Back issues
No 1464 28th Mar 2015
Homosexual child abuse scandals and corrupt petty money-grubbing around Parliament express the degeneration and weakness of the capitalist ruling class hammered by unstoppable economic crisis and the failure of its international warmongering “solution” to reimpose colonialist exploitation. But the fake-”left” makes nothing of this weakness, hamstrung by decades of Politically Correct single-issue diversions from revolutionary politics like feminism, “gay rights” and black nationalism. These are increasingly revealed not only as petty bourgeois evasion by pretend “Marxists” but weapons for the reactionary capitalist build up of ever more destructive Nazi war fever, demonising “jihadist” revolt and Russian-aided resistance against the Kiev-fascist regime installed by CIA manipulation. ALL the “left” still stick to “parliamentary pressure” failing to warn the working class of oncoming Slump repression and sinister fascist manoeuvring within mainstream bourgeois rule. Leninism needed
Decadent homosexual child abuse scandals, daily revelations of sleazy money-grubbing parliamentary corruption and “free world” support for fascist civilian massacring coups from Bangkok to Kiev and Cairo, are all signals of the total meltdown failure of the capitalist system, falling apart and heading for Third World War.
The lies and pretences, and sheer degeneracy of hoodwinking bourgeois “democracy”, and the fascist aggression of capitalism it covers up, are exposed as never before, but so too is the confusion, opportunism and anti-revolutionary hostility of the fake-“left”.
They fail totally to put the revolutionary perspective at the centre of leadership and understanding.
Domestically the smell of sleaze and corruption is almost pestilential but their petty bourgeois moralising embrace of “gay is normal” proselytising and other PC single-issue individualism means they fail to put the boot into such ruling class degeneracy.
Just the opposite, PC diversions have helped cover up such scandals for decades, protecting the sick farce of parliamentary politics which has been used to fool and hoodwink the masses with the idea it is getting some kind of “representation” to deliver “steady improvements” to life to eventually remove the ridiculous and sickening unfairness and inequality of life under capitalism.
Instead of exposing such continuing illusions about bourgeois “democracy”, which is in fact nothing but a cover for bourgeois dictatorship and its non-stop and ever intensifying exploitation, these PC distractions and diversions – from feminism and black nationalism to environmentalism and animal rights – , help tie the working class back behind ideas of reformist changes through voting, just when spontaneously arising contempt for its corruption and betrayal has (correctly) become almost universal.
Abroad, the world is being torn apart by capitalism’s deliberate drive to war as a means to escape and evade its catastrophic crisis, wiping out “surplus capital” and trying to ensure the burdens of that “necessary” destruction (if profit is to remain the rationale, guiding world production) are pushed onto firstly, the working masses, and then all other capitalist rivals in desperate to-the-death cut throat competitive trade war and then all out devastation.
Once again the “left” is totally exposed, falling, in practice, on the wrong side by failing to warn the working class of this unfolding mortal conflict and its only possible resolution through revolution.
Instead it capitulates to imperialism’s “War on terror” nonsense, every “condemnation” of Third world upheaval as “evil” or “criminal” or “just a CIA plot” aiding the build-up of imperialism’s “kill them all” atmosphere to create World War chauvinist frenzy.
The outright Nazism Washington and its imperialist sidekicks have been steadily sliding into over nearly two decades, (from the blitzkrieg on Serbia onwards) is even clearer from the now unapologetic support for foul Swastika-toting, death-squad civilian-killing fascists in Ukraine trying (but currently failing) to suppress the Russian speaking eastern working class, and to whip up a monstrous Goebbels hate campaign against Russia (to further escalate war hysteria).
On top, a decade and a half of blitzkrieging in the Middle East – just further escalated in Yemen – has left an agonised mess of entire countries blown apart and utterly destroyed, including Syria, Iraq, much of Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya and above all else the benighted Palestinian nation, with tens of millions gruesomely tortured, massacred, maimed, bereaved and turned into devastated refugees living in burnt out cities or scrappy desert camps.
The devastation is both direct or via Western armed proxies like feudal Saudi Arabia now in Yemen and most of all the Rottweiler Zionist land-theft occupation of Palestine, non-stop imposing genocidal oppression and ethnic cleansing dispersal on the indigenous Palestinian people.
Rebellions, Islamic or Russian nationalist (and even hesitatingly communist), which this devastation has stirred up among the anarchic warlord chaos, including increasing “blowback” from insurgents or jihadis allegedly set running by the West, are now non-stop making a mockery of capitalist claims to be bringing “renewed stability and prosperity”.
But it not the “jihadist” rebels who are to blame for country after country being shattered and destroyed.
That is solely down to world-dominating and agenda-setting capitalism’s own crisis disintegration and intentional war “solution” to force its unprecedented and epochal collapse onto the rest of the world and to “shock and awe” both capitalist rivals and Third World revolt into complying with the topdog US Empire’s continuing plunder of the world’s resources and labour despite its total bankruptcy and failure.
Or else be destroyed.
Blaming this World War Three turmoil and chaos on the resistance that has been stirred up is truly Goebbels-like circular propaganda, declaring “black is white”, “cause is effect” and comparing a flea-bite to a hurricane in alleged “murderous depravity” etc etc.
The collapse and the deliberate World War drive of monopoly capitalism to escape it, ever more urgently demands of, or rather leaves no choice to, the working class but to end this profiteering system and its plunge towards vicious Nazi blitzing destruction.
It is an unstoppable and intractable plunge despite the Quantitative Easing-fed false credit “upturns” lyingly declared by the ruling class to be an (impossible) “recovery”.
