etc.
But they are all also totally misleading because they OBSCURE the scientific nature itself of epochal change when a system’s time is up; they MISS the real philosophical depth of what goes wrong in human society relationships which puts the world in such total crisis; and they FAIL to draw attention to the truly important details of the system’s workings which help guide mankind’s understanding towards the revolutionary consciousness which alone can bring to an end this capitalist disaster for civilisation.
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.
The capitalist profits, which have driven civilisation forward miraculously for the last 800 years, are ultimately flawed because they are a specific expression of complex HUMAN relationships and HUMAN exploitation, - not because of their bullying greed for material resources, or their criminally and suicidally wasteful exploitation of them.
It is because the transformation of the world proletariat by capitalism will ultimately no longer allow the working masses to tolerate exploitation and unfairness and periodic wars and disasters any longer, and because international monopoly-bourgeois interests can NEVER STOP endlessly reimposing their class domination EVERYWHERE, that finally gives the answer “to all the burning questions of war and peace”, not just in the Middle East but all over the world, - the answer in REVOLUTION.
And with the planet edging relentlessly towards a World War III armageddon of inter-imperialist crisis, and facing the problem of the Western world’s working masses still being brainwashed/ dominated by fake-’left’ reformism and TUC/Labourism, the absolutely crucial message of today is that REVOLUTION is the only possible future for mankind, nothing else.
This fake-’left’ domination is not only not upset by exposures of, e.g., the inhuman tyranny of imperialist warmongering Middle East oil-exploitation and associated neocolonial bullying which inflames the region, - this fake-’left’ absolutely FEASTS ON such exposures of “all the burning questions of war and peace in this area”, etc.
Why? Because just explaining the oil frenzy providing the immediate context of imperialist tyranny, also automatically reinforces the entire philosophical world of “there’s always a reformist solution to any problem”, etc,
And it is true. In purely rational terms, a fairer solution to the inter competitive monopoly-imperialist greed for oil, in conflict with the middle East people’s wishes for a better life all round, COULD be found.
There is not a ‘left’ reformist group in the West (and beyond) which does not revel in the exposure (repeatedly) of imperialism’s oil exploitation tyranny.
But what they ALL conspire to keep quiet about is that rational solutions will NOT be found. In the reality of the class-war real world, ‘rational’ (i.e. reformist) solutions are IMPOSSIBLE.
Portentous statements like “He who would understand the economics and the politics of the Middle East from the beginning of the 20th century, must learn to spell, pronounce and really grasp the significance and meaning of just the word - OIL.
“This single word furnishes the key which unlocks the door to an understanding of all the burning questions of war and peace in this area, ranging from the struggle of the leading imperialist powers to carve up the Middle East in the aftermath of the first imperialist war of 1914-1918 to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the war in Lebanon, the Gulf war, the war in the Balkans and the war in Afghanistan presently being conducted with characteristic brutality by US and British imperialism”,” etc, etc, sound very fiercely ‘left’, and anti-capitalist, and even ‘revolutionary’, - but in today’s all important context of the international balance of class forces and class ideologies, they are hollow.
The ‘news’ of this grab-for-oil by imperialism has been old hat to Marxist analysis precisely since the grabbing began more than 100 years ago. This pattern of human and territorial conflict has been the whole basis for the entire historical epoch of colonial imperialism.
But even such slightly pompous and pointlessly one-sided emphases as these would hardly be worth a mention or a second glance if it were not for their origin.
They are publicity-leafleted extracts promoting “the launch of this very important book” put out by a fake ‘left’ sect whose problems are the epitome of the entire anti-revolutionary swamp which for generations has been undermining serious anti-imperialism ideologically throughout the world, corrupting and bringing down the Soviet workers state eventually.
And the Lalkar backbone of the wretched Scargillite SLP is not merely recycling as usual its safe old Revisionist “anti-imperialist” propaganda with this book, but is also scrambling a bit desperately too to keep upright because world developments are now shining their harshest light on the very compromise deals of old Stalinist rottenness which helped set up this horrifically confused and tortuously dangerous Middle East imperialist powder-keg in the first place in 1948 by insanely agreeing to allow Zionist agents from Western imperialism to come in and colonise Palestine.
The big issue Lalkar is on the spot over is the continuing contemporary running-sore of the explosive Middle East situation which exactly reflects and draws attention to that original impossible nonsense which was foisted on the region of allowing Zionist colonisation to proceed), – namely the mythical “two-state solution” which is inevitably proving equally impossible to fulfill.
The only positive way to get out of the Third International’s Revisionist quagmire of the class-collaborative “peaceful road to socialism” plus Zionist “sharing” of Palestine, etc, – (opened up by the projected “economic disintegration of imperialism” in the face of “superior planned socialist economic competition”), was by returning to the Marxist-Leninist science (of imperialist boom/slump recurring warmongering crises as the driving force of historical developments), and totally denouncing these hopelessly rotten Stalinist ‘theories’.
