Back issues
No 1403 31st March 2012
"Respect" election shock signals contempt for parliament and the class-war cuts it is imposing but is no answer to the catastrophic crisis either – just more of the same reformist confusion which has tied down the working class for a century and a half. But the upheaval shows the potential for building revolutionary leadership, starting with the exposure of all reformist nonsense and the pretend revolutionary fake-"left" opportunism which tailends it. The world will continue to plunge into devastating crisis Slump disaster and collapse everywhere culminating in universal war turmoil and destruction, the only answer capitalism has ever given, to distract attention from its shameful failure and collapse. The crisis failure now is on a larger scale than ever before and unstoppable no matter what temporary "upturn" respite it gets from insane money printing. Only world scale revolutionary struggle to end this foul exploitative tyranny for good can change anything
The Respect bye-election upset of the parliamentary apple-cart in Bradford has predictably triggered a flurry of petty bourgeois fake-"left" excitement about a supposed "step forwards" for the working class which serves only to emphasise how far away from any understanding of the catastrophic world crisis any of them are.
Just the opposite.
For all their differences with RESPECT and its programme, they all have one thing in common with it - complete failure to warn the working class that this "victory" can achieve nothing in itself, and leaves the working class heading into the heart of the great Slump depression and Worl War disaster in all history.
Only a deep understanding of the contradictions which riddle the capitalist class rule profit making system can explain that it will always slide back into such breakdown failures on an ever greater catastrophic scale and cannot be controlled, regulated, reformed or improved.
It must be ended and that can only be by revolutionary overturn to establish socialism worldwide.
And that demands the building of a revolutionary scientific world perspective, challenging and exposing all the reformist class collaborating garbage of the past which has kept the working pinned down within the imperialist system and its "democracy" fraud.
Illusions that step-by-step change can gradually move things forwards if only sufficiently "principled" "brave" or "outspoken" leaders can be found, have been used for more than a century to fool the working class and keep it away from grasping that only overturning capitalism will ever change anything.
Galloway was immediately at pains to head the working class away from any such Marxist understanding.
However personally bold and outspoken he or other RESPECT figures might be on some imperialist atrocities and injustices, Galloway's objective role and that of movements like RESPECT are precisely to hold back the working class and keep them tied to the parliamentary racket covering up the actual dictatorship of big money capital which really rules the world.
Far from taking the working class forwards, it is yet another mechanism for stopping or diverting the spontaneous movement of the working class towards revolution, the only way capitalism's disastrous slump and war collapse can be stopped.
That is not to say that the surprise overturn vote is not significant.
As an objective event, a symptom of great social movement, of course the humiliation of the hated class-war Tories AND of the supine paralysed class-collaborating pretend "opposition" stoogery of the Labourites by this upheaval is every bit as revolutionary in its significance as the demagoguery of George Galloway immediately declared to the news cameras and capitalist media.
But that is because the victory reflects powerful revolutionary forces building up under the surface, expressed here in the massive overturning of the old three-way parliamentary stitch-up, the same forces that triggered the spontaneous riots last summer and the huge upheavals of the Arab Spring and other revolt in the Third World.
The suddenness and unexpectedness is itself exactly a symptom of all revolutionary movement in society and is a powerful signal of the unseen underswell of frustration, anger and contempt building up by molecular level changes in the working class which are reaching a threshold where they burst through like lava splits the ground around a volcano.
This is exactly the Marxist dialectical understanding of slow unseen buildup of changes as contradiction in all phenomena in nature, the pressures, (and counter-pressures holding back change), sharpening relentlessly until things reach the point where they can continue no further without resolution – suddenly, and often violently, breaking through, a transformation of quantitative changes into a qualitative difference virtually overnight (historically speaking, though in some cases almost that quick, as in the Egyptian and Tunisian outbreaks last year).
Galloway has a skilful line in rhetoric and a masterful turn of phrase at times in denouncing some of the worst atrocities and warmongering hypocrisies of imperialism.
And he correctly connected the "shock result" in Bradford to the same underlying upheavals which have led to the spontaneous revolts in Egypt and Tunisia and to the outbreak of rioting and street revolt in England last summer.
But things are not as they seem.
To begin with, Galloway has also pitched in with most of the fake-"left" in demonising figures like Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, smoothing the way for the civil war provocations and NATO blitzings and destruction which followed, and the foul warcrime atrocity of Gaddafi's death by iron bar buggery.
As with the rest of the fake-"left" such parroting and repetition of the West's shallow "anti-totalitarian" so-called human-rights lies and half-truth provocations makes a mockery of any anti-imperialist protest and anti-NATO pacifist protest which they then follow through with.
The shallow "democracy" illusions on which such confusion and shameful class collaboration is built was right to the fore in Bradford.
In TV interviews and press articles Galloway was at pains to emphasise the "peaceful democratic" nature of the election result.
His supposedly "radical" declaration that the event was a "Bradford Spring" seemingly tying it to the revolutionary upheavals in Egypt and Tunisia, and to the outburst of riots on the British streets last summer may upset the red-faced colonels and Tunbridge stockbrokers, but it was anything but revolutionary.
To the contrary, Galloway was declaring that "revolution" can be made through the parliamentary mechanism, knowingly and cynically pinning the ferment down once more to the old "play by the rules" pretences which have hamstrung the working class for a century or more, just at the point when the old parliamentary fraud has never been more threadbare and despised for the corrupt racketeering it is.
It is the bourgeoisie which makes up the "democracy" rules and they have only ever had one purpose, to cover up the actual dictatorship of capital with the lying pretence that everyone "has a say" in society.
It is there to keep the working class away from the only possible solution to its problems, revolutionary overturn of the rotten festering capitalist system and the establishment of planned socialism under the control of the working class for the benefit of the great "99%".
Only the ending of the parliamentary racket and the revolutionary overturn of capitalism itself, can solve the rapidly worsening spiral of economic and political failure which broke surface in 2008 and will unstoppably continue unravelling whatever short-term "growth" pretences are made via insane Quantitative Easing money printing (which only extends the massively polluting printing of dollars by US imperialism which has been used to stretch out the "boom" for several decades anyway, making its final eruption 10,000 worse).
