Recent paper
No 1316 24th June 2007
Explosive resolution of corrupting Abbasite stoogery in Gaza a telling expression of the dialectic of imperialist crisis, pushing revolutionary understanding closer to the surface. Further imperialist siege torture and stooge bribery will rebound in conditions of growing world political crisis for the entire capitalist order heading for terminal collapse into warmongering chaos and destruction. Palestinian response is a telling symptom of the worldwide transformation of ordinary people no longer prepared to suffer the degradation and tyranny of the profit making system – a massively optimistic sign of revolution to come – the only solution to oncoming mayhem. But the need for conscious scientific Marxism is paramount
The shattering and historic victory of Palestinian militancy in Gaza is sending massive shock waves through the imperialist system because of its powerful revolutionary example.
Its timing could not be more devastating for imperialism, already reeling from setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, revolt in a dozen more countries and with oncoming financial crisis looming ever larger.
Heroic levels of sacrifice and steadfast determination of the Gazans, their increasing organisation, endless patience and dogged capacity to hold out against monstrous genocidal siege strangulation and continual murderous indiscriminate blitzings by Zionist fascism and its imperialist backing, have long been an inspiration for the struggling masses throughout the Middle East and the Third World beyond.
But the willingness to endure even harsher “punishment” from imperialism and its Zionist rottweillers in order to turn over Fatah stoogery and disruptive sabotage, shows the clarity and combativeness of the struggle has gone to a new level.
The fight of the Palestinians has been the forerunner, focus and signal of the entire Middle Eastern conflict and its ripples now spreading into Africa via Somalia, Sudan, Nigeria etc, into Asia -Pakistan, Nepal, Iran and Indonesia, - and in the eruption of left leaning anti-imperialist nationalism in South America, as well as the continuing Marxist struggle in Colombia.
There is significance in all directions from the eruption; in the increasing experience and fighting capacity revealed by the masses; in the increased clarity that will follow resolution of the near civil war chaos being stirred by imperialist crisis influence; in the pivotal impact the events will have on further clarifying and inspiring the entire Middle East struggle; in demonstrating the growing impact the Middle East struggle has had on anti-imperialism in general, and the anti-Zionist fight in particular, inspiring the Palestinians; on the further exposures of imperialist manipulation and double dealings, and the falsity of its “freedom and democracy” Big Lie.
And there is worldwide general significance as the unfolding events express and measure overall the increasing depth of imperialist crisis, which is not only losing its grip ever more on the crucial Middle East centre, but of its overall 800 years of ever expanding world domination and exploitation.
The reflected impact is now finding expression even in the heart of imperialism as the comfortable academic world erupts in class conflict over a renewed campaign to boycott Zionist universities, adding more to the fight against the genocidal suppression of the Palestinian people.
Material realities of the rapidly deepening capitalist crisis forcing out these developments, as Marxist science has predicted, turning the petty bourgeois idealist illusions of “negotiated settlement” – an impossibility for this particular new colonialism – into the tragic depravity of the Abbas presidency’s debased treachery.
The greatest lesson of all to be drawn is that the suffocating stench of the Abbasite counter-revolutionary corruption – from playing the treacherous role of “trustee” in the Gaza concentration camp to now imperialist approved “management” for the West Bank Bantustans which Zionist fascism has long been imposing on the entire Palestinian people – is the inevitable rotten end-point of class collaborating “compromise tactics” led for decades by Arafatite nationalism which have shackled the Palestinian revolt.
Behind the obscene debasement of begging for, and accepting, US money and arms and the willingness to use them for civil war and intimidation against their own people, is decades of petty bourgeois confusion fed by philosophical idealist confusion, and above all Stalinist “peaceful road” misleadership and its particularly fatuous and grovelling expression in the Middle East of the “two state solution” for the Occupation of Palestine (sponsored by imperialist trickery (the warmongering liar Blair to lead it now!) and gone along with by every shade of fake-“leftism” from mainstream New Labourism to the Trotskyists).
Whatever the ideological limitations of “Islamic revolutionary nationalism”, its leadership is being forced upwards by the unbearable contradictions of the capitalist crisis to deal with these new lessons.
As every petty bourgeois observer has noted, the overturn “changes the landscape utterly” – a microcosm of the giant revolutionary changes in consciousness which the entire world imperialist order is facing as its system hits the buffers.
The running sore injustice of the Zionist fascist occupation of Palestine has been at the heart of modern imperialist domination since the end of the Second World War, the concentrated expression of its world tyranny and oppression focused on the crucial Middle Eastern world with its massive natural resources and crucial strategic importance economically and politically.
All the force of the world imperialist crisis bears down on this tiny region.
The lying joke West Bank “government” will no more last in this furnace than the stoogery which the West has tried to impose on Iraq, or Afghanistan (and several dozen other unravelling western client fascist regimes from Pakistan to Mexico.)
And the more desperately imperialism tries to bolster it up the more telling are the lessons for the entire Middle East, and all the world’s working class in the hollowness and lies of imperialist “concessions” and “reforms” and “deals” and “democracy”.
It has taken long decades of betrayal and “broken promises” for the working class in Britain to be slowly educated in the lying reality of Parliament and fraudulent “democracy” and the multiple onion layers of “left” radicalism which always promises movement and “jam tomorrow” but always simply props up the entire bourgeois dictatorship in the meantime, even as it slides into warmongering chaos.
The desperate straits of the rapidly deepening crisis of the capitalist system - now accelerating down the slope towards all out World War conflict - means these lessons are being taught far more quickly and sharply elsewhere.
The effort to bribe the West Bankers is so crude that it has dismayed even this Zionist sympathising “left” in the bourgeois press:
The western strategy, endorsed not only in Jerusalem and Washington but by European foreign ministers at their meeting in Luxembourg on Monday, is to set up an elaborate demonstration exercise for the Palestinians. They will be offered two alternative Palestines and asked to choose which one best represents their future.
On the West Bank shall arise Fatahland, soon to be showered with cash from the very western tap that stayed shut as long as Hamas were in the picture. President Mahmoud Abbas will not only receive money but multiple goodwill gestures from Israel: an easing of roadblocks, cooperation on security, a glimpse of the “political horizon”, meaning the prospect of negotiations aimed at an eventual Palestinian state. If things go well, a high-ranking Israeli government official told me yesterday, Israel could once again return chunks of West Bank territory to Palestinian control, as it did during the Oslo process.
