Back issue
No 1382 11th February 2011
Stunning Egyptian and Tunisian risings are powerful confirmation of imperialism’s catastrophic economic and political failure and the Third World rebellion it is causing which will turn the crisis screw ever further. But decades of revisionist muddle and retreat from revolution has left a leadership vacuum which urgently needs filling with a fight for Leninist revolutionary science and leadership, there and everywhere. Build Leninism now
The giant upheavals spreading like a virus in the Middle East and now touching Yemen and Jordan as well as Tunisia and Egypt are shattering blows against imperialism’s failing grip on the planet.
These are already more than “ten days that shook the world” as the American journalist John Reed declared of the titanic Bolshevik revolution in 1917.
The events are nowhere near fully-fledged communist revolution nor are there any signs they will yet become so.
It remains to be seen how far they can go in immediately shaking the Mubarak gangster regime to pieces.
But even if for the moment they get no further than the spontaneous anger and incredible bravery and sacrifice (over 300 lives so far) which has chased out one repressive imperialist stooge capitalist dictator, Ben Ali, and has been ready to hang Mubarak in effigy in Cairo, they will intensify the collapse in confidence of the ruling imperialist monopoly domination caused by its intractable slump crisis problems.
They will also change for ever the consciousness and understanding of the Middle Eastern masses and of the whole Third World and their own confidence in their mass strength and ability.
The great question now posed is the urgent need for revolutionary understanding.
Vital Leninist theory alone can provide the leadership to transform the struggles into a complete overthrow of capitalism.
However long that might take (and decades of failing to build any such perspectives and organisation because of Stalinist revisionist retreat and the “collapse” of communism it led to – in reality the defeatist liquidation of the still viable Soviet Union – make the task greater) it is a crucial perspective for guiding all coming struggles.
Without the aim of establishing disciplined workers states capable of resisting the endless subversion and sabotage of imperialism while they get on with building planned socialist production, there is no way out of the chaos and escalating warmongering destruction of the anarchic capitalist system.
The world is crying out for Leninist communist leadership to give form and coherence to the struggles, and to give them the knowledge and strength to survive and develop.
Encouragingly, great throngs on the street in Tunisia, Cairo, Alexandra and to some extent tiny Yemen have so far refused to be fobbed off with just the expulsion of figurehead dictators and are demanding deeper and more far reaching changes.
But they are a long way from cohering into the clear and organised struggle that is needed.
They are a long way from calls for socialism as far as can be discerned at present.
That may emerge, but they are certainly a long way from an understanding of the need to build a disciplined and organised working class movement which can establish a class based power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, to completely overturn all private profit based production and the vicious class society built on it, the source and cause of all their problems.
The rejection of the capitalist stooge Mubarak dictatorship and repression which has held them down, and their refusal to be cowed is an excellent start but still going little beyond anarchic rebellion at best or petty bourgeois liberalism.
Such leadership as is being reported in the capitalist press seems limited to “democratic demands”:
Inside, as midday struck, hundreds of thousands bent down to pray, a moment of silence to remember the scores of protesters who have lost their lives in the past fortnight. As they rose, the chants against their president that have filled this square for days rang out with renewed energy. “Mubarak leave now!” bellowed Tahrir. “The people want this regime to fall.”
What shape that fall and its aftermath should take is the subject of increased focus amongst protesters, many of whom are aiming to give their demands a firmer shape without compromising the non-hierarchical nature of their uprising so far.
The Guardian has received a copy of four specific demands laid down by a loose coalition of 300 youth co-ordinators who helped plan the initial demonstrations last week against Mubarak and his regime. They include not just the removal of Mubarak but also the disassembling of the entire NDP elite around him, precluding a smooth transition should vice-president Omar Suleiman, a close Mubarak ally, take the helm once the president leaves.
The document also calls for the formation of a committee made up of judges, youth leaders and the military which will appoint a transitional government, plus a founding council of intellectuals and constitutional experts who will draw up a new constitution and put it to the Egyptian people in a referendum. Finally it demands free and fair elections at a local and national level once the new constitution has been implemented.
But these are the tame ineffectual demands that the revisionist so-called “communists” have tepidly put forwards, including the alleged “hard nuts” of the Stalin-nostalgics like Lalkar/Proletarian whose “analysis” of Egypt mouthed a few platitudes about the pace of events in revolutionary times and concluded:
It is very much to be hoped
(!!!!)
that the masses will be successful in smashing all plots to steal their revolutions and install revolutionary-democratic and genuinely anti-imperialist regimes - regimes that are able to attend to the problems of their own people and free the region from the suffocating grip of the imperialist looters. The Arab people have everything to gain from such a struggle and we wish them every success.”
How can so much be got wrong and so much opportunism be crammed into a few sentences???
If the vicar-like passively-murmured “hoping” means anything at all why is the Lalkar not raising immediately for the masses in Egypt the question of the raging catastrophic capitalist collapse everywhere.
It is this which challenges everyone (and not just the “Arab people” so opportunistically patronised in this Lalkar phrase) – with the disintegration of the now interlinked whole world monopoly capitalist economic and political system and its relentless plunge into total disaster, destruction and World War.
Why are they not explaining the unbearable historical tensions caused by the contradictions of class rule which can no longer take humanity anywhere except into Slump, disaster and utter blitzkrieg destruction as the great dinosaur imperialist monopoly rivals fight for collapsing markets.
What is this opportunist limitation of “democratic” and “genuine” anti-imperialism which says nothing about building Marxism and Leninist leadership to fight for proletarian dictatorship???
But the giant world crisis poses all this right now.
Of course the great mixed throng of raw protest in Tahrir Square demands first of all freedom and a voice.
And all blows against the torturing dictatorship that force a relaxation in its grip (and the US imperialists behind it), are progress.
But the great upsurge can only make sense, be inspired and guard against subversion and being thrown off course, collapsing back into stifling reaction and demoralisation, with the profoundest struggle for Leninist communist consciousness.
If the momentum is headed-off into a variety of cul-de-sacs and “democracy” feints which can solve nothing as such in themselves and have the danger of going right back round into the repression and stoogery of the past, under new management, nothing will have been learned. The danger is apparent in Tunisia:
Few places better illustrate the problems of Tunisia’s unfinished revolution than Kasserine, a lawless and poverty-stricken border town nestled below mountains on the Algerian frontier, nearly 200 miles south-west of Tunis. For centuries a bastion of rebellion and unrest, the rural town of 100,000 people had the highest death toll of the revolution after Ben Ali’s police snipers were ordered to shoot to kill to quell street demonstrations. Far from the golden tourist coast, Kasserine has the highest unemployment, crime rate, suicide levels and divorce figures in Tunisia.
Jobs are so scarce that much of the population survives from the smuggling of petrol, cigarettes and hashish over the Algerian border. Makeshift stands sell jerrycans of contraband fuel for £1 a throw.