Devastating penury, homelessness, unemployment and hunger is all that is on offer the for working class everywhere from the poorest Third World countries to the heart of the "richest" nations in Europe and most of all, top-dog power the USA.
And on top of that there is massive escalation of warmongering chauvinism, scapegoating, deliberate conflict and class splitting through racist and other regional, ethnic, local and trade differences, to fragment working class resistance and to keep whipping up the war atmosphere that monopoly capitalism uses as a diversion from and excuse for its total historic failure.
That comes from the epochal breakdown of the centuries long class domination of the bourgeoisie and the sharpening of the contradictions, built into the capitalist profit-making way of doing things, to a point of complete unsolvability.
There is no making things better, or "Stopping War", or "ending corruption" by simply "being honest" or declaring opposition to the warmongering, or "winning mass anti-war support to block capitalism's war machine" because these things are in the fabric of the capitalist social and economic order, and its overwhelming ideological influence.
It is easier to completely overturn the domination of the ruling class and end forever the capitalist system than to "regulate" and "hold back" it war and slump tendencies.
To spell it out that means by revolutionary struggle to establish a dictatorship of the working class to guide and develop the creation of a socialist world free of the hampering restrictions of private profit and greed.
But no such things will be spelled out by RESPECT which is an avowed reformist movement, intent on doing exactly the same reformist kow-towing to the capitalist system and its parliamentary fraud as every other opportunist class collaborating party.
Neither will it be made clear by the rest of the great morass of fake- "left" pretenders be they part of the long rotten Stalinist revisionist retreat from revolutionary philosophy and understanding, or their "anti-matter" reflection, the posturing fake-"left" "opposition" Trotskyists, whose multiple shadings are even more opportunist in their poisonous "anti-Stalinism" (which was never anything but petty bourgeois anti-workers-state-ism from the start (i.e. anti-communism)).
"Gorgeous" George Galloway even makes it explicit that he is not against Labour as such, but only the degeneration caused when "Tony Blair and his successors murdered the real Labour tradition".
He wants the restoration of "true Labour" he declares, almost certainly with an eye on displacing the current leadership, and its craven capitulation to capitalist slump by the "three cheeks of the same bum" as he describes the various current parliamentary parties who all offer exactly the same austerity and bankruptcy effectively.
But "old Labour" was as corrupt and opportunist as anything ever done by the Blairites, who simply extended a foul and class collaborating tradition to its logical end point when the underlying crisis in capitalism had already ripened to the point of rottenness and the working class distrust and suspicion of the old parliamentary racket had almost reached breaking point.
New Labour came about because of the long decline of world imperialism into crisis throughout the post-war period and particularly moribund and incapable ossified British imperialist arrogance, which cannot hold its own against the other major capitalist powers in the cutthroat turmoil.
Even by the 1980s the British ruling class could no longer afford the reformist concessions made out of fear of a near-revolutionary working class in the post-war period, when an inflationary "boom" was sustainable to fill the vacuum left by the great crisis destruction and wipe-out of the devastating Second World War and Third World near-slave exploitation provided enough super-profits to pay for it.
Thatcher's class war experiment to push back the working class, particularly through the 1984 Miners Strike battles, was only partially successful, meeting huge spontaneous resistance later (Poll Tax riots etc) and degenerating into the sleaze and corruption of the early 1990s when Blairite spin stepped in to keep things going, simply lying blatantly about the crisis and the "benefits" it was providing while in fact running the greatest fire sale ever of privatisation and mortgaging of state resources (built by arduous working class effort) to the world market racketeers, "maxing out" both public and private credit and dragging the working class into the world warmongering which imperialism is turning to as a "solution" to its historic failure.
The black-is-white "spin" Goebbels trickery, set in train by Blairism as a desperate cover-up to keep the parliamentary racket going, still failed to prevent the contempt and rejection of the parliamentary racket from deepening, election by election, and was finally brought down by the quagmire defeats of imperialist war interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, exposing the Goebbels big lies which were used to "justify" them.
The long developing and increasing working class abstention of the twentieth century has intensified in the twenty-first with not only even lower turnouts to vote, but with such voting as there is, made purely for reasons of hostility and anger, to punish the Labourites mostly or the overall corruption, self-seeking and privilege of all of the parliamentarians.
Voting positively with expectations of leadership and change has collapsed completely except in special circumstances such as Bradford, where a particular stratum of the population has been mobilised, such as the Muslim community.
Some public sector workers, tied most closely to the reformist "welfare state" concessions of the past, still turn out for Labourism, reflecting a petty bourgeois corrupted dependency on the reformist bribery of the past which has long hampered and held back revolutionary grasp.
But mostly parliamentary "democracy" has almost completely lost its sway, the ruling class surviving only because there is no positive revolutionary philosophy to fill the gap, all Leninist objective science having been buried post-war beneath a tide of Moscow influenced revisionist retreat into "the peaceful road" and "peace struggle" pacifism mind-rot, or the sour anti-communism of Trotskyist "anti-Stalinism".
The last General Election was an even bigger joke with low turnouts in all the working class areas, virtually no positive voting at all, and a completely inconclusive result salvaged only by the deliberate retreat of the Labourites from making any effort to offer any leadership (despite having a first crack at joining up with the Liberal-Democrats) and then the desperate expedient of a Tory "Coalition" for which the ruling class has played, and now permanently destroyed, the fantasy notion among some petty bourgeois sections that "Liberalism" was anything different.
The desperation of the ruling class to keep its lying parliamentary racket going, even as the greatest catastrophic credit and financial failure in all history is ripping its world exploitation system to shreds, has since led to the most extraordinary suppression of all leadership and politics in parliament, starting with the supine failure of the Labourites (and their official TUC backers) to offer any resistance at all to the savage class war slump austerity impositions.
So fearful is the ruling class of any hint of "leftism" that even the tame stooges of Labourism have been reined in, and nothing but token resistance offered by the official TUC behind them.
Even the tanker drivers strike has been suspended via the same Labourite networks.