There is no recovery and the artificial, printed-money momentum in some capitalist economies teeters constantly on the edge of even greater implosions than the 2008 “world financial crisis”.
Collapse into ever greater decadence, repression and war will continue unstopped and unstoppable until capitalism is completely overturned by revolutionary struggle to establish working class total power.
That means urgently building a revolutionary party and leadership.
The world is crying out for such understanding as the great turmoil of the Middle East, Ukraine, Africa and Latin America indicates, along with working class anti-austerity rebelliousness growing in Europe and America (where it currently finds expression in the spreading Ferguson black anti-racism upheavals).
It has never been more ready for the great class war that will eventually bring down the rotting, greed-ridden profit system and establish planned socialism but it is suffering from a lack of clarity and understanding, revolutionary leadership in other words.
But the moralising PC posturing, social-pacifist “Stop the war” bleating, fatuous “Stop Austerity” protests and “marches against racism” of the “left” are not only pathetically inadequate in the teeth of the greatest Slump collapse and drive to war seen in history but rank opportunism from the entire spectrum of the “labour Movement” through to the 57 varieties of Trotskyist and Revisionist self-declared “Marxists”.
Their contempt for theory and sectarian refusal to openly debate and learn lessons, smothers the living struggle for Marxist-Leninism.
Workers need to hear, and are increasingly ready to take up the understanding that only the class war to overturn the degenerate capitalist order can now save them from chaos and deadly destruction, by establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat (meaning the overwhelming majority in society) so that socialism can be built with the constantly growing participation of the masses.
Every battle for housing, health, education and jobs, needs to have this perspective at its heart so that whatever the immediate outcome the real context of world collapse is understood and deepened, to build for the eventual total victory of the working class.
But the dozens of different “left” pretenders from “left” Labourites to sour Trots and dull-brained revisionists, continue to tie workers back to reformism and sleaze-ridden parliamentary processes.
It is total misleadership and betrayal.
Even with “left pressure” all that will happen is capitulation and useless treacherous class collaboration as a long record of Labourism proves.
Should any reformism actually go far enough to really challenge capitalist interests, direct bourgeois interference measures will follow from the sneaky “coalition” overriding of “democratic wishes” (for what little they are worth in the money and media manipulated, advertising saturated, gerrymandered form elections take within capitalism) to “states of emergency”, privy council rule or outright military coup.
Now that the inevitable Slump disaster has really broken surface, (and continues to have to be imposed on the working class, particularly in the weaker countries) there is even less room for the old reformist pretences, where the ruling class in the richer countries made some minor concessions on welfare and health etc, to head off potentially revolutionary discontent.
The proof comes thick and fast, particularly with the rapid collapse of the campaigning “against austerity” that the Labour movement and most of the Trots have backed, as personified by the Syriza hodge-podge “left coalition” in Greece.
But any revolutionary conclusions are ignored and brushed under the carpet, the normal dishonest response of all petty bourgeois “left”ism to the unrolling of real events which constantly undermine and disprove their shallow sloganising.
All of the “lefts” variously supported, or were ambivalent about, the Greek “anti-austerity” movement, boosting the fake-“left” Syriza assemblage of assorted reformists and Trotskyists, which has immediately capitulated to European monopoly capitalist finance pressure, with all its bold promises to repudiate the debt forgotten and its “Vote to end austerity” nonsense utterly discredited.
The “left” will wriggle away from this disaster without any of them explaining why they did not make clear, for at least the last four years, why they mightily postured around “Greek Solidarity” without saying a word to challenge the dangerous nonsense that “austerity can be rejected with an electoral vote”, instead of warning, as the EPSR did, that crisis is built in to capitalism and unstoppable except by its overturn.
The same is true for the Stalinist revisionist Greek Communist Party, the KKE, which denounced Syriza but only for “left” infighting purposes, quibbling over details of the next parliamentary move – such as leaving the Euro or not, but all within an electoral framework and saying nothing about revolution.
It makes no difference within the gigantic capitalist crisis whether a capitalist economy is in or out of Europe and the Euro economic mechanism, the hurricane collapse and escalating trade war of world wide capitalism will sweep through it either way.
Making that a key issue (without putting it into a revolutionary context) just leaves the working class exposed to the same kind of democracy illusions as Syriza, as well as playing into the hands of petty nationalism.
If the KKE – or even the Syriza for that matter – was to repudiate all the debts and thereby threaten the whole European banking or currency system, as speculated by the Lalkar/Proletarian revisionists eg, it might certainly pose new questions – so why do they not spell out what those might be???
Surely such a financial collapse would immediately confront the Greek workers and many more in Europe with total turmoil and breakdown?
So what would that imply?
Surely the questions raised must be of taking control of the major parts of the economy, in order to establish some kind of working class authority and battle against the inevitable warlordism, anarchy and chaos that would follow?
But that brings the issue immediately to how should it be done?
The ruling class of course will be thinking out such issues, and will be ready to step in long before the working class “transfers its confidence to the KKE in the next election”.
None of the “lefts”, Trotskyist or revisionist have said anything about the three fascist coups which Greece has already experienced, including the 1930s Metaxa dictatorship, the colonels’ junta of the 1960s and 1970s and the 4-year fascist civil war waged on the WW2 communist partisans which was backed and organised by British rule under the authority of Attlee’s British Labour government between 1945-49 (a significant lesson in social-democratic Labour Movement ‘democracy” in itself, running imperialism and barbarously killing communist and independence anti-colonialist movements).
A fourth coup is obviously not ruled out.
The warning is not just for Greece as the 1973 Chile overturn of an elected socialist government demonstrates and, equally, the 2013 violent street massacring toppling of Egypt’s elected president, and many more brutal coups.