In Gaza, meanwhile, would fester the new land of Hamastan, an Islamist-ruled hellhole shunned by the rest of the world, starved of all but the most emergency humanitarian aid.
Where Fatahland would feel the warmth of the west’s open arms and deep pockets, Hamastan would know only its cold shoulder...If all went to plan, either Gazans would eventually rise up and eject Hamas from power, or Hamas itself would realise it had to change course. After all, if the Palestinians of the West Bank were marching towards prosperity and statehood, Gazans would not want to be left behind.
...But it is surely a delusion. The first and most obvious danger is that the more generous the west is to Abbas, the more his credibility will be destroyed. Every dollar or euro he takes will confirm him as the lackey of foreign powers, casting him alongside Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Nuri al-Maliki of Iraq and Fuad Siniora of Lebanon as a mere western proxy. Each bouquet from Israel will tarnish him further, establishing him as the servant of the enemy. Already the Arab press is comparing Abbas with Antoine Lahad, the strongman whose hated South Lebanon Army served as Israel’s policeman. As has happened so often before, in seeking to boost “moderates,” the west only hugs them to death.
Besides, the whole idea rests on a series of faulty assumptions. First, it assumes that Israel will indeed come through with the goodies it promises. On this, the record is not encouraging. Ehud Olmert has repeatedly met Abbas and promised the release of tax funds or greater freedom of movement, only to do nothing. Second, even if Israel does hand over the cash, there is no guarantee that Abbas’s Fatah-dominated administration could translate that into improvements on the ground. Again, past experience is not encouraging. Put crudely, Fatah has shown itself to be either corrupt or incompetent or both...
The dangers are multiple. If the West Bank is lavished with money but much of it stays in Fatah’s gilded circle, thereby creating a class of haves and have-nots, there would be a surge of precisely the resentment that led to Hamas’s election victory in January 2006. Who knows, Hamas could even end up taking over the West Bank too - after all, they had the edge over Fatah in elections there. Precedent makes clear that shunning the movement only makes it stronger. Ostracised for the last 18 months, they are more powerful than ever.
Yet this is the current strategy, not just of the Israelis and the Bush administration - who both reiterated it at yesterday’s White House summit - but everyone involved. I know it’s always more comfortable to cast those two actors as the prime villains in this drama. On last week’s Any Questions, the panellists confidently condemned the 18 month-long American and Israeli embargo of Hamas. But that embargo originated in a set of UN demands that Hamas refused to meet, was backed by the EU and firmly endorsed by Britain. This, in other words, is our policy too.
...But it is badly mistaken. The sounder approach is surely to recognise that Hamas is now a fact of life in Palestine, just as political Islam is a fact of life in the Middle East. We may wish it were not so - I certainly do - but we cannot wish it away. Hamas enjoys a democratic mandate; it now rules a territory that threatens to be a Taliban-style state on Israel’s doorstep. It simply makes no sense to pretend that it does not exist.
The choice now, says Tel Aviv University analyst Gary Sussman, is either “to isolate Hamas, pushing it further into the Iranian orbit, or to engage it, luring it into the western and Sunni orbit”. This has to be the more pragmatic course.
The giveaway phrase in this anti-revolutionary piece of course is the notion of “luring” the militancy back into the reformist delusions about “democracy”. But it is a bit late for that as another piece declares:
The fundamental cause is, of course, well known. Israel, aided by the US, was not prepared to accept Hamas’s victory in last year’s Palestinian elections. Backed by a supine EU, the two governments decided to boycott their new Palestinian counterparts politically and punish Palestinian voters by blocking economic aid. Their policies had a dramatic effect, turning Gaza even more starkly into an open prison and creating human misery on a massive scale. The aim was to turn voters against Hamas - a strategy of stupidity as well as cynicism, since outside pressure usually produces resistance rather than surrender.
The policy shocked even moderate western officials like James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank chief, whom the Americans had appointed to help Gaza’s economy before the Hamas election victory. “The result was not to build more economic activity but to build more barriers,” he said this week while explaining why he resigned in disagreement with US and Israeli strategy.
It is also well known that Hamas was as surprised by its election victory as everyone else and that it offered its rival, Fatah, a coalition government of national unity. The offer was refused. If this was done initially out of wounded pride, Fatah’s rejection of Hamas’s regularly repeated overtures increasingly appeared to be coordinated with Washington as part of the boycott strategy.
Reports have been circulating for months of a more sinister side to the boycott. According to them, the US decided last year on a plan to arm and train Mahmoud Abbas’s presidential guard in a deliberate effort to confront and defeat Hamas militarily. Israel has already locked up several dozen Hamas legislators and mayors from the West Bank. The next stage was to do the same in Gaza but have Palestinians, rather than Israelis, run the crackdown.
Arming insurgents against elected governments has a long US pedigree and it is no accident that Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser and apparent architect of the anti-Hamas subversion, was a key player in Ronald Reagan’s supply of weapons to the Contras who fought Nicaragua’s elected government in the 1980s.
Documents doing the rounds in the Middle East purport to have evidence for Abrams’s “hard coup” strategy. One text recounts Washington’s objectives as expressed in US officials’ conversations with an Arab government. These are, among others, “to maintain President Abbas and Fatah as the centre of gravity on the Palestinian scene”, “avoid wasting time in accommodating Hamas’s ideological conditions”, “undermine Hamas’s political status through providing for Palestinian economic needs”, and “strengthen the Palestinian president’s authority to be able to call and conduct early elections by autumn 2007”.
The document is dated March 2, less than a month after Saudi Arabia brokered the Mecca agreement under which Abbas finally agreed with Hamas on a unity government. The deal upset the Israelis and Washington because it left Hamas’s prime minister Ismail Haniyeh in charge. The document suggests the US wanted to sabotage it. Certainly, according to Hamas officials whom a depressed Abbas later briefed, Abbas was told to scrap Mecca at every subsequent meeting he has had with Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert or with US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and Abrams.