Suppression of even the most timid "opposition", with even the one-time pretence of valid and genuine debate (within well understood non-revolutionary boundaries of course) comes with the extension of Blairite spin into an ocean of hype and Goebbels lying on an extraordinary scale by the Cameroons – blatant favouring of the rich presented as a bizarre fantasy "Big Society" of alleged near-"socialist" principle; privatisations, plundering and sell-offs of public services declared to be "protecting" the NHS and Post Office etc as they are dismantled; ever more sleaze and corruption simply denied as "not being the Tory way" when it is glaringly revealed to be exactly so, from bribes for influence to Murdoch press secretaries who "know nothing" even more than Manuel in Fawlty Towers; the most obscene extension of class privilege and wealth differentials declared to be "all in this together"; the savaging of the world economy and killing of production as "stimulating the upturn"; devastating destruction and warmongering against the Third World declared to be "keeping the peace"; torture, civilian blitzkrieg and the foulest fascist depravity of random killings, pissing in dead skulls, barbaric beatings and endless drone killings as "fighting for freedom"; the propping up of yet more corruption, warlordism and fascist stoogery as "democracy"; and Wild West-style vigilante killing of "terrorists", Bin Laden, Palestinian leaders, Gaddafi, and so on without trial as "upholding the rule of law" etc etc etc.
But keeping the lid on even the timidest of reformist opposition (not because it would achieve in itself but through of fear of what it might unlock) will not work forever.
Increasingly spontaneous revolt will burst through as the riots have demonstrated.
And the crisis is exposing ever more this more than threadbare Goebbels racket to the point of total farce with the toff Cameron's desperate floundering pantomime stupidities pretending to eat "common peoples'" pies and pasties, and the equally farcical and craven Labourite "sausage roll" responses.
Even the capitalist press can see the Marie Antoinette parallels of a doomed ruling class totally out of touch with reality.
The question is what next?
The parliamentary "democracy" joke has been the greatest historical trick ever pulled, covering up the vicious exploitation and tyranny of ruling class domination, a class dictatorship which is the actual reality of bourgeois society, hidden behind a pretence of voting etc which keeps the mass of ordinary people pacified in the richer countries where it can be afforded.
If it fails the ruling class will have to turn to overt dictatorship and open fascism as it has done at various points of "emergency" in the past, in particular during the First and Second World Wars when democratic elections were "suspended" and arbitrary arrests and roundups made, and as it has done throughout the "Empire" anyway which was one long imposition of concentration camps, secret police surveillance, torture, blitzkrieg, genocidal slaughter and collective punishments, from Kenya to Malaysia, from Australia to the Americas, throughout the Middle East and not least in the foul and brutal suppression of the Irish nationalist struggle for three decades of "human rights abuses", death squad activity, torture and daily racist intimidation.
The "good" imperialists have been as brutal and violently tyrannical as any German Nazis or Japanese "monsters" – more so in the post-war record when newly dominant topdog imperialist power of the USA has carried out hundreds of interventions, coups, invasions and all-out wars (with a death toll of multiple millions directly, not to mention hundreds of millions starved, diseased or worked to death) to keep in place the worldwide network of stooges, fascists and gangster regimes which keep the jackboot on the neck of the Third World working class.
It is their sweated poverty labour in factories and farms which keeps the Western ruling class in indolent luxury and power and pays for the trickle of reformist concessions which until now have sustained the "democracy illusion".
But the crisis is tearing the world to shreds and with it the capacity for the ruling class to keep on paying for the democratic illusions in even the richest countries.
The class war savagery just beginning with the cuts and "austerity" is going to get far worse yet – as the Spanish working class are discovering for example with a new €50bn cuts onslaught on top of already massive unemployment and Slump penury, and as the Greeks are suffering.
And for all the professed "upturn" in the American economy, the same continues to face the working class everywhere.
The "US economic growth" in the presidential election year is the biggest fraud in history achieved on the back of the massive injections of huge amounts of fantasy electronic and paper dollars spun out of thin air by "Quantitative Easing" to salvage the almost imminent meltdown of 2008.
It can firstly, only feed through enormous inflation into the world system, and secondly is the most gigantic trade war aggression by the giant American economy.
Diluting the dollar in this way accelerates hugely the deliberate collapse of the dollar as a currency, wiping out the real value of the enormous and utterly unrepayable debts that the US economy has run up over nearly two decades of massive deficit (bankrupt) trading with the rest of the world and particularly China and the big capitalist rivals Germany and Japan.
The "shock and awe" of the worldwide warmongering and fascist depravity is there partly to make sure no one complains or tries to argue back.
It is a huge area for analysis by Marxism to understand the difficult economic detail but it is already clear that all this paper credit feeds the great swirls of market savagery which now take out country after country with sovereign debt defaults, unless they bow to the demands of total speed-up and intensification of the rate of extraction of surplus from the working class.
The US is also vulnerable to such capitalist speculative pressure but as the world's largest economy, able to push the worst onto its rivals.
The great capitalist rivals are under the cosh, in Europe and potentially Japan, and in turn push the slump burdens outwards.
The demands of the markets hold the little countries in thrall, tearing up any pretences of "democratic decisions" as Italy and Greece have found out directly with imposed "technocratic" governments, and others like Ireland, Spain and even the UK.
The whole world is crushed by the demands of the insatiable US ruling class effectively, even eventually its hangers-on and sycophantic smaller powers like the desperate British ruling class.
This world currency and credit aggression is the prelude to all out conflict eventually that will almost certainly rip the world apart in open war just as in 1914 and 1939.
The British ruling class knows, and constantly declares, that its only chance of survival in the international cutthroat currency and trade wars unleashed by the crisis is to impose draconian cuts everywhere which will push the working class all the way down to the exploitation levels prevailing in the least well off parts of the Third World eventually.
There is no special status for workers in "civilised" countries as the petty bourgeois illusions of the imperialist period still fondly and complacently believe, in a delusion that they are "different and more democratic".
Nazi racism and scapegoating is being consciously stepped up to split the working class and help put through the cuts as the carefully media publicised meeting of backward European nationalist "anti-Islamist" EDL demonstrated again this week.