But still the “left” are all pitching into the British general election with the same old “left pressure” reformist opportunism as if nothing has been learned.
Using election tactics is necessary for any working class leadership but Leninism makes it clear that can only be to expose Parliament for the confidence trick it is.
And its corrupt degeneracy has never been more exposable as sleaze and foul decay pour out, showing a ruling class more shaken in its confidence than ever before as the crisis brings splits and recrimination to the surface.
Scandal is now almost continuous.
Firstly, case after case emerges of spivvy money-grubbing and private pocket-lining influence peddling which if they do not “break the law” – and there is plenty of outright fiddling – is only because the MPs make up the rules themselves so they can constantly enhance the excessive “comfortable” salaries they already pay each other, along with lavish expenses and endless freebies and “lunches”.
Not only is this petty greed contemptuous of the “public”, as with the nasty little Tory-chairman chancer Grant Shapps and his lies about his Internet racket, but shows a ruling class reduced to grovelling around in secret as Sir (!!) Malcolm Rifkind was caught out doing, after a bit on the side from some supposed Chinese companies.
What a humiliation for an alleged “big gun” of the Tory establishment, part of an Empire-racist ruling class that would once not have deigned even to acknowledge the presence of a Chinese businessman (or “coolie”), let alone run around after a few crumbs from what is still a workers state, albeit saturated with dire revisionist illusions.
How the mighty are fallen!
In this degenerate bribery and fiddling, (and parliamentary vote fixing manoeuvres too), on all sides (UKIP, Tory, Labour so far) the finger should be pointed even more at the monstrous dissembling and grubbiness of the Labourite ex-Home Secretary (!!!) Jack Straw (the man who let General Augusto Pinochet go back to Chile in the 1990s), and the entire Labour establishment around him (“left” MPs too) which colludes in burying away the story (quickly taken off the “media radar” too by the same string pulling that suppresses all “inconvenient” facts).
Even the “principled lefts” in Parliament who may not take money, but like the “glory” and ego-boosting public attention, are shown up, failing to make clear that this racket is just a part of the freesmasonry-ridden ruling class, a revolving-door, jobs-for-the-boys club on the Thames whose members constantly interchange with the multinational corporation boardrooms, Stock Exchange, banks, military and judges etc who, as a class, actually call the shots in capitalism on all the big issues leaving only the most trivial and unimportant decisions or endless pointless “reorganisations” of the NHS etc for parliament, to pretend “things are being done”.
This sickness has to be overturned.
But the entire Labour Movement still pretends that “change” can come through parliament, a reformist delusion that has corralled the working class for 150 years away from revolutionary politics, and which sneers at the idea of coups and clampdowns with their complacent “couldn’t happen here” petty bourgeois smugness (laced with underlying racist arrogance, since it obviously could happen to the Greeks, Africans and Latin Americans etc).
All kinds of stirring indicates differently for Britain too.
There are mutinous rumblings in the military establishment echoing secret military plots in the fraught near-bankrupt Britain of the 1970s, with all kinds of generals and “retired MI6 chiefs” coming out of the woodwork and suddenly being given generous deferential interviews on programmes like the BBCs Today to sound off (- who elected them?) – and ever more repressive and draconian surveillance and censorship being imposed by reactionaries like Home Secretary Theresa May, along with constant “anti-terror” scaremongering:
Conservative MP Col Bob Stewart, a member of the Commons Defence Committee and former Commander of UN forces in Bosnia, said senior generals should sacrifice their careers in protest [at defence cuts].
UK spending is forecast to drop below the NATO minimum of two per cent of GDP - a level former commanders described as “parlous” and giving the “green light” to aggression by Putin.
Col Stewart told a meeting of the UK National Defence Association said the mass resignation of the Chief of Defence staff, Gen Sir Nick Houghton, his vice-chief, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach, and the three chiefs of the services would do far more than any pleading from former ministers.
“The people in this room are all retired. If we are really a parlous state in defence, why are the Joint Chiefs of Staff not tendering their resignations?
Former Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Graydon...said he would favour such a mass resignation if defence spending falls below two per cent after the general election.
He said prospect of British troops being forced to fight within US Divisions due to defence cuts was a “humiliation”.
He also warned the prospect of the Greens and the SNP forming part of a Coalition after the election is a “recipe for chaos”.
Both parties oppose the Trident nuclear deterrent.
Col Stewart’s remarks come days after the head of the US Army, Gen Raymond Odierno, said he is “very concerned” about cuts to Britain’s defence budget and warned that they risk diminishing the Army’s ability to fight future campaigns.
...Gen Odierno disclosed that the cuts have forced the US to undertake an urgent review of how British troops could fight alongside their forces in future conflicts. “I would be lying to you if I did not say that I am very concerned about the GDP investment in the UK,” he said.
Air Commodore Andrew Lambert (Rtd) said Britain’s armed forces are now “paper thin”, and the prospect of Russian aggression in such a context “scares the hell out of me.”
He urged Chancellor George Osborne should tie defence spending to three per cent, in line with economic growth...and warned that political parties are seeking to “bury” the issue.
This Colonel Blimpery is arising because keeping control by fooling the people no longer works, but its open repression is a sign of desperation and panic as all fascism is.
But it is no joke.
Echoes of the Nazi period – sans jackboots – are also now unmistakeable in the latest attempted thought-police Home Office “listings” of alleged “extremism” ie anything and anyone the ruling class deems to be “subversive” or “against ‘our values’ etc”– essentially anything that is not tame acceptance of the bourgeois dictatorship and its hoodwinking “democracy” cover.