Most ominously, the document of US objectives outlined a $1.27bn programme that would add seven special battalions, totalling 4,700 men, to the 15,000 Abbas already has in his presidential guard and other security forces, which were also to be given extra training and arms. “The desired outcome will be the transformation of Palestinian security forces and provide for the president of the Palestinian Authority to able to safeguard decisions such as dismissing the cabinet and forming an emergency cabinet,” the document says.
Alastair Crooke, a former Middle East adviser to the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and current head of a research institute in Beirut, points out that Israel blocked some arms deliveries. It was wary of sending too many into Gaza for fear Fatah might lose them, as indeed has happened. In this sense, only part of the plan went ahead. (Britain has played a small part in helping Abbas’s security forces. It has provided about £350,000 of “non-lethal” equipment this year for protecting the Karni freight crossing between Gaza and Israel.)
But Crooke says Hamas was irritated that the Mecca deal was being sabotaged, notably by the refusal of Mohammed Dahlan, Fatah’s long-time Gaza strongman and head of the Preventive Security Forces, to accept the authority of the independent interior minister appointed to the unity government. “Dahlan refused to deal with him, and put his troops on the streets in defiance of the interior minister. Hamas felt they had little option but to take control of security away from forces which were in fact creating insecurity,” Crooke says.
Ahmed Yousef, a Hamas spokesman, confirms the movement thought it had to move fast. In his words, last week’s events were “precipitated by the American and Israeli policy of arming elements of the Fatah opposition who want to attack Hamas and force us from office”.
These developments reflect both the strengths and weaknesses of the heroic and self-sacrificing Hamas and other militancy in Palestine.
Decades of bitter experience have created a firm and deepening grasp of the reality of the Zionist colonisation, which was deliberately implanted on the Palestinians’ own land as a permanent knife thrust of imperialism into the heart of the resource and oil rich Middle East post war.
Zionist occupation can never cease being a monstrous out-of-time colonialist intrusion, able to secure its own place only at the expense of total destruction of all Palestinian resistance and claim to their own land (other than the joke fragments offered as a humiliating sop to “lure” the dispossessed away from their totally justified struggle) and by repeated smiting of the Arab nation and general Middle East around it, which will always be driven to oppose this hostile alien presence.
Hamas’ consistent refusal under all kinds of monstrous genocidal pressure to recognise the laughable “state” of Israel, imposed on them by gun and bomb terror, land theft and “ethnic cleansing” (invented by imperialism!!) in the 1940s, has been a major signal of the maturing grasp of this core struggle within the entire anti-imperialist movement on the planet.
Hamas’ ideology is not Marxism and it remains to be seen how sufficiently it can grasp the revolutionary demands of the epoch.
The oncoming slump and war collapse of the whole of imperialism will eventually demand the highest philosophical grasp of an entire perspective of complete revolutionary transformation of the world which only the clearest scientific leadership, based around the science of Marxism can achieve.
Few anvils are beaten on so hard as this one however and Hamas’s statements already show hardening and tempering, reflecting more of the underlying anti-imperialist sentiment which has thrown these leaderships to the surface than most others (including the nearby Hizbollah), and less the religious and cultural background from which most of the Middle East rebellion has adopted its leadership in lieu of better philosophy.
It is the disastrous misleadership of Moscow dominated revisionism and its retreat from militancy into “peaceful road” delusions which has left the entire region (and the world in general) bereft of revolutionary perspectives, forcing the spirit of struggle out through other channels.
But conscious scientific understanding of all the developments in the crisis, and the overwhelming need for communist revolution, is the crucial need for all workers everywhere, and the more urgently as the onset of world trade disintegration and credit collapse turmoil gets closer.
The vital battle for revolutionary science will not be aided by the “left” reformists and fake-”left” still swamping the workers movement.
Just the opposite. Far from underlining the lessons the Gaza development holds, the fake-”left” was promptly looking for ways to bolster it again, as the “luring” comments above make clear.
Typical too was the supposed “left”-ism of “firebrand” MP George Galloway from the latest incarnation of reformist confusion-mongering, the ‘Respect’ party, instantly on the radio last week urging yet again for Arafatite compromiser Marwan Barghouti to be released from the monstrous Zionist political incarceration he has been held in for years.
This was a last ditch attempt to get a “reasonable” leader, sufficiently battle scarred to be accepted by all Palestinians, to pursue a “rational settlement”, i.e. to smudge the sharpening differences and avoid the revolutionary content being deepened any further.
Of course Barghouti should be released from prison – since he is suffering as unjust and vicious a prison punishment as the many tens of thousands of other Palestinians put away, oppressed, tortured and deprived of their lives and freedom by the Zionist fanatic colonisers year by year for simply resisting and battling against their dispossession and murderous suppression.
But new “hopes” for negotiation and a “rational” solution to the “problem” are heading entirely in the wrong direction.
The Palestinians have been learning the bitter lessons of the impossibility of a “rational” and fair solution for two decades of Arafat and the cynical “Oslo accords” and their contemptuous “two state” offer for the Palestinian people to be satisfied with a fraction of their own land - and the scrappiest, most barren, isolated pockets at that, permanently in fragments and always overseen by the gloating settlements of the ever expanding Zionist seizures (illegal - for what that is worth in the blind eye world of ‘official’ UN double-dealing and universal imperialist hypocrisy which has funded and nuclear armed the otherwise unsustainable “Israel” for six decades).
And that only in exchange for the permanent acceptance of their own destruction as a viable nation (alongside the legacy of unsolved injustices from the remnants of the colonialism of genocidally overrun “natives” from the Aborigines, the Maories and the dozens of slaughtered or decimated American Indian nations to the millions of dead and displaced Africans taken in the slave trade) or total genocide.
Even more extreme is the outright hostility of the Trotskyists, painting the entire movement in the Middle East as more “reactionary” than imperialism - an extension of their craven and cowardly lining up with imperialism to “condemn terrorism” and bolster the demented “war on terror” excuses for the warmongering which imperialist crisis itself is responsible for.
These anti-communist poseurs write off in this way all the armed struggle resistance of the entire third world, including the benighted Palestinians.
But this wooden academic shallowness which grasps nothing of the dialectical transformations of history is now badly exposed by its alignment with imperialism and Zionism.