It is failure to begin to understand the sweeping epochal scope and extent the capitalist crisis which leaves the fake-"lefts" floundering without the remotest sense of the intractable and world shattering contradictions which will push the working class eventually into action to force the ending of this degeneracy and the advance of the world into a new period of history under the dictatorship of the proletariat to build a rational, fair, coherent and carefully unwasteful world economy devoid of the demented consumerist excess and environmentally devastating profit driven insanity of capitalism.
None of the Trotskyists and Stalinists begin to explain the enormity and all pervading destructiveness of the crisis now facing mankind and which is the only possible context in which to grasp and explain the unravelling war turmoil, fascist brutality and necessary revolutionary upheavals to come and which have already begun.
Instead they dribble along behind the likes of Galloway's RESPECT, opportunistically riding its parliamentary opportunism tailcoats.
On past form, for all their revolutionary pretences the fake-"left" will undoubtedly be swept up in seeing the RESPECT victory as a "move forwards" just as many decided four years ago the tricksy opportunist Obama black nationalist/feminist presidential victory deserved a similar flurry of "optimism", (the political basis on which the entire south-west section of the EPSR broke away in a flurry of subjective accusations about "unfair polemics" and which they have never retracted despite glaring proof in endless Washington warmongering events of their completely wrong position) - and as the Ken Livingstone election campaign for London mayor did 10 years ago (and who the fake-"left" opportunists are once more calling to support despite the subsequent record of rancid opportunism, and support for Labourite and US warmongering).
Some fake-"lefts" have already jumped in, declaring the result to be "first real sign of a socialist-oriented and anti-imperialist resurgence" and backing RESPECT as such without a word of criticism.
Or as Tariq Ali, the arch poseur, opportunist and gray-haired guru of the Trotskyist "left" now says:
Respect is different. It puts forward a leftist social-democratic programme that challenges the status quo and is loud in its condemnation of imperial misdeeds. In other words, it is not frightened by politics. Its triumph in Bradford should force some to rethink their passivity
Respect is not different at all but exactly the same old reformism using a slight variation to tap an unusual population with a particular ethnic background that is scapegoated and victimised more than most as part of the warmongering diversions that US topdog capitalism has now been instigating for the last 15 years, to suppress Third World revolt and to make sure any capitalist rivals understand its ruthless readiness to take them on should they challenge its "right" to keep on plundering and exploiting the lion's share of the world's wealth despite its total bankruptcy.
It is not even clear that the surprise vote is yet a general movement of the working class anyway, rather than a particular ethnic and cultural grouping made up of mixed petty bourgeois and working class elements, to which Galloway has pandered with his "who are the real Muslims" posturing which could well equally alienate and turn away many of the other sections of working class, pushing them into the arms of the worst fascist reactionaries.
These were dangers that were clear to Leninist science eight years ago:
The entire vast literature of Marxist-Leninist science, - demonstrating how proletarian revolution, into a PLANNED whole-world technological modernity, is civilisation's only serious development possibility, steadily being revealed taking the long view, ending the destructive contradictions of all class-conflict based historical progress hitherto, - is kept well out of sight by these terrified petty bourgeois.
Very little of the working class, therefore, will be misled by this bogus "socialist" and bogus "anti-war" celebrity posturing, - there being nothing put up to believe in other than yet another rehash of 'Old Labour', following on innumerable similar previous such 'Clause IV' pointless exercises like the SLP, the 'Militant' Socialist Party, the Socialist Alliance, the various CP "peaceful road" factions, the SSP, etc, etc, etc, etc.
The penny still refuses to drop that it was EXACTLY 'Old Labour' which spawned New Labour and acted much the same as New Labour for 100 years, holding back the working class with false "reformist" promises in order to prop up British imperialism, in ALL its warmongering and economic activities essentially, as the "alternative" party of government UNTIL NO LONGER CREDIBLE, which is when New Labour had to be born.
New Labour, Old Labour, replacement old Labours, - they are all the same "reformist" joke, propping up the imperialist system which cannot possibly be "reformed" and yet still remain a competitive, monopoly capitalist, "free" market.
And since all these various celebrity sects always have and always will remain consciously and determinedly COUNTER-revolutionary by every ounce of personal instinct, class instinct, and social position instinct, then workers will always sense this and will never be likely to seriously mobilise en masse behind any of these mountebanks.
Historically, workers did it once behind Labour, and what did they get??? Warmongering imperialism and capitalist crisis never disappeared, and are worse today than ever before.
The next serious history-making move by the working class will be to revolution.
'Respect' may yet make a few small waves, but if workers do get conned to any extent, it will largely be due to the bogus "revolutionary" sects around the fake-'left' who are sniffing round the 'Respect' worthies in a farcical living contradiction of their own specious reasoning for such opportunism.
Despite covering themselves by jeering that Respect would not get far by reducing its appeal to workers to a bare minimum of least controversial "reforms" (the LCD lowest common denominator principle), insisting that a full "revolutionary" programme would be needed on the contrary, - these Trot and Stalinist-minded fake-"communists" nevertheless either all joined up or else lent support of some kind to this latest pathetic opportunist exhibition.
So what is exposed here???
The utter fraudulence of these sects' own pretensions to any "revolutionary understanding".
The necessity at all times for Marxist Leninist scientific truth about the revolutionary essence of all world history is in no way at odds with a Bolshevik Party using sensible tactics at all times to, for example, split its enemies when the revolutionary forces were still too weak to do otherwise.
Signing the robber peace at Brest Litovsk with German imperialist warmongering to avoid a certain crushing was one famous example, as was signing the Hitler-Stalin pact to avoid becoming the West's sole intended target for renewed German imperialist warmongering aggression.
Going to international trade conferences to sign economic agreements to break the West's embargo was another, rather than going to preach communist revolution.
But what "necessary" tactics make it wise or essential for these bogus Trot "revolutionaries" to pretend to workers that the opportunist confusion of the likes of Loach, Monbiot, Serwotka, and Galloway MUST be supported in their joke "socialist", and joke "anti-war", and joke "anti-imperialist" posturing??????