Under this, it will be compulsory not just to accept the lies but to enthusiastically endorse them, “doublethink” made palpable, a ghastly Catch 22, where anyone who disputes anything (including these fascist controls) is deemed to be the enemy, because they query them, echoing George Bush’s Iraq war declarations of “if you are not with us you are against us” and therefore a potential target.
Merely thinking is now enough to be a crime attracting severe punishment, as this bourgeois press letter queries:
When did it become possible for UK citizens to be jailed for significant lengths of time not for what they have done, but for what they might do? I find it troubling that Brusthom Ziamani can be imprisoned for 22 years for apparently intending to go ahead with a planned crime (Teenager jailed for 22 years for plot to behead a soldier, 21 March). I have absolutely no sympathy for the systems of thought and reasoning that publicise, glamorise and encourage the type of violence that Ziamani is alleged to have planned, but are we not at a point where we are now imprisoning citizens not for what they do, but for what they think, say and write? Commander Richard Walton of the Metropolitan police is quoted as saying, following the sentence, that the work of officers aided by MI5 had “probably prevented a horrific terrorist attack taking place on the streets of London”.
Are we now jailing citizens on probability? Other probabilities spring to mind. Might he not have changed his mind? Been bragging to his associates and girlfriend? Been dissuaded when confronted with the reality of an attack, rather than the imagining of it? These seem to me to be at least some other plausible probabilities. Are there any members of the legal profession troubled by this sentence and its implications? Any MPs? Where does this sit in the development of the law in the UK?
Chris Roome, Kent
The ruling class also wants to impose a bureaucratic compulsion to support “our boys” whatever rampaging torture, massacres and mayhem the capitalist military imposes on other peoples’ countries, such as the British special forces currently sent to “train” the Hitler tattooed Kiev killer-squads and the “official” Ukrainian army responsible for civilian blitzing mayhem in eastern Ukraine, costing 5000 lives.
But that is a desperate move too reflecting the major defeats and setbacks forced on Kiev and its Western backing by the increasingly well organised Donbass resistance.
May and the establishment would like to see all such disasters go unreported and a willing enough capitalist press has gone very silent on the matter; the bourgeoise know very clearly how damaging such defeats are for its own morale.
Calling for the defeat of imperialism’s blitzing and warmongering is a central platform of revolutionary Bolshevism, recognising that it is through ruling class defeat and setback that the opportunities open up for working class advances and revolutionary transformation.
The emerging exposure of another kind of fiddling, this time with little boys, is also another defeat and setback for the ruling class.
This vileness has been virtually endemic in the Establishment, as long known around media and political circles, but kept silent partly by legal and state “security” threats and partly by the opportunist complicity of the parliamentary racket, and the press, on all sides.
The cover-up is itself as much a depravity as the disgusting and degenerate abuse, which has devastated thousands of young lives with lifelong psychological and sometimes physical trauma, severe injuries and even death by suicide or, it is emerging, by murder during the more grotesque of the sexual rapes.
As an expression of the decadent degeneration of the entire ruling order it could not get much more pestilential.
But the stories are now pouring out of the sick and vile orgies and rape parties of little boys at various venues and of the depraved activities of assorted monstrous homosexual paedophiles like Cyril Smith and others; and equally of the Establishment cover-ups all the way to the top of both the Tories, and the Liberals with Margaret Thatcher using prime ministerial authority to suppress investigations and public exposures and David Steel “overlooking” the abuse and even recommending Smith for an honour.
Drawing this kind of filth out is exactly the kind of exposé which Lenin declared in What is to be Done? should be a basic task of revolutionary political education for the working class.
Disclosing and analysing all such monstrousness should be used as a weapon to expose and attack the ruling class, to lay into, ridicule, and set back its arrogance and “authority” and to inflict the greatest possible defeats politically and socially.
But the fake-“left” has not only failed to take up this foulness as a means to wreak as much political and philosophical damage as possible, its Politically Correct posturing and preening has prevented this depravity and its exposure being used to show the working class what a degenerate mess the ruling class creates.
Effectively its “gay rights” has been a “left” cover for joining in the cover-up of this vile scandal, a collusion running all through the “Labour Movement” and the fake-“left”.
By adopting the “gay rights” campaigners’ insistent mantra that homosexuality is “normal and no different” except as a “lifestyle choice” to majority heterosexual development, the “lefts” (bar the “honourable” exception, (on this issue only) of the late SWP member Paul Foot) have long blocked off even investigating such incidents, deeming that checks or inquiries would be “homophobic”.
All more sceptical scientific inquiry and attempts to understand the psychology of homosexuality, and its predisposition, in political form, towards reaction and anti-communism, whipping up anti-Palestinian hatred (Tatchell), anti-Cuban workers state condemnations, demented warmongering against Russia over Sochi etc etc etc, (led by the smug self-obssessed prig Steven Fry), have been deemed “homophobia” which must be banned, censored, and on occasions even physically attacked, most recently for example being used to bar entry to public Left Unity meetings in Leeds at the instigation of the Workers Power Trotskyists.
As a result, all kinds of depravity and tragic devastation of thousands of children’s entire lives has been left unchallenged or even covered up by the left, such as the 1980s Mark Trotter paedophile scandal in Hackney’s ‘left’-Labour council, where this homosexual was able to abuse hundreds of children in the council homes for 15 years, infecting many of them with AIDS, because he was left uncontrolled by local Labour councillors who declared it would be “homophobic” to make background checks or raise suspicions.
Multiple other cases include the Kincora Boys Home in Northern Ireland’s occupied zone, the Bryn Estn boy’s home in north Wales, London’s Elm Guest House, Dolphin Square, Bradford, Rochester and on and on.