Trickier is the ostensible support for Hamas of the relatively recently launched “Proletarian” CPGB-ML - the “fresh face” which Lalkar has used to avoid too many awkward questions over its eight-year long cover up for the Little Englander trade-union bureaucrat mentality of the Scargillite Socialist Labour Party and its anti-communist opportunism (including Scargill’s joining in with “condemnation” of terrorism [see EPSR 1245 e.g.])
Its latest piece pleading for the “unity of the Palestinian people against the common enemy” equally leaves plenty unsaid – and not least its long support for the entire history of the Arafatite compromise “dealing” and the resulting corrupt opportunist degeneration (already well entrenched in Arafat’s time) which followed in a direct line from this.
“Victory to the Intifada” it postures to set a “revolutionary” tone.
Detailed description of the siege suffering of the Gaza strip helps set the scene to explain the “wholly justified” armed struggle militancy of Hamas, with a recognition that this militancy has now won the leadership of the Palestinian majority (already the case in May when this was written).
Fiery words. But does this mean a stirring and resolute insistence, the only possible Marxist perspective, that only revolutionary war will ever produce an answer to the monopoly imperialist backed Zionist occupation and that the opportunist fudging of the Abbasites should be condemned?
Not a chance.
Instead, despite some rapping over the knuckles for Abbas, all the old compromise gibberish which has led directly to this point is wheeled out yet again, based on the deranged two state solution, with severe strictures for the “inadequacy” of the Abbas leadership
Dishonestly the ‘Proletarians’ pretend that this is what the Hamas leadership is fighting for too:
A new unity government was inaugurated on 17 March. In his speech at the opening ceremony, Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh defined the overall aim for the new administration as being to build a Palestinian state on the lands occupied by Israel in 1967, saying. “The government will work with the international community to put an end to the occupation and recover the legitimate rights of our people.” Haniyeh further declared that “resistance in all its forms, including popular resistance to occupation, is a legitimate right”. (Quoted in ‘Palestinian unity cabinet approved’, Al Jazeera Online, 17 March 2007)
But this is sleight of hand trickery.
Hamas has always made it very clear that it will never recognise Israel as a state.
It correctly states that any such deal would be a tactical matter and that a full solution to the Palestine question cannot be achieved without ending completely the Zionist occupation.
Apart from a concession on a temporary basis in the light of its own strength versus the huge pressure upon it, such a tactical demand further grasps that for the Israelis to truly pull back to the 1967 borders would be impossible anyway without total turmoil.
In the growing world imperialist crisis erupting all around, and most of all in the Middle East, with imperialism facing dire setbacks from continuing military and political defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, and turmoil rising in Pakistan etc etc, such a withdrawal would have explosive revolutionary impact.
It is not going to happen in other words, until revolution is pushing forwards anyway.
But the CPGB-ML makes none of these connections and the crucial perspective of the onrushing crisis for the system is completely ignored.
The basis of Marxism, its understanding of the intractable contradictions of the profit system and the relentless course towards catastrophic collapse in overproduction disaster and the trade war, slump and world war that leads to (see the Communist Manifesto, three volumes of Capital, Lenin’s works on imperialist economics, Bukharin etc, etc etc as well as the entire history of the twentieth century) simply does not exist, as a living context for all the events of world development.
The only future that this promises for the entire planet is total disintegrating chaos and agony for as long as imperialism continues to hold sway.
The capitalist ruling class will go to any lengths of ruthless “shock and awe” world terrorising (including nuclear bombing, biological warfare, and all the horrors its ‘technology’ can dream of etc etc) to hold onto its centuries long domination and the fabulous luxury and power of the tiny minority.
And until it has dealt with the total saturation of the world economic system in “surplus” capital (surplus for profit purposes that is, rather the needs of the billions in penury and poverty) it can only impose war and destruction as a “solution”.
The only alternative is the universal spread of revolutionary upheaval to overturn this long out of time oppression and exploitation, to build a coherent cooperative world economy and society based on the common ownership of production and doing away with the profit system forever — communism in other words, but done better this time than the first titanic but flawed 20th century experiments.
In other words gigantic historical turmoil is the only immediate future for mankind.
Not for the Proletarian.
“Peace and stability” are just a few signatures away it babbles:
The rocket attacks are a perfectly justifiable and inventive measure of self-defence by the Palestinians. The only way Israel can stop these attacks and help to create peace and stability in the region is by sitting at the negotiating table with the elected Palestinian leadership and accepting the creation of a Palestinian state constituting the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem (with the settlements removed, the apartheid wall pulled down and with the right of return for Palestinian refugees expelled from Israel at gunpoint).
And this too despite recognition (in a 2005 article) that:
The Israelis have never yet honoured an agreement with the Palestinians, and it is plain to see that they are continuing that dishonourable tradition. On the one hand, they are being seen to do just enough to stifle criticism, both international and internal, while, on the other, they are attempting to continue their occupation, albeit in a repackaged form.
Proletarian’s tricksyness and avoidance of open discussion is the key problem left through the world “communist” movement, a hangover from the errors and mistakes of the Soviet Union’s revisionist leadership and its philosophical echoes and reflections left around the planet from China to Cuba.
It dishonestly helps cover up the crucial understandings.
On Palestine for example Proletarian’s insistence on the 1967 borders as a permanent two-state ‘solution’ is a sly evasion of the most basic question of all; what right does “Israel” have to exist at all?
As many previous Bulletins have analysed this is the critical question always covered over by Zionist apologists — EPSR 1321 for example:
Far worse than the problem of lumpen anti-Semitism from small racist parties is the scandal of the international Zionist lobby trying to brainwash the world into preventing the origins of the Palestine catastrophe from ever being discussed...
The aim is simple: Be as critical, controversial, or challenging as anyone could wish about any past or present deeds in the Arab-Jew conflict; but NEVER allow the 1947 implantation of the so-called state of “Israel” onto the land of the Palestinian nation EVER to be re-examined or even discussed...
“WHY and HOW and in particular WITH WHAT ENVISAGED CONSEQUENCES was the decision made to FORCIBLY implant “Israel” on the homeland of the Palestinian nation post-1945 (and more and more brutally strengthened ever since, despite the ever-increasing warmongering catastrophe that inevitably this has all unleashed)???????????