Kasserine was at the forefront of Tunisia’s historic January uprising, the first time in the Arab world that people on the streets have ousted a brutal dictator. The country’s hope of becoming the first true Arab democracy spread across the region, inspiring Egypt’s revolt. But as the world spotlight turns to Cairo, Tunisia’s rural interior fears its revolution could disintegrate.
The town now finds itself at the heart of the attempts by Ben Ali’s former ruling RCD party to stir fresh violence to disrupt the revolution. In the past three days, at least five people have died in Tunisia in the worst violence since Ben Ali fled on January 14. The interim government has blamed the wave of violence on a plot by old figures in the RCD party to stir panic and damage the revolution.
Last week in Kasserine at least 1,000 thugs descended on the town centre, ransacking schools, smashing buildings, attacking the court-house and robbing at knifepoint, left to run riot through the town by the lack of police. “This was a war of terrorism,” said local lawyer Bedma Askri. “The RCD paid criminals and thugs around 15 dinars each [£5] to do this.
“In some cases, they just plied them with alcohol in exchange for violence. That’s poverty for you, when someone will smash up a town and terrify people in exchange for a drink.”
Anti-RCD demonstrators took to the streets of Kasserine and the chaos spread. Further north along the Algerian border in Kef, crowds rose up this weekend after police shot dead two demonstrators protesting against security forces. Government buildings were ransacked and burned in protest at the deaths. In Kebili, in the south, a youth hit by a teargas canister was killed as anti-police demonstrations were violently put down. Protests spread to Sidi Bouzid, near Kasserine, where the revolution began in December when an unemployed graduate set himself alight.
Elsewhere across Tunisia, from Sfax on the coast to Bizerte north of Tunis, crowds protested against the appointment of new local governors they said were RCD cronies. In a desperate attempt to calm tensions, the interim government finally caved in to demands to dissolve the RCD party, symbol of the old regime, taking the first steps to suspend party activities.
Protesters today crowded outside the Tunis parliament building during the first meeting of MPs since the revolution, demanding that the assembly, dominated by the RCD, also be dissolved. The country is still under a midnight curfew which the government is nervous about dropping.
“The revolution isn’t over yet,” said Abdelaziz Bouazi, a Kasserine trade unionist and history teacher. He had been up until 4am patrolling his street as part of a neighbourhood vigilante group. Hundreds of prisoners, including convicted murderers, had escaped in Kasserine during the chaos of the revolution and were still at large.
“Men aged between 15 and 35 don’t sleep at night here, they’re up protecting the streets. There’s no rule of law – the judges are still corrupt, so there’s no justice.”
For lawyers, trade unionists and opposition politicians, Kasserine will be the true test of Tunisia’s revolution, which has seen more than 200 dead and more than 500 injured, as well as rapes and disappearances. “It’s only here, in this forsaken region, that you’ll be able to judge whether it has worked, whether the acute inequality of Tunisia is over and the old regime finally finished,” Bouazi said. “The regime’s head has been cut off but the beast is still breathing. For now, the demonstrations will continue.”
Kasserine’s trade unionists are planning more local protests against the interim government’s appointment of regional governors seen as still craven towards the old regime. In the mining heartland of Gafsa, one new governor has already been forced from his offices under army escort after locals rose up in revolt.
Tunisia’s population of 10 million, seen as one broadly united front against Ben Ali, does not face a problem of breaking up along tribal lines. But the rural regions, far poorer than the tourist coast, insist they will revolt again if their problems of acute unemployment and corruption are not addressed.
In Kasserine, students picked through the charred remains of the former secret police headquarters, where torture was routine. The floors were strewn with files detailing which locals had been given numbers and spied on.
Upstairs, a fetid cell still stank of human excrement. “We’re watching events, but if nothing real changes in people’s lives here – no equality, no opportunities, no chance to work, the stranglehold of the RCD party – we’ll stage a new revolution,” said Aymen Fakraoui, an engineering student.
That is exactly what the ruling class wants in calls for “calm” from William Hague and Hilary Clinton Barack Obama.
And no surprise that leading “moderate” liberals like Al-Baradei, a Nobel Peace prize winner (a “qualification” that should immediately disqualify anyone in a cloud of the greatest suspicions) has been parachuted into Cairo.
Consciousness is needed immediately whatever can be achieved in the streets at present, setting its sights on the ending of all imperialism everywhere as part of a complete world struggle.
Essentially all the world’s masses are ready to learn this.
This is not backward 1905 with a vast population of peasants isolated on the great steppes and barely able to use a knife and fork let alone attain socialist consciousness, colonial “natives” easily awed and impressed, and forelock tugging class relations persisting still even in parts of the richest countries.
This is the world of mobile phones and Internet universal international news and sophistication even among these who are most exploited and degraded and oppressed, kept in enforced lack of education, poverty and silence.
Revolutionary democracy???
What a completely criminally disarming monstrosity of evasion and cowardice and failure to present the ABC of Marxism which leaves the working class vulnerable to all the manipulations and coups that have slaughtered hundreds of thousands – tens of millions – since the end of the Second World War alone (and which continue apace around the non-Marxist demagoguery of the “Bolivarian 21st century socialism” for example despite new warnings like the Honduran coup, and attempts at coups in Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia etc.
Events in Cairo have already delivered a thousand lessons in the monstrous hypocrisy and fraudulence of capitalist “freedom and democracy” lies, which have supported and funded the thug monster Mubarak for 30 years (among many such fascist regimes) while pumping out the endless hypocritical “freedom” campaigns against imperialist demonised scapegoats from Myanmar (Burma), Sudan, and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, to Iran and Venezuela, blitzing and bombing for “regime change” when deemed necessary as in Iraq and Afghanistan, or constantly provoking and threatening, as recently against North Korea, endlessly against Iran and all the remaining workers states like Cuba and most of all China.
The reality of the “democracy” Washington and London are hastily pretending to be interested in suddenly for the masses of Egypt or Tunisia (abandoning to the crocodiles their now damaged-goods stooge with typical no-honour-among-thieves bad faith) – this “democracy” has always been the cover only for endless fascist blitzkrieg, gangsterism and manipulation to keep the world in thrall for grinding exploitation.
The imperialist West and particularly the dominant US monopoly capitalist power has long not only supported the festering and depraved fascist brutality of these regimes (and plenty more) but has financed them, armed them, advised them and controlled them, as part of the jackboot writ of imperialist exploitation everywhere.
Egypt has been one of the key destinations for the CIA (and MI6) rendition flights taking selected victims spirited from the streets into a sinister and barbaric world of tiny cells and torture rooms, Mubarak’s notorious police and secret security service a useful proxy for carrying out the brutal and barbaric torture the West pretends not to be involved in (but in which it actually leads the way as Wikileaks and other revelations have further proved recently).