The whole essence of the entire fake ‘left’, in all its 57 varieties of Trotskyism, centrism, museum-Stalinism, etc, etc, lies in this philistine unwillingness/inability to return to Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory. They all endlessly evade that whole question wherever possible, and cover up relentlessly each sect’s rotten Revisionist and/or Trotskyist origins.
Posturing ruses about oil, or about the CIA itself doing Sept 11, or about Genoa anti-global anarchists being police stooges, or Hamas and Sharon serving each others needs, etc, etc, etc, are not necessarily without a scrap of truth in all of them, hinting at the sort of non-stop reactionary provocations which the imperialist system won the Cold War with; – but they all DELIBERATELY miss the point.
The great historical question to be faced by the whole world is whether or not capitalism’s injustices can be resolved through piecemeal reformist pressure (as all parliamentarianism has always pretended, including Revisionism Scargillite syndicalism, and all centrism and Trotskyism in practice (with the SWP support for ‘left’-Labour candidates; or Trot entryism into the Labour Party, etc, etc)), --- or whether on the contrary the Marxist science of history is what needs to be followed which ONLY ever tried to teach REVOLUTIONARY understanding in all things as the sole possible way forward for civilisation, building on the ruins of warmongering imperialist slump destruction.
As typically dithering middle-class tendencies who are unhappy to stick their necks out any further than the most ‘left’ trade unionist (petty bourgeois compromise) mentality, the entire fake-‘left’ spends its whole time putting more and more effort into merely posturing about how “anti-imperialist” they really are, – but, of course, without ever finally telling the working class whether the world is heading for rational reform, or total, final, global warmongering, revolutionary upheaval.
What does it matter? Well the bourgeois class-war ideologists have not the slightest doubt that smashing the working-class resistance to slump and war is one thing when the proletariat has been totally disarmed worldwide by generations of Revisionism (and its fake-’left’ echoes) into always expecting ‘left-pressure reforms’ to inevitably finally win the day for sanity and reason - but that taking on an international working class which has deliberately been made CONSCIOUS that revolution is the only possible and sensible answer when capitalist crisis degenerates into its slump-warmongering phase, - is another level of difficulty entirely.
Hence the huge recent bourgeois-press puff pieces for Lula in Brazil and for Tommy Sheridan in Scotland, as just two examples.
What is imperialism hoping to gain by bulling-up this type of “socialist Firebrand”?
Why, endless new Salvador Allendes, of course, - crucial when capitalist crisis conditions have become hopelessly bad but the working class still needs harmlessly diverting aside into safe ‘reformist daydream’ backwaters where they can be trussed up at leisure, as Pinochet did in Chile after Allende handed him the Chilean working class on a plate by lulling them with crap that “firm parliamentary reforms can do it”, etc, etc, – just like the SSP, Lula, the Socialist Alliance, Lalkar’s SLP, etc, all say.
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Discussion
Endless ‘left’ marches and protest politics are dying on their feet out of sheer futility and lack of perspective
Calling for “urgent protest to achieve peace” in the Middle East is the latest way the fake “left” has found to avoid offering a genuine perspective of what must happen in the Middle East fighting.
Their “pacifism” is a million miles from the genuine revolutionary politics of Leninism.
They are not really looking for peace at all – since peace is impossible while the fascist Western colonial implant called “Israel” exists. Only when the Zionist forces are defeated and Arabs and Palestinians have majority rule over their own land – all of it – can peace prevail.
Fighting for peace therefore means just that – the military-political battle waged by all anti-imperialist Arab and Palestinian forces, and the revolutionary political battle to expose imperialism’s overall world war plans in the metropolitan countries, and work for the political overthrow of the capitalist ruling class in the West.
When the anti-imperialist fighters in the Middle East call for a ceasefire as a diplomatic tactic to embarrass Western warmongering (which is petrified that the Zionists are doing so badly on the battlefield that they will find no way of claiming a sickening “victory” of some sort over Hezbollah), it is one thing.
When self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” in the West call only for peace it just exposes their completely anti-communist running away from Marxism, and capitulation to petty-bourgeois reformist- “pacifist” illusions.
Either the Zionists will survive at the cost of the death of the Arab and Palestinian peoples. Or the revolutionary nationalist and eventually socialist revolutionary forces of the Middle East will defeat the Western-sponsored NAZI stormtroopers, crack all confidence in the Zionist state, and overthrow it, in the same way that previous seemingly all-powerful direct Western colonial outposts were defeated in the Middle East and Africa (British Empire, French, Portuguese, South African apartheid etc).
It is an intensely political fight. The Zionists and their Washington backers won’t hesitate to use the most murderously cruel and inhuman methods – but are being unnerved by the strain of the mountain of sophistry and hypocrisy they have to use to attempt to justify their savage massacres of women, children and old people – as the world looks on with increasing awareness that what is being perpetrated is sheer NAZI brutality.
Western ideology of the US and UK being for “democracy, freedom and peace” are being torn apart by their backing for the Zionist master-race slaughter of the peoples of the region.