The formal explanation of "to turn Respect into the reborn Bolshevik Party that our class-struggle needs" is a sick joke on several levels, but the implication that these ludicrous anti-communist worthies can be the godfathers of renewed Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science only reveals that these fake-'lefts' still haven't the faintest idea of what Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science is all about.
The truer explanation for this opportunist fawning is that the fake-'lefts' are always afraid that some collection of celebrity smart-arses like Galloway, Monbiot and Loach MIGHT just succeed as a "new socialist party" and steal the thunder of all these bogus "revolutionary" sects.
What an even more desperate poverty of intellect and poverty of spirit this feared perspective reveals among the fake-'lefts'. For what would any "successful party" of such grotesque opportunists as these celebrities signify other than something abominably shallow and insincere and confused which might as easily spark a reaction towards fascism as a serious class-revolution towards communism.
For any workers other than these anti-communist fake-'left' sectarian frauds, casually or blindly supporting such opportunist posturing shallowness (as Respect has so far produced) ought to be a worry.
One very CORRECT tactic Marxist-Leninist science indicates in this area of work is the occasional need to support some prominent 'left' pretensions as a rope supports a hanged man, - the Bolshevik attitude briefly towards the initial 1920s rise of the Labour Party in Britain.
It is a tactic that might have been appropriate for a Bennite breakaway from Labour, or was needed for Scargill's 'Clause IV' revolt to form the SLP.
But Galloway's odd record and resisted expulsion is hardly in that league of needing to test-to-destruction the "genuine socialist alternative" claims of a Benn or a Scargill to make a deliberate break in order to build a completely new party. [EPSR No1217 27-01-04].
What is clear is that Galloway is as up to his neck in going along with the poisonous demonisations poured out by capitalism against the likes of Gaddafi and spreading as much confusion as the rest of the craven cowardly and capitulatory fake-"lefts" who all bought into the sanctimonious Goebbels stampeding of civil war in Libya and now Syria, (jsut as the all capitulated to the "condemnation of terror" after 9/11) because they have absolutely no grasp of capitalism's desperation and need to provoke war at all costs, for intimidating the regional uprisings (Egypt, Gulf states etc), and for generalised continuation of warmongering.
His bombastic shouting about the "Arab Spring" fails to differentiate at all the magnificent and heroic spontaneous uprisings in Egypt (which have yet to change anything substantial about the capitalist stoogery of the Egyptian regime because they too need revolutionary perspectives) and in Tunisia, from the deliberately provoked violent-from-the-beginning "uprising" in Libya set in train by the Western intelligence agencies and complicity media machine, by firing up the most backward, reactionary and monarchist elements there to overturn the bourgeois nationalist revolution of Gaddafi-ism, which for all its erratic bourgeois nationalist ideology had a certain amount of anti-imperilaist form.
It is the tragedy of Gaddafi-ism that it always rejected the struggle for revolutionary communism in favour of Gaddafi's bizarre individualistic Green Book semi-socialist philosophy, which among other failings, never dealt with the festering undertow of petty bourgeois stoogery, old monarchism and tribal rivalries in Libya, which capitalism was able to manipulate and set going (especially after Gaddafi's equally misled compromises with Washington had opened the door further to infiltration and subversion).
Genuine Marxism needs to point out to the working class both there, and worldwide, that such philosophy is neither the solution to its problems nor an adequate defence against the depredations of imperialism, contrary to the "revolutionary defencism" of the museum-Stalinists who vacuously chant pointless "Victory to Gaddafi" or "Victory to Syria" slogans, virtually on a par with Galloway's equally confusing identification with assorted Middle East bourgeois nationalist regimes from the rebellious former Western stooge Saddam Hussein to the Syrians Galloway equally lauded in the past.
Their position may be marginally better than the foul Trotskyist poison against the assorted "rogue state" victims, re-broadcasting every capitalist lie and distortion invented in the Langley press rooms, but is just as confusing ultimately.
Galloway's monstrous declaration that Gaddafi was a "tyrant who should be strung up", even fails on that count, and is part of the demonisation which the West used to stampede the anti-Arab Spring revolt there last year (an "emergency" provocation got going out of ruling class panic after the Cairo events threatened to spread to the entire Middle East) shows the confusion and cowardice that emerge from a failure to analyse the world with scientific Marxist rigour and polemical open debate.
The only possible perspective for all these struggles is the Leninist understanding that the imperialist manipulation and use of the endless conflicts and internecine and bloody squabbles which its profit-hungry antagonistic system constantly spawns everywhere, is the overidingly important factor in each and every situation (in the modern US-dominated imperialist world), and that defeat for all these interventions is the clear revolutionary perspective, by whatever forces might be drawn into the struggle for whatever more or less (usually less) honourable purposes of their own.
Only shattering defeat and failure for imperialism will open the door to the working class and other proletarian masses to push forwards the revolutionary struggle that will eventually be the decisive factor in humanity going forwards.
So if there are important historical events expressed in Bradford, as many fake-"lefts" have rushed to say, then all the more reason to be fighting for a Leninist revolutionary perspective, seeing that such historical movement is an opening for, and opportunity to battle for, revolutionary understanding finally after decades of total vacuum in such understanding and boomtime philistine rejection of serious discussion and debate.
The Bradford outburst shows there is a hunger for a new understanding - which demands revolutionary perspectives.
A party to struggle for such science needs to be built, drawing in all those who agree with its aims as supporters and cadres.
Build Leninism.
Don Hoskins
Cowardly and complacent Trot SWP assertions that the capitalist crisis will eventually end without the need for a revolution repels. The working class urgently needs to be drawn into an open all-out struggle for Leninist revolutionary perspectives. Only socialist revolution will stop the inevitable slide into slump and world war.
The Galloway election victory, threats to disrupt the Olympic Games, the tanker driver dispute and calls for further strike protests and demonstrations against savage pensions, health service and welfare cuts are signs that the deep-seated working class unease and anger at the slump conditions now being imposed on them is coalescing into a revolutionary movement that threatens to erupt at any moment.