That democracy trick includes (and has been most successfully used to “fool the people”) the “sophisticated democracy” of the great “parliaments” of the richest and most “open free speech” Western countries, and most of all the “liberal” Obama/Clinton “black liberal” and “feminist” presidency, the most sickening application of “politically correct” single-issue politics yet to cover outright cynical reactionary manipulation.
The sudden discovery of the “rights and ambitions of the people of Egypt for democracy and the hope of reforms” being earnestly proselytised by the “great leaders” of the Western world, including the Camerons and Hagues of the Tory Government, is a sickening spectacle of humbug and threadbare dissembling that would make a five-year old infant’s denials of hitting their sibling look sophisticated.
Only six weeks ago the most glaringly stitched-up and manipulated election in the history of stitched up and manipulated election rackets (essentially all capitalist parliaments and presidencies) was carried out to keep the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship in place in Cairo.
The ludicrous pretence of a “98%” victory passed with barely a murmur from the West, just a raised eyebrow here and there and the turgid, buried, down-page news stories that are always published deep within the foreign pages, so that the Western capitalist establishment can formally rebut and deny what in practical effect is total press control and censorship, continuing to the end the laughable pretence of “free speech” and “open debate”.
But not a word appeared in the popular press, and none of the hysterical front page stories backed-up with pages of snatched photos and “inside stories” and “spreads”, endless TV news film and none of the pompous “statements” and political condemnations which pour out for weeks on end over the slightest pretext around some specious, unverified, unwitnessed, petty bourgeois story of alleged “persecution” or “repression” in the countries and regimes that have incurred the West’s displeasure, like Zimbabwe, or Iran, or Burma or Sudan, or China or Cuba.
What rank and vile hypocrisy.
It is even more repulsive coming from the “great black hope” Obama presidency which has shamelessly used both black nationalist aspirations and feminism to disguise and continue the monstrous fascist warmongering of the American Empire throughout the Middle East, and escalating it ever further with the torture and mechanised drone civilian blitzing of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the coup in Honduras and constant coup plotting against the left nationalisms of Venezuela and Bolivia etc.
What a foul Nazi manipulation of liberal illusions, far cleverer than the original Goebbels ever could be – even if all liberal and fake-“left” “politically correct” illusions in single issue causes could, and should, have expected nothing better from bourgeois “democracy” and especially after a century of lessons in its gross hypocrisy and the trickery of reformism.
Even greater humbug is the pretence that now “the people” should choose their leaders as a sanctimonious William Hague says, while Uriah Heap-like “ever so ‘umbly” declaring that the West should “not interfere in the sovereign rights of another nation to choose its own leaders”.
Would that be in the way that the West has “not interfered” to make “regime change” in Iraq or Afghanistan, or constantly declares its ambitions to depose any number of other scapegoated and demonised leaders???
Only weeks ago the capitalist press was full of calls for intervention to oust by invasion and the ultimate violence of armies the just-elected president of the Ivory Coast because of the alleged “will of the international community” meaning the imperialist US, its pet UN bureaucracy, the European Union of the other rich Western countries and the lead stooges of the African Union, like ultra-corrupt oil-soaked Nigeria (itself a constant alternation of brutal military coups and light-fingered Swiss bank account “parliaments”, and all run by the Western oil giants anyway as Wikileaks showed recently).
Together they arrogantly declared they would ride roughshod over the internal constitutional procedures of the Ivory Coast, which had found for duly elected president Laurent Gbagbo, because they did not succeed in twisting the election to put in their own compliant stooge candidate Outtara who they therefore simply declared to be the winner anyway.
Interference is all that imperialism does throughout the world and has done for decades to manipulate and twist and pressure and bribe its gangster and fascist stooges into place, to keep the masses of the planet permanently under the brutal jackboot, and therefore permanently docile and pliable for maximum exploitation in the sweatshop factories, near-slave plantations and deadly mines.
Bribery, skulduggery, obscene press and media brainwashing internally and via the BBC and Voice of America, ballot rigging, gerrymandering, massive financial interventions, and relentless international pressure through sanctions and constant background or even overt military threat are the norm for all “democracy” throughout the bourgeois controlled world, and right into the heart of the advanced countries (most of all).
And if that does not work then the CIA and other intelligence agencies will be working overtime to jostle and bribe and provoke petty bourgeois “populist” movements, reactionary blockades, and right-wing strike disruptions, using bought officials, journalist agents, stooge trade unionists, and corrupted academics, etc etc to disrupt and paralyse any movements towards genuine freedom or socialist reform.
The classic example is the fate of deluded revisionist Salvador Allende’s government, completely sabotaged in Chile initially throughout its three years of properly elected “legal communism” rule, before its inevitable overthrow in 1973 by the fascist Nazi brutality and torture of General Augustus Pinochet, trained and guided by the CIA,
That the devastating stupidity of revisionism had invited the monster into the government to “keep order” against the intelligence agency provoked strikes and turmoil is an important lesson on top.
Finally if even paralysing disruption does not work then comes the overthrow itself, the coups, the death squad intimidation, massacres, torture, violent repression, exactly as with Chile and as country after country in Latin America, Asia, and Africa have suffered since (and will continue suffering until imperialist skulduggery is ended).
In the Middle East the regime change invasions and torturing blitzkrieg civilian-killing occupations have produced nothing but corrupt failure in Iraq (even to form a stooge government) and a government in Afghanistan that is a byword for bribery, drug-running warlordism, corruption and public election racketeering.
Pakistan swings between military coups and degenerate pocket-lining opportunist pretences of parliamentary democracy.
Where people have been able to seize the electoral process to reflect their will in spite of all Western manipulation and pressure (no easy matter), in Lebanon and on the Gaza strip in Palestine for the most telling examples, the West has not only completely ignored the result but has simply declared another winner, like the super-degenerate stoogery of Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, whose “compromises” have recently been revealed by Al-Jazeera to lead only into the most degenerate collaboration with Zionism and imperialism – a state level “trusteeship” to equate with the foulest cooperation by any concentration camp prisoners anywhere in history. [It is small wonder the Lalkar/Proletarian Stalinist revisionists are saying nothing about their early support for Abbas (and the opportunist compromiser Arafat before him), trying to cover-up their grotesque errors with ever more strident “support” for Hamas (and tangling the past mistakes and stupidities of revisionism in even greater dishonesty by just such cover-up).
Marxism does not support anything but Marxism and scientific understanding however brilliantly various leaderships have carried forwards the rising militancy of the Third World (as Hamas have done for a while).
That does not imply any kind of sectarian dismissal of any struggles with can impose defeat on imperialism and its agencies.
By whatever means and by whatever leadership every steps forwards which reflect better the increasing determination of the masses such as the heroic Palestinians, is welcome.