An entire, worldwide, powerful Zionist brainwashing campaign is being conducted to achieve exactly the same censorship suppression, — a truly outrageous achievement by the cleverest international religious freemasonry that has ever existed.
But it will fail, of course.
When working in the same direction as the flow of historical class and national forces, propaganda can be all-powerful.
But when the historical tide has turned, then all of the brainwashing propaganda smartness in the world, allied to no matter how many powerful freemasonry connections here, there, and everywhere, — cannot halt the rot.
No thanks to Lalkar/Proletarian however and its refusal to look in the eye the one of the worst disasters for Middle East of all, Stalin’s Moscow recognition in 1948 of the declaration of Israeli statehood.
But then the Proletarian does its best to avoid ever mentioning its philosophical foundation – the badly mis-analysed world view of Stalinism – at all.
It is not a question of “covering up monstrous crimes” that shallow western Goebbels Lie propaganda endlessly heaps on Stalin’s historical plate in its continuing fear that the Soviet history and communism might soon look attractive again (as it most certainly is doing as crisis deepens).
Lalkar is robust enough to handle that.
It is not even a question of evading the real crimes that Stalinist paranoia was responsible for, as it twisted and turned in tactical confusion (appalling enough, though many, many orders of magnitude less than CIA and White Russian propaganda would have it, and with much more complex causes.)
It is a question of avoiding all discussion and polemic on the awkward political and philosophical errors stemming from Stalin’s retreat from revolutionary clarity and the worldwide insistence on “peaceful road” inanities and abandonment of the need to overturn imperialism and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat as the only route to socialism and a planned and rational future for mankind.
The logical end point of the “fight for peace” policies which Stalinism evolved into was the post-war collapse of communist influence – especially in the key Middle Eastern cockpit – and finally the deranged self-liquidation of the perfectly viable Soviet workers state itself (and its enormous world potential).
Stalinism has been a disaster for the Palestinians and the entire Third World, which is why the masses have turned elsewhere for leadership, into the cultural traditions and forms of militant Islam most notably.
They will only be won back to Marxism, when there is an unstinting and open examination of all the mistakes and errors of the past – not by ignoring them shamefacedly (or opportunistically) distracting attention from the philosophy like some three card trickster’s showy flourishes.
Another of those is the classic Stalinist technique of fingerpointing at a “bad apple” when things go wrong.
Just as Nikita Kruschev is the fall guy for a (supposed) ‘sudden’ 1950s “counter-revolutionary swing” on whom to pin the blame for the subsequent degeneration of the Soviet Union (and entirely wrongly anyway since not only did the USSR continue solidly for three more decades, but also it picked up some revolutionary vigour and momentum again suppressing counter-revolution in Hungary, backing Cuba, Nasser, etc, etc at that time ), and thus avoid the all important deep rooted philosophical investigation (which would lead right back to Stalin and the leadership around him), - so the ground is laid to finger Abbas for the mess in Palestine, to sustain the deluded hero worship for Yasser Arafat and by association the Stalinist influence he acted upon.
It is done all very ‘objectively’:
The main technique employed in pursuit of this aim has been to supply the President’s (Abbas’s) office (as opposed to the Palestinian Authority as a whole) with money and arms, on the condition that these arms are used not to resist Israeli occupation but to crack down on militant groups. Thus Fatah starts to be seen as an arm of the Israeli state, and Hamas starts to resist them accordingly.
It’s fair to say that Israel and its imperialist backers have had some success with these tactics. The beginning of this year saw a considerable escalation of tension between Hamas and Fatah, in some cases leading to gun battles between the groups.
However, much to the irritation of the US and Israeli administrations, Abbas clearly realises that he cannot simply bypass Hamas – the Palestinian people are strongly tuned into what’s going on, and they will not stand for it. It is to Abbas’s credit that he finally went off-message, engaging in negotiations with Hamas leaders that led to the signing of the Mecca Agreement between Fatah and Hamas on 8 February 2007.
But the Abbas stoogery, foul though it is, is merely the logical continuation, to its poisoned end point, of the “don’t provoke them” argument that the entire peaceful road philosophy distilled down into.
For years the PA has anyway increasingly insisted on suppressing and policing its own people to avoid “rocking the boat” as it pursued the rainbow end fantasy of a “two state solution”.
It has tipped very easily into the open counter-revolution because the deepening crisis has driven it there.
The treacherous readiness to sacrifice a scapegoat is not quite brought to its conclusion in this May article because the Proletarian was still slyly hoping the revolutionary spirit of Hamas would be contained by “unity government” - before the crisis forced the pace to a resolution.
But that is no excuse - it was clear that the PA had gone poisonous months ago when it started openly taking US and Zionist weaponry and money. In what way was anything to “Abbas’ credit” even then?
The pressing need for “unity” has long been another card played by revisionist opportunism to avoid discussion.
And of course the masses have to be constantly on guard against imperialist “divide and rule” tactics, one of the most powerful weapons of the ruling class to turn the masses on each other via religious, tribal, race, gender, national, trade, or regional differences.
But it was a fundamental point of all Lenin’s struggle that unity can only be achieved by getting it right - by fighting the understanding through openly and clearly.
The very name of his party, the Bolsheviks (majority), reflects exactly the titanic struggle over those points in 1903 and Lenin’s political entire life was spent arguing and polemicising, until issues were clarified.
It proved the sound foundation for the most important political transformation of the last 200 years, the Soviet 1917 revolution.
It is revolutionary clarity which sees and understands the actual balance of class forces on the planet which can best understand who is friend and who is not, and establish real solid unity.
It is the highest scientific world view which can then make the most flexible tactical moves by continuously having in mind and developing a total perspective of the class struggle - including offering the West Bank a renewed chance to built Palestinian unity as Hamas has done etc. or even various tactical agreements with imperialism and the Zionists.
But it is no mistake that lying warmonger Tony Blair is now be a “special envoy” for a special effort to re-instate the “two state” compromise nonsense, hoping that the partial understanding of even the Hamas and other militancies can be yet confused and prevarication continued, perhaps .