Strikes and protests alone (no matter how militant) will not stop the crisis but they do create huge openings for discussion and debate around the only solution that will: a revolution to overturn capitalism worldwide and build a socialist system based on human need and co-operation.
The working class urgently needs this understanding if it is to avoid the catastrophic consequences of capitalism's crisis, which is driving down the world's masses living conditions to levels of misery and despair that will far outstrip even the horrors of the 1930s Great Depression and subsequent world war.
However, neither Galloway nor any of the "firebrand" trade union brothers leading the disputes, or their "fake"-left cheerleaders and polite "critics", have the remotest intention of building such an understanding, either because of their complete incomprehension or deliberate anti-communist confusion-mongering.
In fact, by not placing their demands within the context of capitalism's inevitable collapse, everything they say heads the working class in the opposite direction; away from revolution and towards illusions that capitalism will somehow be able to solve its crisis – which is impossible.
An article by the supposed "Marxist theoretician" and Trotskyite SWP guru figure Alex Callinicos published in the latest edition of "Socialist Worker" deliberately and disgracefully (but not unexpectedly) avoids taking this revolutionary perspective on the crisis and misleads the working class into thinking that the crisis will eventually be resolved on capitalism's terms, thereby making all talk of revolution unnecessary.
Even the mealy-mouthed headline "Has the economic crisis nearly ended?" carries within it the implicit assumption that capitalism will eventually solve its crisis and sets the wrong tone from the start.
To avoid any doubt as to whether or not he is merely positing current bourgeois wishful thinking and deliberate misinformation around recent supposed "positive" economic signs as a rhetorical question in order to expose them and say "Of course not, and as Marxism always predicted and the 2008 Great Crash confirmed, the crisis is unstoppable," he almost immediately turns 150 years of Marxist understanding on its head with this astonishing statement:
At some stage, this crisis will definitely end. (!!!)
This confident and categorical assertion gives the lie to all the "revolutionary socialist" posturing of the SWP and exposes their complete inability to grasp Marx's dialectical materialist approach to understanding all phenomena, which sees the internal contradictions within the capitalist system only ever leading to its eventual collapse into a catastrophic crisis of non-stop slump and war unless, and until, it is overthrown by the working class through socialist revolution.
It also exposes their simpering petty bourgeois arse-crawling awe and wonder at the ruling class's supposed abilities to dig itself out of every crisis and return to the path of onwards and forever upwards growth; and by holding on to such backward and reactionary illusions, it diverts the working class away from the only understanding that is worthwhile and true – that this crisis will not end, ever, unless a consciously revolutionary proletarian movement is built to overthrow capitalism once and for all.
It flies in the face of all evidence to the contrary that has been pouring out of the world's media non-stop since October 2008, including (just two days after Callinicos's article was published) the OECD's "double dip recession" warning signs that shows that, far from ending, slump conditions are unfolding rapidly.
And it is built on a deliberate misreading of Marx's deeply profound theory of collapse:
Capitalism has always moved in what Karl Marx called a "dysfunctional circuit"—a cycle of booms and slumps. He shows in Capital Volume III how the slump itself—through unemployment pressing down on wages and the destruction of unprofitable capital—helps to create the conditions for an economic revival.
This wooden description omits the most crucial piece of understanding Marx and Engels came to as early as 1848 in the Communist Manifesto (and reproduced in every issue of the EPSR), which is that each crisis becomes more threatening to bourgeois class rule than all the crises that preceded it, in a cycle of crises that brings the system closer and closer to its eventual and final revolutionary collapse.
Marx was writing when capitalism was in its manufacturing stage and the periods between crises were short. He did not live to see the emergence of imperialism, during which the accumulation of capital becomes so great, and the time it takes for crises to erupt to the surface so protracted, that it takes a world war between imperialist rivals to destroy the amount of surplus capital necessary to create conditions for a potential capitalist revival. However, as Engels was able to confidently predict in 1887 when he foresaw that German expansion would lead to the slaughter of millions in a world war, such catastrophic conditions also prepare the way for inevitable proletarian class rule (see Lenin's 1918 "Prophetic Words").
Callinicos's petty bourgeois complacency does not grasp the depth and seriousness of the crisis, ascribing its cause to "the bursting of the huge bubble of cheap credit that inflated in the middle of the last decade" but failing to explain why capitalism needed to flood the world market with cheap credit in the first place.
Rather than causing the crisis, the phenomenal expansion of credit helped to stave off collapse after the 2001 crash by providing cash-strapped consumers and businesses with the money necessary to continue spending and investing. Credit expansion was therefore a sign that capitalism was already deep in crisis, as it had been has been for decades. It gave it a temporary breathing space whilst at the same time deepened the crisis by increasing the impoverishment and indebtedness of the world's masses after the bubble burst in 2008, and thereby further restricting their ability to consume the goods capitalism needs sell in order to expand and survive.
The EPSR has for thirty years been marginalised, treated with derision and suppressed at public meetings by the SWP and the rest of the fake-"left" for warning the working class that capitalism is hurtling towards catastrophic collapse, but now Callinicos finally concedes, because it is blatantly obvious to anyone taking a cursory glance at the situation, and because bourgeois commentators are saying so, that, in Greece at least, the situation is now catastrophic:
Meanwhile, the crisis itself has increased government borrowing. In part this is because states are taking over private debts. If governments then try to reduce their debt burdens by cutting public spending, this further reduces effective demand. Economic output shrinks, making it harder to meet the debt targets imposed on the weaker eurozone economies. All this has happened on a catastrophic scale in Greece, which is experiencing a slump comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s. But there are fears that something similar is beginning to happen in Spain, a much bigger economy... No, the crisis isn't over.
So if the situation in Greece is catastrophic, what does the SWP say the working class there should do about it? Why doesn't Callinicos argue for revolution as the only path out of the crisis for the working class there, if everything is so bad? Or in Spain? Or Italy, where conditions are so dire that people have set themselves alight in despair and protest? Or in Japan where more than 700 people have starved to death in since 2000? Or in the US where once comfortable middle class families are forced to eke out a living in tent cities and storm drains? Or in the UK where expressions of working class anger and rage at the intolerable conditions they live under already erupted in Britain's cities in last summers riots?