But only scientific Marxism will finally end for good the imperialist system, the source of all the world’s problems, and confusing the world with “support” that does not make that clear is simply adding to confusion.]
The lessons of “democracy” have been most savagely driven home to the Gazans, not only by imposing the Abbasite treachery on them anyway but through another round of jet fighter and tank invasion, terrorising, genocidal savagery, the most barbaric “punishment” yet in the constant siege blitzkrieging Nazi onslaughts carried out by the demented and self-righteous occupying Zionist Jews, horrifying the entire world by its white phosphorus Nazi criminal savagery and needle-bomb terrorising inhumanity.
None of this and much more is drawn into the fake-“left” one-sided analyses.
The emptiness, shallowness and philosophical bankruptcy of all of them – Trotskyist poseurs and the Revisionists alike – is being demonstrated daily as this tidal wave of revolutionary feeling passes across the Middle East, with not a word from any of them about the world significance of this upheaval, and its enormous importance for revolutionary perspectives everywhere including most importantly of all in their own countries.
Not one has spelt out the overwhelming context of the world capitalist war-plunging crisis which puts the urgent requirement for universal socialist revolution at the top of the agenda.
And this exposure of the fake-“left” will be one of the best and most important results and impact of these titanic upheavals which are taking the world revolutionary struggle to a new level as the capitalist crisis unstoppably spirals into catastrophic economic and political failure, further exposing the dire philosophical opportunism, dishonesty and bankruptcy which has poisoned the great proletarian struggles in the world for decades.
Predictable headline slogans calling for “Victory” to the Egyptian people and for the “workers to consolidate their gains” have eventually emerged from the Trotskyist and revisionist fake-“left” papers, along with reams of patronising advice on “how to organise” and fatuous truisms calling for “support” from workers everywhere for the revolution.
It is nothing but empty and shallow platitudes, the mouthing of revolutionary phrases.
The limitations of the fake-“lefts” are underlined by their utter incapacity to see the giant world shattering significance of the events for their own struggles and need to build revolutionary consciousness where they are (which is the best way to “support” the Egyptians anyway rather than give them high-handed advice on how they ought to be organising on the street, with its echoes of the “how to picket” advice the fake-“lefts” Trots love to hand out to the working class here which learned such organisational basics a century ago and can do them far better than any outsider, as can the Egyptians).
It is the widest theory that is needed, not instructions on leafletting.
This is far more than a revolution in just these countries.
It is far more than bringing down the brutal gangster fascism of stooges such as Mubarak and a “struggle against imperialist brigandage and predatory wars in the region” as the Lalkar/Proletarian revisionists declare.
To limit the understanding to the “region” is to yet again try to contain the events and diminish their significance.
It smacks of the same academicism and narrow understanding that continues to declare the Western warmongering to be all about the “war for oil” rather than an expression of its complete disintegration into slump/war crisis.
Revolution is something for other people, effectively this says, happening “over there”, and conveniently lifting any responsibility for arguing for revolutionary perspectives here.
But to borrow and adapt a capitalist advertising slogan, this is “not just” an Egyptian nationalist revolution, it is “not just” a potential pan-Arab revolution. It is not even just a complete Middle East revolution and a massive extension of the regional fight to remove the demented, fanatical Zionist fascist colonialist intrusion holding down the entire region for imperialism with utmost brutality and genocidal viciousness.
Egypt is above all an indication of a leap in a generalising world revolution against the dying and moribund production-for-profit system of capitalism and its parasitic imperialist finance-monopoly capitalist form which has been stifling and choking the planet since before the turn of the twentieth century, bringing it repeatedly back to disastrous slump failure (at times partially and regionally as well as worldwide in the 1930s and now) and twice to world shattering war destruction, a path it is once more accelerating down.
The superficially startling and sudden upheavals are further confirmation of the EPSR’s long argued analysis that the great wave of insurgency, “terrorism” and even “piracy” throughout the Middle East over more than a decade of the “war on terror” is all part of a general growing process of Third World rebellion that is ripening relentlessly towards open revolutionary struggle, pushing back imperialism as part of, and feeding into, that enormous epochal crisis.
If this sometimes incoherent and sporadic but ever more confident Third World rebellion does not finally have the strength in itself to complete the job of totally overturning the throttling domination of monopoly capitalism (which remains to be seen – and it is becoming more confident) it is looking increasingly likely that it will at least erode imperialist control so far that it must eventually trigger revolutionary struggle right into the heart of the most advanced imperialist countries (just as on a far lesser scale the Vietnam Tet offensive triggered a wave of upheaval in the 1960s throughout Europe and particularly stimulated the widespread and significant Vietnam anti-war movement in the US).
The new revolts come on top of ten years of complete American Empire failure to pacify Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and Iran, and the unravelling of its imperialist authority over Pakistan, Nepal, Lebanon and even increasingly India, despite the deliberate Nazi policy of “shock and awe” intimidation.
Latin American left nationalism too threatens US interests more and more, and increasingly Africa too is in turmoil and chaos, from Nigeria to Congo to Kenya. The rumbling discontent in the Philippines continues, and the Nepalese Maoist struggle has not gone away.
The Pentagon’s “long war” plans to extend the specious nonsense of the “war on terror” into permanent intimidation of the whole planet, in order the prop up faltering US dominance against allcomers, and give it the “right” to keep plundering the lion’s share of the worlds resources and labour output, whatever economic disaster and bankruptcy its incompetence and arrogance have brought it to, are failing miserably.
Despite spending tens of billions on torturing, blitzkrieg destruction and military oppression in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan the US onslaught has failed to tame the alleged “terrorists and insurgents”.
Just the opposite, it has hardened the resolve and recruited tens of thousands more into the ranks of those who want to fight back against the endless exploitation and degradation forced on them.
Nigeria, Thailand, Indonesia, Latin America, South Africa, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Lebanon, parts of India are just a few which have joined the simmering ferment of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and above all the central and non-stop growing struggle of the genocidally brutalised and scapegoated Palestinian people, the deep heart of the Arab revolt and a critically important aspect of the new upheavals.
Internally these slow piecemeal but stalemate defeats and steadily haemorrhaging disasters have been eating away at the US empire itself, already destroying the credibility of one presidency (and its British side-kick Nazi war stooge Blairism) and rapidly exposing the fraud liberalism and “politically correct” feminist and “anti-racist” handsome black man-of-the-people cover for Obama-ism’s continuing (and escalated) fascist Nazi warmongering.
These are all expressions of the tangle of historic contradictions and impossible difficulties which now face the class-based rule of capitalism and which can only be dealt with by its complete overturn to establish rational planned socialist production across the whole world.
Its most fundamental expression is the constantly unravelling economic slump catastrophe.
Despite all the propaganda efforts to pretend that the bank credit disaster of 2008 has been “overcome” and that economies are seeing “the recovery”,the reality is that the contradictions which almost stopped the whole world capitalist trading system dead in its tracks then (another “surprise” which only Marxist-Leninism had understood and constantly warned about) have not, and cannot ease up.