All attempts at social, scientific and psychological inquiry – the basic method to develop understanding – on such issues are also deemed unacceptable and anyone raising such questions, even just to make the point that there is possibly more to be understood, without pre-judging the outcome, has been censored, blocked from debate, and vilified.
Such questions, which are part of mainstream psychology and neutrally investigated (see developmental psychologist Oliver James for example who has reviewed the literature) are not just a valid part of political understanding but vital to exploring and understanding all aspects of society, crucial for a working class leadership.
The “left” have also aggressively maintained that homosexuality and paedophile abuse are “completely separate” and that to even suggest that in some instances there are correlations is “unacceptable”.
But as the strea1m of cases from the American Boy Scouts to the Catholic Church homes in Ireland, as well as virtually all the current cases demonstrate, the abuse is nearly always of homosexual men on boys.
It is clear that the majority of paedophile abuse – including Savile –is heterosexual (inasmuch as the term means anything for such grotesque psychologically damaged monstrosities), the majority of homosexuals are not paedophiles: but , it is not the point; but that there is a correlation in virtually all the cases now is clear and significant.
Denying that such a correlation exists as “being homophobic” is anti-scientific and prevents any kind of reasonable investigation and understanding developing; it has helped the ruling class get away with the foulest of behaviour and abuse.
It does nothing to build a rational and tolerant acceptance of homosexuality (clearly a complex phenomenon) by understanding of what it is, how it develops and how best to cope with it, as well as any possible problems for society in a minority of cases.
There are plenty of people, far from reactionary, with doubts on these matters and “left” PC rejection of all such questions and inquiry simply drives them towards the UKIPs and other reactionaries of the world.
It has taken the disquieted and disturbed middle class, unsettled and unnerved by the impact of the latest seven year long “austerity” phase capitalist crisis stagnation, to produce a deluge of revelations in papers like the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph, (as well as the maverick “entrepreneur”-funded liberal Exaro, burrowing away at four decades of suppression and cover-up) to bring some of the details to surface.
An avalanche of disclosures is now emerging despite ever more desperate legal and state intimidation of police, Establishment behind-the-scenes string-pulling, all kinds of freemasonries and “Club” connections, and outright political manoeuvring to suspend, fix, delay, “kick into the long grass” and bury all official inquiries and investigations (which will only ever get at part of the truth anyway).
The ruling class believes it can, and has been able to, quite literally get away with murder and the wholesale destruction of ordinary peoples’ lives (already true about various conveniently dead perpetrators, whatever particular crimes are proven in the latest cases or as further details emerge).
The exposés, compounded by multiple layers of complicity and “blind-eye” collaboration over decades of much of the bourgeois media and other middle class insider hangers-on, are a significant lesson in the arrogance, depravity, and degeneracy of the ruling class and could help break away, or at least neutralise even sections of the middle class from continuing support for capitalism.
Equally the opportunism and collusion of the Labourites should be exposed, not least the likes of such careerists as Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harmon, both caught out as having supported the Paedophile Information Exchange in their early careers.
Such fake-“left” duplicity saw taking up single-issue campaigns like this as a stepping stone in their own advancement, before a full separation had been made between reformist “gay rights” campaigning and child sex campaigning; and the venal self-seeking of it was more than confirmed by their denials before the past connections were revealed.
The real vileness of these two, like all Labourites, lies in their reactionary participation in, and aid for capitalism, fooling the working class by salvaging its already bankrupt parliamentary rule in the late 1990s, running imperialism and participating in the worldwide oppression and exploitation it imposes.
They were at the forefront of its slide towards crisis warmongering, not least as part of the Blair government’s WMD Goebbels lie instigation of the war on Iraq, and the non-stop destruction, torture and killing that has followed.
But Labourite use of PCism including reactionary feminism, and black nationalist “anti-racism” reformism (also adopted by the Tories!)is a major part of fooling the working class.
All these issues and others like global warming, fracking and other environmental damage, risky genetic manipulation, etc stem from real problems, persecution and oppression in the distorted, callous, alienated, and exploitative profit making system, riddled with gross inequalities and antagonistic conflict at all levels, and uncaring of the massive damage it wreaks in the pursuit of profit.
But none of them can be solved within capitalism and the reformist notion that they can be, or must be, dealt with before the working class can make a revolutionary change is at best deluded and disarming reformism, and usually a deliberate distraction from revolutionary perspectives.
To say this is not to declare that all these questions should not be taken up; they are all important and part of the fight against capitalism as the EPSR has spelt out in the past (EPSR No. 975 17-11-98):
Male-chauvinist prejudice, homophobic prejudice, and racist prejudice are endemic rotten features widespread throughout capitalist society. No one can doubt their vile inhuman divisiveness and their latent potential for fascist aggressiveness to scar society right down into the kitchen of every home in the land, in all lands.
Slowly, there is beginning to be agreement and understanding, which is to be welcomed, that these degrading features of society cannot possibly disappear until the capitalist system itself is got rid of (which is the tireless uncontrollable source of ALL insecurity, self-pity, vindictiveness, paranoia, bullying, and all other pathetic ego-tripping and self-justification afflicting every individual to a greater or less extent suffering the frustrations and alienation of capitalist society.)
Campaigns now for re-education, however, are equally obviously essential tactics for the socialist movement to challenge the whole of capitalist society with, including the working class which can be as backward as any on such issues where bourgeois cultural norms tend to dominate universally. Some piecemeal reforms will also make important human-rights progress too, such as ending the barbaric legislation of imprisonment for homosexual acts between consenting adults in private, and other rescindment of primitive laws of discrimination in all fields.