The entire planet is going through revolutionary turmoil, with spontaneous outbursts of revolt erupting everywhere as the crisis drives down living standards and forces the ruling classes of every capitalist nation to tear up all past compromises with the working class in order to maintain their class rule.
The world's masses are ripe for revolutionary argument, and the argument urgently needs to be made if their protests are going to make a qualitative leap towards an all out struggle for socialism.
The cowardly refusal of the SWP and the rest of the fake-"left" to argue for a revolutionary perspective on all world developments becomes more repellent the deeper and more devastating the crisis gets as it deliberately diverts workers away from the only perspective that offers them salvation. It needs to be thoroughly and ruthlessly exposed in the strongest way possible.
The retreat of renegade former EPSR supporters away from no-holds-barred polemic and debate to expose all such shades of petty bourgeois deviations and cover ups because they feel uncomfortable with the tone and directness of the arguments made is equally repellent because it also refuses to give a lead to the working class and does nothing to raise the level of debate.
An unashamedly Leninist revolutionary party that takes up arguments on all issues thrown up by the crisis, no matter how difficult, needs urgently needs building. Build it now.
Phil Waincliffe
Return to top
World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
What did Bush Sr. know about sabotage of the Cuban airliner?
THE worst act of terrorism in the history of Latin America took place on October 6,1976, when a Cubana de Aviación plane exploded in flight off the coast of Barbados and the 73 passengers and crew on board lost their lives.
08.jpg)
At that time the director of the cia was George Herbert Walker Bush.
What did the cia and the U.S. intelligence community know about this terrorist act then? Specifically, what did the then director of the cia know?
In an article published in Granma on May 8, 2006, titled "What did Bush Sr. know?" journalist and researcher Reinaldo Taladrid Herrero related a long history, excerpts are reproduced here:
Twelve years later, September 7, 1988, during a hearing in the U.S. Senate, Tom Harkin, Democratic Senator for Iowa, asked the then Vice President and Republican presidential candidate George H. W. Bush a series of questions, "Mr. Bush, when you were director of the cia in 1976, did you investigate the role of Posada and others in the explosion of the Cuban aircraft?
"Mr. Bush, you were the director of the cia when the sabotage happened and 73 people lost their lives and you took a personal interest in this and in a related series of anti-Castro bombs which hit the hemisphere in 1976.
"According to federal officials in Miami, the 1976 air attack was carried out by a coalition of anti-Castro paramilitary groups calling themselves coru.
"Concerned about this wave of attacks, you, Mr. Bush, as director of the cia, took a weekend trip to Miami at the beginning of November 1976, together with a veteran fbi official in order to - as was stated - to investigate the Cuban connection with the attacks on the aircraft and on Letelier [former Chilean Foreign Minister] here in Washington.
"The real question is, given Posada's past links with the cia, cia knowledge of the Cuban connection with the sabotage of the Cubana aircraft and the attack on Letelier, why, as director of the cia, were you not aware of the role of Posada in all of this at that moment? Why was no action taken at that point?"
The Senator's questions went unanswered and barely received any press coverage. They remain unanswered by Bush Sr.
If, as Senator Harkin stated, Bush Sr. traveled to Miami in. November. 1976 in the company of a senior fbi official, according to information disclosed in subsequently declassified documents, he already knew that Posada and Bosch were responsible for the sabotage.
A cia document dated June 22, 1976 and described as "delicate sources of information," states: "Subject: possible plans by an extremist group of Cuban exiles to blow up a Cubana airplane.
"Source: a businessman with close links to the Cuban exile community. Generally a reliable informant.
"1. An extremist Cuban group headed by Orlando Bosch is planning to place a bomb on a Cubana de Aviación flight from Panama to Havana. According to the initial plans for this operation, this required the placing of two devices on Cubana Fight No. 467 of June 21, 1976, scheduled to leave Panama at 11:15am local time..."
Another cia secret document, dated October 13,1976, addressed to the FBI Intelligence Division, reads,
"Subject: Leads on persons involved in the Cubana aircraft accident October 6, 1976.
"1. This agency has investigated the names of the persons who allegedly took part in the blowing up of the Cubana de Aviación flight.
"2. We have determined that this Agency had links with a person whose name has been mentioned in relation to the notified explosion. The employer of Lugo and Lozano in Caracas was Luis Posada Carriles ... Posada is a former cia agent. He left on friendly terms in July of 1967, but reestablished contact in October of 1967... we continue to maintain occasional contact with him."
An Intelligence Information cable from the cia Operations Directorate dated October 14,1976, classified as "priority" and sent to 14 top officials, which states:
"... during a fundraising dinner for Bosch at $1,118 per plate, held in the home of Hildo Folgar, a Cuban exile and prominent surgeon, Bosch said, 'Now that our organization has come out well from the Letelier job, we're going to try something else.'
"A few days after the fundraising dinner, Posada was heard to say the following, 'We're going to down a Cubana plane, Orlando has the details.'"
There is another secret report, dated November 2, 1976, from the fbi office in Miami to the fbi director in Washington, which reads, "In a meeting at the Caracas Anauco Hilton in which Frank Castro, Gustavo Castillo, Luis Posada Carriles and Morales Navarrete were present, plans related to the blowing up of a Cubana plane were discussed... shortly after the Cubana aircraft was blown up, Hernán Ricardo Lozano phoned Orlando Bosch from Trinidad to tell him that 'a bus with 73 dogs on board had fallen over a precipice and they were all dead.'
Why then did the government of the United States tell Venezuelan authorities that it had no information on the events which could be used in the trial of the masterminds?
Days after the questions Senator Harkin raised before the Senate hearing in 1988, George Bush Sr. was elected President of the United States.
How strange! Later, as President, George Bush Sr. befriended Orlando Bosch.
Draw your own conclusions.