But as the Gaza events demonstrate, the material pressures of the imperialist crisis will increasingly force more clarity to the surface, even if there is a long and twisted road to go yet before a scientific world view is achieved.
Conditions leading to catastrophic slump crisis collapse (which none of the fake-”left” truly understand, whatever academic articles they produce on it, until recently mostly ridiculing the EPSR for its constant warnings on the subject) are getting more desperate for imperialism.
It underlying problem of massive and ever accumulating capital surplus, has neither gone away nor can go away.
The relentless factory production of dollar bills which have constantly inflated the credit system since the end of the Second World War, to feed the monopoly capitalist dominance established by the USA, is reaching ever closer to total implosion and collapse of the dollar.
It has not been helped by the insane expenditure on the Iraq war ($hundreds of billions each year) which has included the incredible spectacle of pallet loads of dollar bills flown in by transport plane and simply disbursed.
At any time this endless pollution of the completely interlocked (globalised) world trading system could collapse completely.
Despite official “low inflation” figures it is clear that massive hidden inflation is threatening all the time to burst through, reflected in the house price insanity, the rapidly climbing prices of world commodities like steel, concrete, timber, and the enormous growing income and wealth differentials in the leading capitalist countries.
The “new” phenomena of private equity investment and its stratospheric levels of greed driven “reward” and “remuneration” equally reflect the insane levels of credit now flooding the system driving price levels haywire.
Even the comfortable Tory middle class is feeling the pinch despite its notionally high incomes – confirming once again the much ridiculed but fundamentally sound understanding of Marxist economics that eventually the capitalist system will impoverish not only the great proletarian masses but will equally drive the petty bourgeoisie downwards into the great mass.
It remains astonishingly difficult to draw together and understand the entire pattern of world flows of capital and credit and make any kind of confident definite predictions. But the capitalist press is constantly reflecting the deep nervousness which runs right through the capitalist finance establishment:
Last week’s wrenching sell-off in bond markets around the world could burst asset-price bubbles in sectors from fine wine to property as investors wake up to a world of higher interest rates, analysts are warning.
Yields on benchmark 10-year US Treasury bonds surged through 5 per cent last week, as investors lost hope of an early rate cut from Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. Investors who have borrowed cheaply and poured cash into risky assets will be forced to reassess their positions as borrowing costs rise.
‘I would see the asset boom of recent years as being associated with a great splurge of liquidity, which at its bottom has low real interest rates and low bond yields,’ said Roger Bootle, economic advisor to Deloitte and Touche. ‘If that is going to be reversed, it could affect assets of almost all types.’
The earth moved in global financial markets at the end of last week. After March’s sharp tremors across the world’s stock markets, this time it was the turn of the bond markets to shake up investors.
There now seems little doubt that we are approaching a watershed at which global financial conditions, which have been remarkably benign for a protracted period, are shifting to a new and more unpredictable dynamic – one with far-reaching repercussions.
To many observers, the events in the second half of last week will seem arcane. A sudden spate of heavy selling of longer-dated, ten-year US Treasury notes, fostered in part by technical adjustments in the hedging of Americans’ mortgage debt, triggered an abrupt jump in benchmark US bond yields.
Yet far from being arcane or irrelevant, last week’s moves are almost certainly the precursors of a global sea-change in financial markets that will wipe out the key assumptions underpinning dozens of high-risk investment strategies, and undercut the financial logic behind at least some of the present wave of highly leveraged corporate mergers.
It was not merely the scale and speed of the shift in bond markets on Thursday and Friday that hinted at its significance, but also the shattering of an historic trend that embodied the recent, prolonged era of abundant capital and low volatility that has proved so fertile for markets, investors, speculators, and corporate players.
On Thursday, as an aggressive sell-off ripped through the US Treasury bond market, the yield on benchmark ten-year notes burst back above 5 per cent in its steepest daily move for two years. Then, on Friday, the ten-year yield came within a fraction of reaching the key threshold of 5.25 per cent.
Crucially, these moves brought to an end a two-decade-long pattern of the bull market in bonds in which successive peaks in ten-year yields have been progressively lower. For many in the markets, the breaching of the 20-year trend was a spine-tingling moment – and rightly so. At the same time, we also witnessed the apparent unwinding of the famous “conundrum” highlighted by Alan Greenspan, of the persistence of very low long-term market interest rates.
To understand the implications, we need to consider what was driving these events.
Despite widespread assertions to the contrary, this does not really seem to have been a sudden flap about inflation dangers. The shift that took place was concentrated in real bond yields, with index-linked bonds barely affected. In addition, the move was not accompanied by any parallel jump in gold prices, which is what would have been expected if this was an inflation scare.
Instead, there seem to be two more credible, principal explanations here. The first is that the Treasuries market finally cottoned on to the likelihood that, with somewhat better than previously anticipated prospects for American growth, the Federal Reserve will not be cutting US official interest rates any time soon.
The second factor is that this sudden leap in US market interest rates reflects the sharp, worldwide slowdown in the past, very rapid expansion of global liquidity as all of the world’s key central banks (besides the Fed) tighten the interest rate screws.
This second factor is one reason why the surge in US benchmark bond yields was mirrored in the British, continental European and Japanese government bonds markets, too.
Where, then, do we go next? In the short-run, as we report this morning, analysts expect a further bout of bond market turbulence driven by the shift in US rate expectations. So much seems inevitable – as does some spillover of increased volatility into other asset markets.
What is not clear is whether the upward march of benchmark yields, in the US at least, will prove a decisive trend. In America, significantly higher yields, if they do persist, probably contain the seeds of their own destruction. As this rise in market interest rates intensifies the squeeze on an already weakened US economy, markedly raising the cost of capital for borrowers, a deeper slowdown in American growth will ultimately trigger a fresh reappraisal of the growth outlook that will send yields lower once more.
....The benign constellation of financial trends that has fuelled a global boom in assets of all kinds for the past five years is now breaking down.
The past global glut of cheap capital created by low official interest rates flooded into every corner of financial markets. As prices rose, and returns were depressed, the much-vaunted “search for yield” encouraged moves into ever riskier assets and strategies in a hunt for enhanced performance.