Its collapses are bringing the revolutionary questions right into the heart of Europe in countries like Greece,Ireland, Portugal and Spain (and increasingly obviously the UK) where the threat of sovereign debt default and savage “austerity” is constantly recurring despite endless “rescue” packages.
The “overproduction” crisis which underlies the complete saturation of the planet in worthless paper dollars, and the US empire struggle to avoid paying for the enormous debts its rapacious demands on the planet have run up, simply gets worse and worse day by day as even the capitalist press constantly indicates:
31 Jan: The European Union is engaged in frantic behind the scenes talks to reduce Greece’s debt as international monitors fly into Athens this week. There is growing concern that the eurozone’s weakest state will be unable to end its worst crisis in decades, without a sovereign default.
Plans to buy back Greek debt at a discount – a scenario that economists call restructuring by stealth – are being given “urgent consideration,” bankers and EU officials say.
The three-stage scheme, which has dominated fringe debate at Davos, would allow the near-insolvent country to purchase Greek bonds owned by the European Central Bank at 75% of their nominal value by borrowing from the European Financial Stability Facility, the bloc’s rescue fund, at depressed market rates.
The arrangement, despite months of denials of a Greek write-off, was likened by the authoritative Sunday Vima newspaper to the Brady plan which rescued Latin America from bankruptcy in the 1980s.
Under the scheme, the EU, International Monetary Fund and ECB – which bailed out Athens to the tune of €110bn after borrowing costs to service the debt hit prohibitively high levels last May – would give Greece breathing space by prolonging the maturity of loans by an extra 30 years.
The assistance is to be repaid three years after the bailout agreement expires in 2013. But with the recession-hit country’s public debt to GDP ratio projected to reach 158% by 2013 – and more than 160% by 2014 – economists say the debt load is unsustainable.
Since receiving the emergency aid, Papandreou’s socialist government has won praise for slashing the budget deficit from 15.4% in 2009 to 9.4% of GDP through a tough regime of public sector pay and pensions cuts and increasing taxes.
Last week it announced further cuts to defence and welfare spending -- saying it would not be signing weapons deals with either Germany or France – and, in a major move against tax offenders, began closing down night clubs that have evaded duties.
Economists also recognize that even if Athens enforced the fiscal consolidation programme demanded in exchange for the bailout to the letter, the country would have to generate a primary budget surplus of 5.5% just to keep up with debt repayments.
That, in turn, would not only require relentless austerity but years of sacrifice in a nation already racked by a widening gulf between rich and poor and the social tensions that unprecedented policies have brought.
The spectre of a Greek default has divided economists, with many arguing that it would trigger a chain reaction and have a catastrophic effect on Ireland, Portugal and Spain which are also struggling with heavy debts.
The head of the world’s main economic watchdog warned politicians today that while the recovery was under way, “it is not the recovery we wanted”.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said the recovery was “beset by tensions and strains which could even sow the seeds of the next crisis”.
Speaking in Singapore he argued that allowing emerging markets to grab the lion’s share of global growth at a time when developed nations are weighed down by debts would create unsustainable imbalances. He also said growing inequalities in both developed and developing nations could trigger social unrest and undermine future growth.
The hard-hitting speech follows hard on the heels of uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and the threat of further strikes in Greece and Spain..
Strauss-Kahn, a former French finance minister, said: “Without jobs and income security, there can be no rebound in domestic demand – and ultimately, no sustainable recovery.”
IMF officials are visiting Greece this week to broker a deal with the country’s left-leaning government after figures showed it was struggling to make cuts in line with an IMF and EU bailout.
The IMF has come under strong criticism for forcing debtor nations in need of bailout funds to sack thousands of public sector workers and impose stiff austerity measures, including higher taxes.
But in a pointed message to countries like Britain, Strauss-Kahn said it was up to individual states to limit their budget deficits, but without widening income inequalities or putting up barriers to growth.
The crisis is irreversible and unsolvable by any amount of tinkering, financial “controls”, “reining in” of alledgedly “maverick bankers” (in actual fact the centre of modern finance capitalism and the pure expression of its monstrous greed and callous indifference), more credit or “stimulation” of industry etc etc.
Like water rising the relentless drive for profit will always find its way around any notional discipline or rational mechanisms.
The bankers and the owners they act for are the core of the capitalist class and its dictatorship and its is an utter joke to pretend they will ever control themselves.
If “planning” (which what sensible controls would be heading towards) was possible overall in the interests of society generally, anarchic private ownership and investment under the control and direction of individual capitalists for their own benefit, would have to cease to exist.
Their right to control production property would have to be taken away.
Ending the crisis can only come with socialism in other words – and that is what the capitalist class will never accept.
It will have to be forced on them – by taking away their “ownership” of the means of production by which they siphon in all the value produced by the endless grind of the 99.99% of the rest of the world, in the Western countries but most of all the Third World, where conditions are always completely intolerable.
The efforts to push to rapidly increasing slump burdens outwards onto the Third World by cheapening the already hugely adulterated trading dollar, (cutting the already bone-pared prices of their output effectively) with massive injections of more paper and electronic credit can only intensify the problems.
Egypt and Tunisia are the proof, like Thailand, Indonesia etc before them (and even Iran in an earlier slump lurch).
Whatever the immediate blows or setbacks the mass street optimism and heroism may suffer, these events are part of a tidal wave of spontaneous world revolutionary ferment which has been building up pressure for decades, particularly in the Third World sweating under endless near slave exploitation and repressive tyranny imposed by gangster and fascist stooges for imperialism.
The tens of millions have become ever more transformed by modern life and modern production, multiplying a millionfold their frustration and the realisation of what they are denied.
As Marx said, capitalism is relentlessly training its own gravediggers, and this time not in one country at a time but across the entire world.
Or to quote the EPSR from 2003 (and many times previously), from an item written long before these events and while the notion of an “imminent” world economic catastrophe as the driving force of history was still being mocked and derided by the ignorant fake-“left” as “irrelevant”, or “no longer true” or “exaggerated catastrophism” (and even by the EPSR’s own more cynical elements who have now revealed their true colours by sliding away from the struggle, without any clear political justification, just as its hots up):
But en masse, the ordinary working people of the world are today far more economically, socially, and politically advanced than they were 40 years ago.
And capitalism’s easily-won glamour/glitz contest with bureaucratic Revisionism for worldwide public opinion is now precisely the cause of all imperialism’s problems. Having “won the battle of history”, all capitalism’s old evils are now flooding back, demonstrating to the world that it has been made a fool of by the idiotic “freedom” propaganda of the entire Cold War. Now with no “red menace” or “evil empire” to blame for everything going wrong, Western imperialism’s total triumph is poised to bring the world only total economic devastation and total warmongering ruin, - all by its own solo efforts.