Return to top
World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
PALESTlNIAN-ISRAEL CONFLICT
Israel seeks to erase Palestinian identity
Dalia González Delgado
THE Israeli government does not want peace with Palestine. Its plans are distinct, to de-Arabize the region, a strategy which has taken various forms. Since East Jerusalem was occupied by Israel in 1967 and incorporated into Israeli territory in 1980 - in violation of international law - Israel's intention has been attain a demographic majority in the city via the meticulous and premeditated construction of enclaves at key points.
Palestinian homes are being destroyed while industrial complexes, highways, commercial centers, schools and closed communities including swimming pools are under construction, solely for Israeli citizens.
In 2011, approximately 2,500 new homes for Israeli colonists were built in the West Bank, and settlements in East Jerusalem were extended in order to accelerate this process.
According to the Palestine/Israel Alternative Information Center (aic), while the physical occupation of land has been achieved, given that almost half of East Jerusalem is now in colonist hands, there is still no Jewish majority, as the colonists comprise 35% of East Jerusalem's total population. Studies by Sergio Della Pergola, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reveal that Jewish citizens have an average of 2.7 children, and Palestinians, four children.
How can Israel counteract the Palestinian demographic majority? By physically isolating East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.
According to the specialist Luz Welles, also at the Alternative Information center, Israel has architectural plans designed to separate East Jerusalem from the West Bank, thus clearly frustrating the possibility of a political solution including the division of the city with East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. For Palestinians, there can be no peace agreement until Israel relinquishes its control of that part of the city.
The mass appropriation of land constitutes a clear Israeli policy. In general terms, the Israeli public discourse does not refer to these constructions as settlements but as neighborhoods, presenting them as totally legitimate. But, in accordance with law and the international community, they are illegal settlements, given their construction beyond the Green Line in occupied territory.
Since 1967, 70,000 Palestinians have lost their right to reside in East Jerusalem, according to figures from the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions (icahd), a nongovernmental organization defending the rights of Palestinians living in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Another significant aspect which the Israeli government is cleverly managing as part of its ethnic cleansing plans is education. Peace activist Miko Peled, born in Jerusalem into a well-known Zionist family, explained how, through the education system, the Israeli government is working to indoctrinate and produce soldiers.
"Racism requires a mentality formed by education. In order to rationalize and justify ethnic cleansing, the Israeli educational system presents Palestinians as culturally inferior, violent, partial to the liquidation of Jews and, at the same time, lacking any real national identity. A Palestinian national identity is nothing more than the product of an anti-Semitic imagination," he observes.
Israeli children are educated to perceive Palestinians as a problem which has to be solved and as a threat to be eliminated. Palestinians are presented as an existential threat via absurd comparisons, such as that of Yasser Arafat with Hitler and Palestinians with Nazis. As Israeli children never come into contact with Palestinians, all they know about them is what they learn in school.
De-Arabizing the history of Palestine is a crucial element of ethnic cleansing. The 1,500 years of Arab and Muslim culture and domination in Palestine are being trivialized, the evidence of its existence is being destroyed.
Through Israeli law, any Jewish person has the "right to return'" or emigrate to Israel. It is called a birthright, even if he/she was not born there. However, any Palestinian born there, but who was expelled, has no right of return. Many Palestinians do not even have the right to visit the country.
These privileges are not the original cause of the conflict, but do demonstrate that Israel is not interested in ending it.
Return to top
World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
Haiti earthquake disaster not forgotten by Cuban communist medical aid
Juan Diego Nusa Peñalver
NOTHING and nobody can cast a shadow over the exceptional humanitarian labors of Cuban medical personnel during these past close to 13 years in Haiti, a country afflicted by disease, hurricanes and a lethal earthquake.
From December 1998 through November 9 of this year, Cuban doctors, nurses and other personnel have treated more than 18 million Haitians, assisted 133, 593 birth's and performed 304, 977 operations (37% of them major). They have also restored or improved the vision of 53, 712 Haitians, the vast majority living in poverty in remote communities, without any distinction in terms of gender, ethnicity, social condition or political affiliations. The only commitment has been to human life.
Not even the hostile U. S. media, such as The New York Times, has been able to ignore the impeccable work of the Cuban medical brigades; for example in combating the cholera epidemic in Haiti, where they have saved the lives of 76,300-plus patients, achieving an extremely low mortality rate in difficult living and working conditions.
The Cuban medical brigade is still working in the land of Toussaint L'Ouverture, while more than half of the mostly Western non-governmental organizations have already left Haiti, leaving its people to their fate.
Highly aware of this fact are two young Haitian doctors, Emile Nadege and Lourdes Phtlippeaux, two brilliant examples of the six graduations of 8,594 students from 54 countries, trained at Havana's Latin American School of Medicine (elam).
They have many reasons to love Cuba, Fidel and its people as if they were family.
"Cuba and Fidel made possible my dream of becoming a doctor and the training they gave me has allowed me to see things in a more human way in order to return to my country and help my people overcome so many illnesses, " Dr. Emile, a native of Port-au-Prince and a member of the first group of 120 Haitians who were part of the first elam graduation, told Granma.
Lively and friendly, Emile is co-director of the community reference hospital in the mountainous rural commune of L'Asile, in the southern department of Nippe, working alongside nursing graduate Raul Larrigana Torres from the Cuban province of Mayabeque. She can be found giving a consultation, covering her area or with a mop in her hand cleaning the floors and walls of the hospital, the pride of the Cuban medical brigade in Haiti.
Dr. Philippeaux, who graduated from elam in 2010 and is an outstanding professional in the likewise mountainous Kenscoff commune on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, emphasizes that her compatriots still need the Cubans' medical attention because it is of high quality and very humanitarian.
"Most of the 10 million Haitians have no means of paying for medical attention and these services do not exist in many places. The state Faculty of Medicine only graduates 100 doctors a year, an insufficient number for our country's needs, " she affirms, while treating Yelia Chery, aged 10 years, for an acute respiratory disorder.
Being given the opportunity to fulfill themselves and contribute to the health of their people and those of other Third World countries are two reasons why Emile and Lourdes will always love Cuba and the Cuban people, they affirm with conviction. •