And self-empowerment through self-organisation by women, homosexuals, and Black & Asian (and other) ethnic minorities, and by the sensorily-impaired and other disabilities, etc, — — all obviously can help swell the common tide of action and agitation against the inadequacies of capitalist society. And there is no reason at all for such single-issue organisations (in origin) not to plug into, valuably...general socialist agitation...
The problem lies with the self-righteous ‘reformist’ extremism that such organisations are prone to, and the confusing influence that their general political opportunism gives rise to when ‘the cause’ is placed higher than anything else in the political spectrum.
Even if occasional advances are made within capitalism however, this rotten system will always regenerate all kinds of divisions, partly because antagonistic dog-eat-dog competition, making progress by stepping on everyone else, is the very nature of capitalism, and because conflict is a useful tool for the ruling class, to “divide and rule”.
The biggest problem is that single-issue-ism is an opportunist way for the “left” to posture and pretend to be “doing something” while avoiding or repudiating the need for revolution, which is why it has seized on all these reformist issues for decades, covering up its deep down petty bourgeois fear of, and hostility to, the working class and particularly the workers states.
So not only has this “gay rights” PCism failed to expose the latest ruling class depravities, and generally single-issue politics are “passively reactionary” (by blocking the revolutionary perspective) but they become increasingly actively reactionary too.
As detailed in the past, the “gay rights” issue has ended up attacking the Palestinian struggle, disrupting its marches in London, and it is part of the fake-“left” capitulation to imperialist demonisation of the worldwide “jihadist” revolt, with Trotskyists and groups like the Weekly Worker declaring all such movements to be “reactionary Islam” (denouncing both ISIS and the Iranians fighting them) partly based on cultural attitudes to homosexuality. But such posturing is out of all proportion as previously explained (EPSR1242 20-0704):
This homosexual counter-demonstration against Palestinian “homophobia” inevitably completely sabotaged the aim of the protest to draw attention to the unbelievable suffering and humiliation still daily tormenting this 8-million strong Arab nation who have now been ethnically-cleansed out of 85% of their own homeland since 1945 to make way for “Israel” at Western imperialist insistence (approved by a tame UN), and whose assassinations, mass murders, beatings, house demolitions, and increasing effective total imprisonment in refugee camps and patchwork reservations, criss-crossed by Zionist military highways and other non-stop surveillance and interference, continue nonstop today, ignored by the whole world.
This greatest longstanding colonial-genocide tyranny in modern records can remain without public attention or sympathy as far as these homosexuals are concerned who are only interested in their own message.
Such extreme anti-communist individualism could not care less that by undermining this key anti-imperialist struggle in the world, the rebirth of international socialist revolutionary perspectives is further delayed.
Some personal homosexual agendas believe that reformism has served their interests, and just want more reforms, not revolution.
Their counter-demonstration was 100% politically reactionary.
The refusal of Russian Bonarpartism under Putin to go along with the campaign to have homosexuality declared “the same” as heterosexuality, has not only drawn the hatred of the “gay righters” in the West but has turned into a demented campaign against the Moscow regime – ludicrously described as “fascist repression” because it will not teach this to young children.
Such accusations would be reactionary enough anyway but are beyond irresponsible at a moment when the West is once more surrounding Russia with deadly threatening NATO troops, whipping up a demented Goebbels war atmosphere against it and arming and provoking the Kiev fascist attacks.
It demonstrates how the PC agenda becomes not just a blockage to revolutionary theory but openly counter-revolutionary.
Feminism is even more a tool of reaction, for example increasingly used as part of the West’s hate campaign against Putin’s resistance to the West’s NATO encirclement and the constant efforts to de-stabilise Moscow with the same kind of counter-revolutionary petty bourgeois “democracy” stunt demonstrations that installed the Nazi Kiev coup, using the most reactionary of the gangster oligarchs as funders and figureheads, as with the anarcho-feminist stunts of the “Pussy Riot” protestors for example.
There is plenty to oppose from a Marxist point of view with Putin whose state balancing act, between the working class and the oligarch billionaire mafia capitalists who have plundered the wealth of the former Soviet Union, is a disgrace and a philistine anti-communist stupidity, providing no future at all for the working class or real defence against constant further exploitation and capitalist subversion.
His anti-communist idiocy, “Great Russian” nationalism and Macho apeing of Western “anti-terrorism” are obstacles to the working class rebuilding a workers state, but Pussy Riot’s anarchic “democracy” stunts are not going to do anything to rebuild any kind of Leninist understanding.
Instead their anti-communist pro-Western usefulness was testified to by their recent visit to London, lauded in all directions by all the bourgeois press.
And if this anarcho-feminism does not make the point enough then the recent eulogies by the Trot-infested Guardian for Kiev “feminist hero fighters”, should be more convincing, a long article gushing on about them simply because they are women and ignoring completely that they are fighting with the fascists, travelling in a van with an 1488 painted on the side, the numbers representing Hitler’s initials (see picture).
Some human progress!!!!
This fascism needs defeating before Putin but it is important not to put any trust or faith in his capitalist supporting regime which needs to be dealt with by the working class as soon as possible.
Other PCism like black nationalism and “anti-racism” equally hovers between distracting from, or deliberately diverting from revolutionary politics and tipping over into all out reaction.
Anti-racism is of course a major issue once more in the US where a wave of demonstrations and protest which erupted against the killing of a black youth in Ferguson last year, and several subsequent examples of police repression leading to the street deaths of black men has demonstrated how close to the surface is the rebellious of the this endlessly persecuted and repressed section of the working class.
But to declare this to be a revolt against racism per se is to miss the point and to mislead the working class as a whole; missing out that a universal oppression bears down on all the US working class, leaving huge numbers in poverty and hopelessness and particularly other minorities too, often racistly singled out for extra bad treatment as well, like the Hispanic population and Native Americans.