And the next surge of worldwide communist revolutionary response to capitalist degeneracy will no longer be fatally handicapped by Stalinist Revisionist daydreams of permanent peaceful coexistence with imperialism, supposedly resulting in the “peaceful road to socialism” internationally, - a sick “theory” which has inflicted more counter-revolutionary damage on the international working-class than almost anything else.
Islamic anti-communism and other feudal backwardness may still screw up the ‘Arab street’ to some extent, but the new generations of the Middle East (and throughout the Third World) will rapidly master every anti-imperialist political and fighting ability that generations before them mastered in China, Algeria, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, etc, etc, etc.
Western imperialist military repression does not only not stand a chance. The coming defeat for its wretched colonial-domination ambitions as the worldwide policeman, forcing everyone to accept capitalism’s degenerate slump and its sick warmongering bullying, will bring down the bourgeoisie’s monopoly imperialist rule in the West itself. (EPSR 1166)
The turmoil is destined only to grow and increase as the catastrophic world capitalist crisis inexorably deepens.
Ten thousand questions come tumbling out as a result for the entire world masses and not just those in the Middle East.
The need for a huge world struggle to find the answers, based on rebuilding Leninist revolutionary science is paramount.
The total spectrum of world historical development over time and across the face of the planet is needed, drawing on the entire body of Marxist and Leninist revolutionary understanding which has been built and developed since 1850.
And most of all a completely thorough, far-reaching, facing-up to the disastrous mistakes and flaws of the leadership of the first enormous achievements of the working class in the Soviet Union, and its legacy of revisionist confusion, retreat and subsequent opportunism and cover-up.
But not a glimmer of this understanding, which is the core of the Marxist grasp of the world, informs the fake “left” commentaries and sloganising about the Cairo events.
Not a mention of proletarian revolution. Not a mention of the dictatorship of the working class.
The economic crisis is mentioned at best only in passing, as having caused “increased food prices.”
All is episodic, limited to the particular events.
A complete lack of historic perspective underlies their stunned surprise at events.
The entire world, and most of all, the fake-”lefts” have been declaring that “no-one seemed to have the faintest idea that these apparently impregnable regimes had become so brittle”, that the events have come out of the blue, that this revolutionary explosion has stunned everyone.
Too many complex factors weigh on world history ever to precisely state the next development to the second.
But unexpected????
Not remotely so to Marxist science.
Here is what the EPSR said in the run up to the Iraq war:
The fear in Cairo, for example, which many in Washington are widely echoing, is that Pan Arab revolutionary tendencies could be driven to fever-pitch if Iraq gets massacred; - and possibly even higher if the NATO nazi onslaught all goes wrong and the Iraqis start fighting back or surviving successfully.
Egypt is one of the world’s most explosive potential revolutionary powder-kegs even at the best of times (which is why Egypt has always been the second largest recipient of dollar-aid in the world, after the Zionist colony itself, - massive bribery to the Arab world’s most populous and poorest state to hold it back from becoming a leader of middle East anti-imperialism, as it was under Nasser).
If international economic disruption from the world capitalist crisis should coincide with an American assault on Iraq (especially a failed one), then revolutionary hell could break loose in Egypt, transforming the whole Middle East picture in a flash. (EPSR 1150 03-09-02)
*****************
Much more remarkable is how the Arab Street has put up with so much for so long without turning to revolution.
In the admissions of the West’s own capitalist press, the suffering described would scarcely seem bearable. Admittedly this is under the torture regime of Zionist Occupied Palestine, but the humiliation tolerated by the Arab nationalist bourgeoisie collectively, at the hands of imperialism everywhere, must make many aspects of intelligent life almost unbearable all over the Middle East.
In the continuing festering situation in the absence of proletarian revolution, the overthrow of a key figure like Mubarak, as with Sadat before him, becomes almost predictable. (EPSR 1129 26-03-02)
Such turmoil is completely in line with the scientific understanding of the crisis which predicts nothing but such eruptions in the coming period and the more so as the desperate crisis collapse of its entire financial system implodes more and more devastatingly.
Meanwhile the intelligence agencies of the world imperialist powers and most of all the CIA are of course working overtime to create maximum confusion, diversions and demoralisation in Egypt and equally importantly, if not more so, in the rest of the world.
Some of the immediate disinformation phrases pumped into circulation from the moment Tunisia exploded and onwards are the notions that “Mubarak is facing the same fate as Ceausescu in Romania”, or that parallels can be drawn with Tian an Men events in Beijing.
This is a multiply layered diversion, distraction and outright calumny playing on the grossest political ignorance and confusion, built on petty bourgeois pacifist notions of “universal human rights”, turn-the-other-cheek-ism and all-purpose philistine concepts, and devoid of any class understanding.
Its immediate purpose is simply to distract attention away from the gigantic and genuinely spontaneous peoples movement in the Middle East, and it is no surprise that a series of planted stories about supposed “violent attacks” in Zimbabwe for example have also suddenly and coincidentally appeared (in the liberal” Guardian naturally) built entirely on unverified and unverifiable “claims” from the artificially created and laughable Movement for Democratic (!!!) Change which Western intelligence set up some years ago to oppose Mugabe’s anti-imperialism.
Egypt has badly caught out the West which has been trying to claim “populist democracy” as its own, organising stunt after stunt in the former Soviet Union fringes particularly to whip up a frenzy against alleged “totalitarianism” with supposed “peoples movements” – so artificial that these “colour revolutions” are universally recognised and derided as CIA set ups, whipped up for weeks on end by Western media hysteria and carefully prepared with nicely colour-coordinated banners and symbols all “spontaneously” appearing at the right time.
The hand scrawled slogans and makeshift barricades in Cairo are utterly different, expressions of genuine anger and mass action.
The colour revolutions are now so grotesquely obvious, feeding nothing but petty bourgeois small-mindedness and Nazism (so rank throughout recent East Europe that Latvia and others annually celebrate the wartime Waffen SS with band music and marches) that even the SWP and other Trots have felt obliged to disown them, as they do in their latest statements on Egypt.
But it is poisonous petty bourgeois opportunism and anti-Sovietism which helped lead to just such stunts, since Ukraine, and Georgia and Belarus and Serbia and others are all the direct follow-on from the wave of alleged “rank-and-file” movements which were used to topple the revisionists workers states in the 1980s and 1990s, beginning with the great anti-communist Catholic backed clerical fascist rebellion in Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the finally successful the Pilsudski worshipping Solidarnosc, also heavily Vatican funded and CIA organised, and also leading to the foulest Western colluding reactionary backwardness and fascism (one of the most eager to send troops to Afghanistan for Bush etc).
These were class upheavals with a completely different character to Egypt, total counter-revolution against the first great achievements of socialist revolution in the USSR and the later extensions into East Europe following the revolutionary mass feeling engendered by capitalism’s last great Slump and its culmination in the Second World War.