The “peace-loving” spin for Washington’s “war on terror” lunacy – a permanently “disproportionate” war against any country alleged to be part of a global conspiracy directed against the US ie. any part of the world that dares to challenge Washington’s diktat – is also being torn apart by its collusion with Zionist blitzkrieg.
What the Western capitalist press is showing on TV about the Lebanese response to the aerial massacre of women and children by the Zionists at Qana is barely one-hundreth of what the Arab world is seeing on their screens.
The anger and seething disbelief at their treatment by Western imperialism is driving anti-imperialist sentiment to a new pitch across the region. All bourgeois commentators with an eye on the Arab street are now redoubling their warnings about how close the poisonous Arab despotisms of Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states are to overthrow in favour of regimes that would be militantly opposed to the West and Zionism.
The fears are so great that some home truths are now being spread about how the “Israeli” state was created as a last act of cruelty by the 1917 Balfour declaration by the British Empire, fascist terror by the Zionist settler gangs in the 1930/40s and then the infamous backing of the UN in 1948.
The stinking Zionist argument -- supported by UN chief Egeland -- that the IDF is fighting “with clean hands” (!!!) while those resisting only ever use use “terror” and “hide among the civilian population” is being widely rebutted too, as it is pointed out that this would be the argument of the SS fighting the French resistance in WW2 as they hanged children by way of collective punishment reprisals after attacks on their troops.
But most of all, it is the sheer courage, audacity and level of inspiration of the Lebanese resistance movement throwing back the fascist IDF at Bint Jbeil and humiliating the Zionist war machine that has shocked the Zionists and impressed the world.
All Western imperialism is OUT OF TIME and no matter how rabidly fascist, so is its Zionist attack dog.
Marx explained how monopoly-capitalism eventually produces human beings who are no longer fit for exploitation – and this is the result on the world stage, where the previously weak and oppressed Arab peoples, kept under by Western oil-exploitation, venal stooge rulers and Zionist thuggery can no longer tolerate their conditions.
The degree of mastery of military technique, the sophistication of the weapons handled, and the unity and organisational skills shown by the Lebanese struggle and the Palestinian intifada are testament to a new stage of combatativeness.
It is only because all the communist parties of the region, subservient to the Moscow revisionism of the decades of Soviet socialist power, were committed to the nonsense ideology of the “peaceful road” that Middle Eastern anti-imperialism became so largely led by Islamic currents.
Co-operation between ostensibly Islamic forces such as Hamas and secular wings of the struggle in Palestine shows that no insurmountable obstacles exist to a non-antagonistic resolution of the ideological differences in the anti-imperialist movement.
It is certainly not for those claiming to be revolutionaries in the West to condemn “terror” – which is moralising gibberish and merely supports Western imperialist propaganda against the Arabs and Iranians, and is totally at odds with any attempt to explain the perspective that it is decaying monopoly-capitalism which is looking for a stunted-up warmongering “solution” to its global profit-making crisis).
Similarly, Lenin calls for workers and oppressed countries to unite against Western imperialism, and while fighting according to Lenin’s axiom of the “revolutionary line in all countries without exception”, that “revolutionary line” doesn’t include spreading obvious Western “democratic” subversion of the primary anti-imperialist fight.
Clearly, at the moment Iranian anti-imperialism is led by a cleric, Ahmadinejad, who seems to be friendly with the Chavez-led Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, but is a leadership that will be inconsistent at best. Nevertheless, show solidarity with the revolutionary-nationalist fight against Western imperialism in Iran, argue for socialism, argue for Leninism – but whatever you do don’t join in Western hate campaigns against Iran, sponsored by the CIA.
Disgustingly, the anti-communist academics of the Weekly Worker have for months spewed out a torrent of articles attacking what they (and pro-Zionist professors) call “Islamo-fascism”. The latest hate piece is a lengthy diatribe against Iran for allegedly busting up a women’s rights demo.
It amounts to vicious academic anti-communist posturing. The whole reason that anti-imperialist movements turned to Islamic leadership is the failure of the communist movement to see the big picture of the necessary fight to defeat Zionism, Westen imperialist meddling and its overt stooge regimes.
The tactics would frequently have to be the Leninist “Kerensky-Kornolov” tactic of 1917, where Bolshevik strategy remained the overthrow the capitalist Kerensky regime, but direct confrontation with it was suspended while the more urgent threat from White Guard counter-revolution was defeated, while egging on the Kerensky troops to fight shoulder to shoulder with the communist forces.
Iran is under direct threat of Western blitzkrieg bombardment at this moment, and that is the clear enemy of socialist revolution. The anti-imperialist fight is utterly primary; and a great deal of toleration should be shown to the ancient cultural differences and leadership realities of the Iranian state, including the kind of “puritanism” that has been a feature of many revolutions (including Oliver Cromwell’s) that is partly a very positive reaction to the need to “strengthen the sinews” to do battle with Western imperialism.
Leninist thinking should aim to supersede “Islamic radicalism” – not betray the anti-imperialist fight.
Build Leninism. Spread the EPSR.
Chris Barratt
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