Even if the demonstrators themselves still see the issue in race terms, what is driving this repression and the astonishingly widespread response to it, is far deeper, namely the ever increasing squeeze on the working class and its exploitation, intensified by the crisis, and their growing frustration and discontent as the contradictions of the crisis escalate. The point was made fifteen years ago when more limited upheavals erupted but applies equally now, only magnified across the US since Ferguson (EPSR No.1085 17-04-01):
The Cincinnati riots against black deaths in police custody are what should be expected; but when class-collaborating reformists attack cop’s racist bias as the problem, the ludicrous propositions follow that the Western imperialist states of ‘bourgeois dictatorship’ (as Marx termed monopoly-capitalism’s unreformable domination) have only known the problem of deaths in police custody when a black minority has come under the cosh; and that if this racism would stop (as per the Macpherson recommendations), then this problem would stop; and, even more stupid, that the class bias in all capitalist democracy policing (pro property, and against anti-authority and anti-property agitators) would not be a concern if there was no racist bias involved in cracking down on dissidence of every kind.
Clearly, more than a few anti-racist campaigners would be even happier if the exposures of officialdom’s race prejudice in all its workings were also accompanied by an even more important analysis of the relentless and vicious class-war bias in everything that the state authorities do.
But the question is what to make of public campaigns which do not hammer out that important additional class-war message??
Capitalist exploitation’s racist bias always needs identifying as such, obviously. But much more importantly, all such incidents needs identifying first and foremost as class domination.
The Cincinnati rebellion is essentially about a proletarian revolt against the rule of the American monopoly-bourgeois class which creates a society where all authority will always be vested in a system which protects property and property rights above all else, and which will keep control permanently, by any means possible, over all potential threats to that property system.
Obviously, large black proletarian ghettoes in America’s major cities are exactly such a threat, but the constant harassment and repression of them, such as has led to the current Cincinnati rebellion, is an anti-capitalist propaganda point LOST when presented as a racist issue by the petty-bourgeois class-collaborating race-relations industry inspired by ‘moral’ idealism.
It is legitimate to fear open fascism taking over Western governments again as in the 1920s and 1930s, and anti-fascist propaganda and agitation is obviously a necessary part of the labour movement’s activities; but nothing except complete historical nonsense has followed when it starts to be proclaimed that “at least fascism has been defeated” or “at least racism has been driven back”. The ‘victors’ over the Axis (fascist) powers then gave the world the genocidal slaughter of Indo-China, Algeria, Kenya, Palestine, Rhodesia, etc; and more fascist tyrannies than can be counted, with millions of butchered or tortured victims, in Indonesia, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, half of Africa, etc, with regime after regime financed and armed by the West under the slogan: “He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard”, notoriously applied to the murderous Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua for nearly 50 years of bloody tyranny.
How was any of all this long reign of terror and ‘fascism’ throughout the Western world any different from the tyranny that German, Italian, and Japanese imperialism used to keep control and dominate with????
How is Kiev any different or the destruction of Serbia, Iraq, Libya Afghanistan and by proxy, Syria etc?
The failure of moralising reformist anti-racism, which fails to put such any revolutionary context to the fight has been highlighted in the last fortnight by the astonishing declaration by the arch-Blairite Equality Commission chief Trevor Phillips, that two decades of state finger wagging and knuckle-rapping against racist attitudes and behaviour has gone nowhere: if anything, he says, pushing such thoughts below the surface has simply caused them to emerge in the more reactionary form of support for the UKIP.
Phillips is not about to develop the understanding of the capitalist crisis which really underlies his discovery and the escalated tensions in society around recent increased economic immigration being used by the bosses to undercut wages and conditions as a means of pushing the crisis onto the working class; if anything the opposite is true and his sudden new enthusiasm for letting people make generalised comments about others based on race, religion and ethnicity is a “dog-whistle” permission for stirring up all kinds of inter-communal tribalism, particularly against white east Europeans and demonised Islamism.
But his “betrayal” does not lie in renouncing reformist anti-racism as one speaker declared at last week’s People’s Assembly “March against Racism”; it lies in bolstering the entire capitalist parliamentary racket, via reactionary Blairism, and its blitzkrieg warmongering of the Middle East, for example, as gigantic a piece of racist oppression (against the Arabs) as anything else, and making clear the basic cause of racist oppression – imperialist tyranny and colonialist exploitation (which incidentally pays for Phillips’ very comfortable salary and those of many other of the black middle class (and all other petty bourgeois too)).
But Phillips is, if anything, more correct than fake-“lefts” when he says that PC anti-racist moralising, such as that on display at last week’s PA march, has helped drive many in the working class towards reactionary groups like UKIP because it is a useless sticking plaster for the crisis severed artery of breaking down capitalism. Again from the EPSR 1085:
There are arguments to believe that such politically-correct-tinged striving might be counter-productive, even. If it is only the National Front that is ever prepared to argue out loud that waves of economic-opportunist migrants coming into the country and taking up scarce welfare resources, housing, good jobs and good education opportunities, etc, is not necessarily to the immediate practical advantage of already-resident proletarians struggling to get the same scarce things for themselves, and that the unfair ‘foreign monopolist’ system was to blame for all this enforced (and condoned) migratory nonsense, – then would not such ludicrous diversions be as likely to attract proletarian support as the PC anti-racist ‘left reformists’ with their “end all immigration controls” and “welcome to all asylum-seekers, the more the better” slogans, which take politically-correct subjective-idealist philosophy to new heights of absurdity???