It takes a philistine backwardness and tunnel vision of extreme proportions to begin to compare these events with working class revolution.
The wave of grossly middle class populism and anti-communist frenzy culminated in the sick degeneracy of the Romanian upheavals fed by lurid stories of supposed Securitate “massacres” such as the tens of thousands supposedly killed in Timosoara, a figure later revised down to less than a 100 in the hidden, inside-page unpublicised press admissions that capitalism will make after events when the exaggerations and hysteria have done their work.
The fascist “trial” of the Ceausescus, of which archive film was recently shown on TV is one of the sickest and most degenerate kangaroo Nazi trials of all time, a parody lasting a couple of hours in a backroom with no legal representation, no evidence and a foregone conclusion, following which there was a hasty and degenerate shooting against a wall.
Whatever opinion anyone had of the revisionist opportunism of the Ceausecus themselves is irrelevant in this; the entire procedure was all the evidence needed of the foulest reactionariness of the populists who were attacking and bringing down a workers state.
The Western comparison with Ben Ali, to pretend some sympathy for some alleged “anti-totalitarianism” is only workable because of the complete collapse of philosophical understanding of the world class struggle in the post-war boom, aided and magnified by this Trotskyist pus, which is still being pumped out around the Egyptian events.
It is fed as well by the “left” pundits and anti-communist academics like Timothy Garton-Ash in the Guardian pouring out the purest shyte about how the great revolutionary example is “no longer 1789 and 1917” but the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Only to a complete moron whose smug and privileged “pass the port” permanent tenure in the establishment cloisters prevents any class understanding of such events, or to be more accurate, whose very real capitalist class understanding drives burning ambition to see the history shattering October Revolution and its stunning Soviet Second World War struggle against Nazism, an effective second wave of the revolution, written off.
The Garton-Ash liberal pretences which are in reality eaten up with hatred for the working class (and it is no mistake they were cheerleaders for Solidarnosc at the time) will muddy the waters but the impact of Lenin’s giant leadership and the 70 years of overwhelming socialist achievement of the USSR since (with not a single capitalist banker or “entrepreneur” needed for its magnificent scientific, artistic, technological and social progress which constantly outstripped the West) is un-erasable.
The self-seeking middle-class populist overturns in East Europe and finally in the Soviet Union were sour, small affairs universally not accompanied by 100s or thousands of heroic sacrifices as the great revolutions following the two World Wars have been, as Cuba was, as the Korean struggle, the Chinese revolution, the African anti-colonialism, the bitter Vietnam war and now the long running Arab struggles continue to be.
The “movement” was simply opportunism, poisoned with illusions in the glitz and glamour allegedly on offer in the West (channelled non-stop across the border by Western TV, West Berlin shopfronts etc) and simply trickling into a vacuum, left by history’s greatest brain-dead stupidity yet, the liquidation of the Soviet Union by revisionist imbecility.
They only succeeded because of the historical abdication of the Gorbachevite leadership in the teeth of Western “market logic” and its liquidation of the workers state.
Even the alleged “repression” in Tian an Men, as the West tried to take advantage even more and pull off a “democracy” (!!!!) stunt in China, and the worker’s state quite rightly (eventually) defended itself, caused under 400 deaths.
Around half of those were of the lynched Chinese army and police forces who were attacked by the “gilded” youth provocateurs, in a deliberate bid to instigate violence.
As the EPSR has many times reported and the capitalist press knows full well, the lurid “1000s dead in Tian an Men” is a complete Goebbels fantasy, not just unprovable to have happened, but provable not to have done.
Such skirmishing deaths caused by the battle against counter-revolution in later days outside the square, are already a lesser number than in Egypt and comparatively far less for a population in China of 1100 million against Egypt’s 90 million.
And the savage torture of the demonstrators reported in Cairo is an additional part of the capitalist tyrannical picture.
But even if there had been greater conflict, the workers states (and even anti-imperialist bourgeois nationalist regimes) are not only completely within their rights to defend themselves against the constant provocations of the West (in Tibet, Burma, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia etc etc) but duty bound to do so.
It is only the widespread delusions in some happy-clappy Christian-like “human rights”, in a universal “right to free speech” (whatever foulness is being urged by say, the EDL, or Cameron’s latest anti-Muslim Nazi scapegoating) and its opposite face, the notion of “awful dictators” without any reference to their class nature and the capitalist world, and the titanic to-the-death class struggle within it, which allow this kind of Garton-Ash poison to make any headway at all.
And that arises from philosophical delusions in “democracy” and the “freedom” which are impossible within capitalism, and the “fight for peace”.
This pacifism and complacent anti-revolutionism, penetrating so far into the working class is a direct result of Stalin-inspired revisionist politics, still punted out by all the revisionist groups to this day, reflected in the “no to war” and “bring the troops home” ineffectual sloganising which the entire fake-”left” (including those making the revolutionary phrases occasionally and the supposed anti-Stalinism of the Trots all join in).
What is never mentioned is the only way war will ever be ended which is through the defeat of imperialist forces everywhere.
The great retreat from Leninist revolutionary understanding and the avoidance of all polemic and debate about the appalling mistakes it has led to in theory and tragically in practice (and which avoidance is part of that philosophical retreat in itself) is the biggest culprit of all in the alleged “failure” of communism which culminated in disastrous dismantling of workers state power in 1989-90.
In that broadest sense alone the opportunism of the Ceausescus contributed to their own demise though responsibility for all such foul crimes (and tens of millions more deaths and murders committed non-stop lies only with imperialism).
The festering rottenness of this politics is nowhere better demonstrated than in the Middle East itself, in the heart of the great struggle, the Palestinian fight, which is the great expression of the Arab world’s shame and humiliation and the sharpest edge of capitalist jackboot tyranny anywhere.
The tragic humiliation and degradation of the Palestinian Authority revealed in the latest round of mass “diplomatic” document leaks, this time from Al-Jazeera, is confirmation of everything Leninism has ever understood about the fatal flaws in reformism, liberalism and the imbecilic faith in “left” pressure, reasonableness and “steady progress” that Third International revisionism has saturated the world with for six decades or more.
Far from achieving progress and movement forwards for the savaged and benighted people of Palestine, subject to some of the most vicious repression and long-term repeated genocidal brutality on the face of the planet (which everywhere suffers tyrannical oppression and exploitation by the rich capitalist West) the illusions in compromise, rationality, “peaceful” struggle and fair-dealing have simply fed the rapacious arrogance and fascist UN-reason of the Zionist cuckoo sitting in the stolen lands of the Arab nation.
Every single concession, compromise, bargaining chip or “extra-mile” offered to try and secure a pittance of national pride and justice has only multiplied the contempt of fascist Zionism and its American empire paymasters (still feeding relatively the biggest subsidies and arms provisions of all to the pretend-state to keep its unsustainable economy and society “viable”.)