Much of this is, if not quite over, now coming to an end. And the adjustment to a new era will bring casualties as speculators are wrong-footed and miscalculations are unmasked.
...If you thought you heard a crunch just then, you probably weren’t mistaken.
The stunning growth of the Chinese economy, using capitalist methods and investment but made possible so fast only because of the overall planning imposed by the Beijing revisionist workers state control, has given capitalist world economics a major boost, soaking up dollar credit and providing cheap goods which have held inflation back in the western economies.
But the purchasing power of China in the world is gradually pushing inflation higher; and increasingly threatening the major capitalist economies.
Anti-communist hostility (still fundamental despite Beijing’s sometimes dire capitulations to and compromises with western ideology (such as the “war on terror”)) combines with trade war viciousness as China is astoundingly blamed for being “too successful”:
The US Congress last night ratcheted up the pressure on the White House to impose protectionist measures against Chinese imports after the Bush administration shied away from accusing Beijing of manipulating its currency.
Although the half-yearly currency report by the US Treasury used its toughest language yet to criticise China for its undervalued exchange rate, the report also said there was no evidence the yuan was being held down to secure an unfair advantage.
The rhetoric failed to satisfy a bellicose Congress. Within minutes, members of both the majority Democrat party and the Republican party announced they would table legislation enabling the US to retaliate against “unfair” competition from China. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate banking committee, and Richard Shelby, the committee’s leading Republican, said they would sponsor a bill giving the Treasury the option to take a case against China to the World Trade Organisation, and to open discussions with the International Monetary Fund about possible currency manipulation.
Mr Dodd, one of the Democrat candidates for the 2008 presidency, said that a change in America’s currency manipulation policy was “long overdue”, while Mr Shelby said that, in spite of the evidence, “[The] Treasury has regrettably declined to label China a currency manipulator”.
Another group of legislators, led by the New York senator Chuck Schumer, was last night planning to announce their own plan for a bill to permit the Bush administration to impose tariffs on Chinese goods. Strongly backed by the US manufacturing sector, the hawks on Capitol Hill say the yuan is undervalued by 40%, making possible a surge of cheap imports which has cost American workers their jobs.
Protectionism has been strongly resisted by the Treasury secretary, Hank Paulson. He said yesterday he favoured dialogue with Beijing rather than confrontation. Speaking in Atlanta, he expressed sympathy with the legislators’ motives but opposed their methods: “I happen to believe the most effective way to get movement and progress is through direct discussions and negotiations, not through legislation.”
The stern tone of the Treasury report, however, suggested that the White House felt it had to respond to the growing anger on Capitol Hill. “[The] Treasury forcefully raises the Chinese exchange rate regime with Chinese authorities at every available opportunity, and will continue to do so,” the report said.
“China should not hesitate any longer to take far more vigorous action to re-balance its economy, promote immediate renminbi [China’s name for the yuan] movement to tackle the currency’s undervaluation, and achieve far greater flexibility in the exchange rate regime,” it added.
The Treasury warned Beijing that running large and growing current-account surpluses could backfire, since holding down the yuan’s value had led to a massive build-up in reserves and lots of money circulating in the economy. This meant speculation in the short-term, but could eventually lead to inflation and a painful crash. “Heavy foreign exchange market intervention by China’s central bank to manage the currency has led to excessive accumulation of foreign exchange reserves and a quick increase in domestic liquidity. These trends clearly increase the risk of a renewed boom-bust cycle, which would be quite harmful for the global economy.”
Some analysts believe that any decision by the Treasury to cite China formally for currency manipulation would trigger a sell-off in global financial markets, on edge after the recent sharp increase in bond yields. Long-term borrowing costs in the US as measured by yield on a 10-year Treasury bond have risen half a point since April and are close to a five-year high.
Markets are concerned that the upswing in the global economy, enjoying its strongest spell of sustained growth since the late 1960s and early 1970s, has resulted in rising inflation and further increases in interest rates.
Backstory: Pressure has mounted on China to tackle its soaring trade surplus. Last year the US/China trade deficit hit a record $233bn (£118bn) and will top that this year. Europe’s was €128bn (£86.2bn) last year. The US and China recently held a “strategic economic dialogue” in Washington, while the EU commissioner Peter Mandelson met China’s trade minister Bo Xilai in Brussels on Tuesday and said “something had to be done”.
These straws in the wind keep blowing past because the imperialist system is headed for the biggest and most historically significant shattering economic and political crisis collapse in all of its long exploitative domination.
It is to all intents and purposes the terminal crisis of a defunct and now deadly destructive social order, way out of time and ripe for overthrow and replacement by human rationality.
There is an urgent need for Leninist understanding.
Don Hoskins
Return to the top
Victory for anti-imperialism in Gaza shows Western colonial and Zionist domination of the Middle East will be DEFEATED
The Hamas movement may be formally “Islamic fundamentalist” but it is the irrationality of illusions in a “two-state” solution and a “negotiated peace process” that has been overcome. Treacherous class collaboration by Abbas and the corrupt stooge Arab regimes, and the wretchedness of the Stalinist-revisionist and reformist lines on Palestine have been utterly exposed
The Hamas victory in Gaza has struck a historic blow against US fascist blitzkrieg domination over the planet and its Zionist attack dog.
The West is horrified that all of its machinations to crush the spirit of Palestinian resistance by arming up the Abbas collaborators with Zionism and getting them to shoot down the Hamas revolution in Gaza have come unstuck.
The Nazi lying fraud of the “free world” that it is for “democracy” has been doubly exposed – once, by its refusal to recognise the election victory of the Hamas anti-imperialist movement in Palestine and the resulting unity government, and then again by the West’s well-documented attempt to murder the Hamas leadership using corrupt stooges from within Fatah.
The West’s own twisted reports of the conflict in Gaza show the Fatah attack was armed and spurred on by the West and the Zionists and that the Nazi-camp guard behaviour of Fatah hitman Dahlan in Gaza – attempting to assassinate the Hamas leaders – left Hamas with no choice but to destroy Fatah in Gaza:
Here is how democracy works in the Alice in Wonderland world of Palestinian politics under the tutelage of the US and international community. After years of being hectored to hold elections and adopt democratic norms, a year and a half ago Palestinians duly elected Hamas with 44 per cent of the vote, ahead of Fatah on 41 per cent.