And it was never going to be any different.
The entire historical logic of the Zionism colonialist occupation inserted into the Middle East at the point of a gun underlined by anti-civilian bomb and ethnic cleansing terror campaigns by the fascist nationalist Irgun and Stern gang violence and brutality, has determined that there could never be any stability or historical resolution to its presence.
In the epoch of ever rising hostility to imperialist colonies this monstrous Nazi trampling all over the existence and rights of the indigenous Arab population (present in the whole of this area for over 1500 years) could only ever attract the permanent determination to fight back for basic justice and humanity and to expel the invaders.
And that in turn has forced the occupiers into ever more brutal and violent aggression against the former inhabitants and all around them, in a non-stop and never achievable effort to secure their stolen lands, an always expanding usurpation which must constantly and unstoppably escalate the injustice and warmongering ever outwards to secure its survival, and constantly therefore increase the justified hostility and hatred against it.
All this has intertwined with the American empire needs for permanent domination of the entire region and its fabulous oil and other wealth and resources, including the vast pool of exploitable labour in particularly countries like Egypt.
There has always only ever been a revolutionary solution to this problem which the sporadically increasing militant leadership movements thrown up by the growing and heroic determination of the Palestinian mass has been grasping with more deeply and more effectively decade by decade (though still a long way from a full necessary Leninist consciousness).
The greatest factor hampering the Palestinian struggle consciousness has been the disastrous illusions that any of this could ever be dealt with by “reasonable negotiation” and compromise with imperialism to achieve a “two state solution” the fanciful and nonsensical notion of “sharing” Palestine with the arbitrarily declared “state” of Israel, a “solution” put forwards by the revisionist influence on bourgeois Arab nationalism through Yasser Arafat initially and variously supported by all the fake-“left”, revisionist and Trotskyist alike .
It was always an impossibility.
Apart from demanding massive one-sided concessions and humiliating sacrifices from the Palestinian people, forced to see 80% of their own land and possessions permanently stolen from them and the best of it at that, and an existence in near-slave apartheid bantustan fragmentation and servitude, with second-class status at best, this “deal” was never actually on the table anyway as anything more than a confidence e trick to buy time for the Zionist entity to build its occupation strength ever higher.
In reality it, and its Washington support, has never intended any justice for the people they have pushed to one side, needing only their constant suppression and effective concentration camp enclosure with the background knowledge that they will be gradually eliminated as a problem historically, using every possible genocidal mechanism necessary.
Now as the ever-rising temperature of world hostility to imperialism has increased, and nowhere sharper than in Egypt alongside (which has been bribed and manipulated for decades above all to hold back the tide of mass empathy and solidarity with the Palestinians) exposing the falsity of this Stalinist-fed line, the “two-state” solution has been exposed along with its protagonists as the foulest opportunist sell-outs.
The Mahmoud Abbas PA which inherited the mantle of the petty bourgeois Arafat has demonstrated that this entire revisionist politics not only fails to develop and fight for crucial revolutionary understanding but will degenerate into the most depraved collusion against the militants.
Never has the pacifist notion of “we were only doing this to achieve peace” as lead PA negotiator Saeb Erekat excused himself, been more sullied with a slide into dirty dealing. For the record:
The biggest leak of confidential documents in the history of the Middle East conflict has revealed that Palestinian negotiators secretly agreed to accept Israel’s annexation of all but one of the settlements built illegally in occupied East Jerusalem. This unprecedented proposal was one of a string of concessions that will cause shockwaves among Palestinians and in the wider Arab world.
A cache of thousands of pages of confidential Palestinian records covering more than a decade of negotiations with Israel and the US has been obtained by al-Jazeera TV and shared exclusively with the Guardian. The papers provide an extraordinary and vivid insight into the disintegration of the 20-year peace process, which is now regarded as all but dead.
The documents – many of which will be published by the Guardian over the coming days – also reveal:
• The scale of confidential concessions offered by Palestinian negotiators, including on the highly sensitive issue of the right of return of Palestinian refugees.
• How Israeli leaders privately asked for some Arab citizens to be transferred to a new Palestinian state.
• The intimate level of covert co-operation between Israeli security forces and the Palestinian Authority.
• The central role of British intelligence in drawing up a secret plan to crush Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
• How Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders were privately tipped off about Israel’s 2008-9 war in Gaza.
As well as the annexation of all East Jerusalem settlements except Har Homa, the Palestine papers show PLO leaders privately suggested swapping part of the flashpoint East Jerusalem Arab neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah for land elsewhere.
Most controversially, they also proposed a joint committee to take over the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount holy sites in Jerusalem’s Old City – the neuralgic issue that helped sink the Camp David talks in 2000 after Yasser Arafat refused to concede sovereignty around the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques.
The offers were made in 2008-9, in the wake of President George Bush’s Annapolis conference, and were privately hailed by the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, as giving Israel “the biggest Yerushalayim [the Hebrew name for Jerusalem] in history” in order to resolve the world’s most intractable conflict. Israeli leaders, backed by the US government, said the offers were inadequate.
Intensive efforts to revive talks by the Obama administration foundered last year over Israel’s refusal to extend a 10-month partial freeze on settlement construction. Prospects are now uncertain amid increasing speculation that a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict is no longer attainable – and fears of a new war.
This end point of accepting Zionist money, CIA money, MI6 “strategies” and Western “help” to actively put down whatever sparks of combative leadership arise, including even discussion assassinations and imprisonment for the likes of Hamas, and of giving away all the basic principles of the Palestinians people’s rights, and historical possession of the land in which they are now persecuted, are so degenerate as to defy description.
But the greatest lesson is that they follow on quite logically from the retreats from consistent revolutionary principles which underlie decades of opportunism and revisionist failure to speak out clearly and straightforwardly for the total overthrow of capitalist ruling class power in all its forms as the only means for the working class to go forwards.
The confusion of Stalin’s mistaken assessment of the relative strength of imperialism and the workers states in the post-war period, revising Lenin, found one of its direct expressions in the disastrous and damaging Soviet recognition of the utterly counterfeit notion of an Israeli “state”, an appalling error persisted in ever since by revisionist politics and even worse hidden, covered-over and lied about.
Until just a short time ago the museum-Stalinist Brar-ites were still calling for recognition of the mythical 1967 borders which the UN recognises, even though they had about turned on (and stayed quiet about) their support for Abbas to succeed Arafat (whose tricky bourgeois opportunism they ludicrously declared to be “genius”).
Shattering world events will help shake this hamstringing philosophy, its poisonous Trotskyist shadow and reformist opportunism.
The Arab masses have the right spirit. But they need the scientific clarity of Leninism – to be fought for.
Don Hoskins
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