It was a good election, as former US President Jimmy Carter observed at the time, a free, fair and accurate expression of the desires of a Palestinian people sick of the uselessness, corruption and gangsterism of Fatah. The problem was that it didn’t quite reflect the wishes of Washington and the international community.
And while there can be no denying that Hamas, which refutes the existence of Israel and has backed suicide bombings, is a threatening organisation, there was no attempt at engagement, in the way that Fatah, whose militants have perpetrated scores of attacks, has been engaged with for years.
Now, after the months of financial embargo of the Hamas-led government by the US and Europe, after the funding and propping up of Fatah’s President Mahmoud Abbas, after the slow, crushing squeeze on Palestinian society that encouraged its social disintegration, what have we got? Virtual civil war in Gaza, the polarisation of Palestinian society, a government dissolved by decree, and a new Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, appointed with the explicit blessing of the US.
The West has boycotted Hamas since it swept to a surprise parliamentary election in January last year, as it considers the Islamist group a terrorist organisation that refuses to recognise Israel or renounce violence.
Israel and the US are expected to ease an embargo on the Palestinian Authority in order to boost Mr Abbas and his secular Fatah group, now that there are two warring Palestinian entities.
What the West is most horrified about is the shocking truth that the destruction of bourgeois forces in Gaza signals to all Palestinians, all Arabs, the entire Third World (and beyond to the rich, Western “democracies”) – that for a people under fascist monopoly-capitalist oppression there will come a time when the only choice is to fight, and that that fight can be indomitable.
Now the Western-backed despots of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia can only quake in their boots at what the implications are for their populations, permanaently aggrieved at the humiliation to the Arab nation of the implantation of the monstrous Zionist cuckoo in the nest.
Compare the “official” reactionary Western line that the Palestinians have been “weakened” by “ceasing to offer a non-terrorist negotiating partner with Israel” – when in reality all that the Palestinians have lost is an ILLUSION that a tiny “homeland” will be granted them by genocidal Zionism – with the REAL analysis (even by Western stooge journalism) that the class collaborating Abbas Fatah side, the Zionists, Washington, London, and the treacherous feudal Arab kingdoms have all been knocked completely sideways by Hamas’s arms-in-hand revolutionary triumph. First the fiction:
Hamas flags flying in triumph over the Gaza Strip represent a historic blow to Palestinian national unity as well as an end to already slim hopes for any sort of meaningful peace process with Israel.
Barring some dramatic reversal after the latest fighting - such as the improbable survival of the Hamas-Fatah coalition government - 1.4 million Palestinians in what is now being dubbed “Hamastan” will not only be physically cut off from their compatriots in the West Bank but will also be ruled by a movement that advocates armed resistance and is boycotted by Israel and the international community.
Neither side will be in a position to conduct negotiations with Israel or anyone else, killing off any hopes of urgently needed momentum to the current stalemate. “It leaves the Palestinians fragmented and very weak,” said a senior Arab diplomat.
Now the REALITY of what the stinking Western press fears (from the same article):
Watching from the sidelines, Israel now has few options left. Ehud Olmert’s weak government is unlikely to send its forces permanently back to Gaza, though it may be the Hamas strategy to try to make that happen as it smuggles weapons under the border from Egypt. Hamas is seen in Jerusalem as the instrument of Israel’s arch-enemy, Iran, which along with Syria helped the Lebanese Shia movement, Hizbullah, in its 33-day war with Israel last summer. “This situation isn’t good for Israel. It’s actually dreadful,” said the veteran Yediot Aharonot analyst Roni Shaked.
Hamas has crushed the hopes of the Bush administration that Fatah would be able to re-establish security control over Gaza, a long-standing Israeli condition for resuming negotiations. Washington had just launched a controversial $60m programme to bolster Mr Abbas’s presidential guard and Israel had quietly allowed Arab states to send in arms and ammunition.
The pro-western Arab states, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are devastated by the Hamas victory, which fuels their own fears of domestic Islamist opposition and strong dislike of Iran’s role in Iraq and Lebanon. They say they want a ceasefire between the Palestinian factions, and then between Palestinians and Israelis. That must be followed by a new and credible peace process
Since 1948, when the Palestinian nation was dispossessed of its land by Western colonialism in the form of the creation of the bogus “state of Israel”, the big lie has been told that a quiescent Palestinian people would eventually get a decent part of what had been their homeland to live on, and that therefore, any fightback they made was intolerable “terrorism”, which would only delay a fair settlement.
Nearly 60 years later, and with generations raised in miserable exile or in appalling conditions in refugee camps or living as second-class citizens in their own land, that lie has been shattered.
The Western press fascist lie machine is desperately trying to keep this disgusting total gibberish going, pretending the end of the Palestinian Authority as a unity government means the Palestinians lack a “viable negotiating partner” so they have “written off any chance of getting a state of their own”.
But a patchwork of pitifully small prison camps does not make for a nation; the land of Palestine is rightfully all theirs; and the world today is rejecting all imperialism, whatever the brutality of its warmongering (as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, South America etc, etc).
Most of all, the racist Zionist killers could never give the people they have conquered anything other than genocide – for the fictional land of “Israel” to exist, the Palestinian nation has to die completely.
But now last year’s huge military defeat for the Zionist gangsters in Lebanon has been followed up the titanic rejection of all pacifist illusions in Gaza. The West Bank can only follow.
The Palestinians are in fact closer than ever to getting their homeland – all of it – by virtue of showing their preparedness to fight and die in their unequal struggle with the Zionist war machine (backed by billions of US dollars), rather than live (if permitted to live) in tiny prison camps.
Four generations of Palestinians have suffered the humiliation of their ghastly conditions, and the double humiliation of leaderships addle-brained by notions that the West would one day bring them a “just and fair” solution.
The rise and victory in Gaza of the Hamas rejectionist front shows that this hopeless reformist nonsense – which became a way of life for the bourgeois reformists to indulge in corrupt lifestyles at the expense of their people – and was backed by Stalinist revisionism from the formation of “Israel” onwards – has been totally exposed.
Chris Barratt
Return to the top