Hammer people too ridiculously and too relentlessly for being ‘politically incorrect’ and it is as likely to create a nationalist backlash as anything else.
Or here from EPSR 1093 12-06-01:
Just parading their utterly abstract and academic ultra-‘political correctness’ line of “no immigration controls” and “welcome all asylum-seekers”, etc, is worse than useless. If the literally hundreds of millions who would willingly exchange grinding Third World poverty and/or political disillusionment, despair, or repression for First World affluence could actually make it to Britain, then the practical stupidity and pointlessness of this ultra-’politically correct’ posturing would become all too apparent.
Changing Britain’s immigration laws is pure reformism and not ‘revolutionary’ at all, no matter how apparently extreme the “no immigration controls at all” academic posture might seem. And not once throughout this whole immigration controversy has the fake-’left’ exposed the deliberate imperialist political encouraging of worldwide emigration for more than a century as a safety valve to take the more enterprising away from crisis-ridden countries where revolution would be the only other option. A socialist revolution in Britain would have the immediate clear internationalist duty, - as posturingly accepted by both the SA and the SLP, - to instantly start helping every other nation on earth to achieve their own socialist revolution. Tens of thousands don’t like life in Kosovo, or Iraq, or Sudan, or Nigeria, or Bangladesh, etc, etc????? Fine, great. So instantly equip them with training, revolutionary education, and material support for an organised return to their homelands to fight for a revolutionary improvement in conditions there. It would be all-round entirely reactionary, to just encourage the individuals who had the drive and ambition to leave their homelands for something better, to just swell the catering and cleaning casual labour force in Britain, or help British backwardness to continue to ignore its gap in training sufficient doctors and nurses of its own, or teachers, etc, etc.
So what is the ‘revolutionary’ point of encouraging reforms for “complete freedom of immigration” now, under capitalism??
There isn’t any. It grants the capitalist state the right to play God over human lives when the only thing worth thinking about any capitalist state or any of its activities is that they are all out-of-date and irrelevant and that the only worthwhile future is to abolish all capitalist states immediately. It pretends even more stupidly that sound ‘reforms’ to a capitalist state’s immigration laws can make a capitalist state quite a worthwhile and tolerable thing after all, pure reformist nonsense. And it says to the native working class that the only real problem is their racist intolerance of all the immigrant newcomers. “Welcome all asylum-seekers” working-class communities everywhere are instructed. “Any problem you think you might have with this rests entirely in your own backward racist prejudices”.
This racistly stupid and lunatically academic ‘politically correct’ nonsense got its answer in Oldham, as the EPSR has consistently warned would begin to happen.
It is quite pointless telling culturally disadvantaged and economically-deprived proletarian communities that more immigrant admissions to the already-lengthening dole queues and housing queues and hospital queues and social services queues could not possibly adversely affect their own lives and that they must overcome their own natural prejudice with a leap in philosophical magnanimity to simply “welcome all asylum seekers”.
It is not going to happen, and the BNP’s intervention spreading ludicrously bogus ‘comfort’ about serving ‘British nationals’ first is a warning to the fake ‘socialist’ swamp to start shedding their own anti-communist and counter-revolutionary prejudices themselves, and quickly, so that a serious Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement can start to be built in the working class, making the only possible sensible anti-capitalist observations and proposals on the immigration question, making world revolution the only sane answer for all, and the only long-term possibility for consigning backward racist prejudices to the dustbin of history.
Replace BNP with UKIP and the argument is still the same; only made ten times more urgent by the hugely escalated use of immigrant labour, and overseas call centres, used by the bosses to undercut wages, social welfare and conditions, part of forcing the Slump onto the working class.
The arguments are complex and need to be constantly gone over to explain to possibly genuine enough anti-racists why only dealing with capitalism, by revolutionary struggle to end it, can deal with the internal divisiveness that it always creates.
But compounding the uselessness and diversionary moralising of the “welcome immigrants” slogans, the Peoples Assembly march last week added two more facile slogans which expose even more the fraudulence of the fake-“left” self-righteous moralising and its poisonous underlying opportunism and anti-communism.
First was “No to Islamophobia”, a dissembling nonsense, immediately and totally undermined by across the board “condemnation” made by all the fake-“left” of “jihadism” and allegedly “criminal” or “evil” terrorism.
This is the form that Third World rebellion has taken and primarily with an adaptation of Islamism as its ideology.
And while the way it fights is not something that Marxism advocates or even supports, condemnation of it is nothing but craven capitulation to the bourgeois warmongering now non-stop everywhere:
But as Marxist revolutionary science made absolutely clear in pre-revolutionary Russia where terrorist acts were the favoured methods of many sincere and civilised anti-Tsarist movements, the onus on the ideology of BETTER ways to fight imperialism was to WORK HARDER to give ‘proper’ leadership to all those determined anti-imperialists, sucked in to terrorist methods of struggle.
What was UNTHINKABLE was to take the side of official imperialist society by joining in the CONDEMNATION of terrorism. It is imperialist society alone which is to be condemned, - for FORCING people to become anti-imperialist fighters by its own rottenness.
And it is precisely the reformist-idealist illusion that Western society’s world-role evils are “curable” that exactly leads on to the naff, reactionary nonsense that it is the movements that are DRIVEN to fight imperialism in the most terrible suicidal ways that deserve condemnation, rather than the relentless Western imperialist-society exploitation of the world economy whose grotesque inequalities and injustices (are) routinely kept in place by Western warmongering interventions. [EPSR No1174 04-03-03]
But the final slogan on the march is the most glaringly reactionary of all declaring “No to anti-semitism”, swallowing totally the deliberately whipped-up reactionary nonsense planted by the imperialist intelligence agencies that Europe has been swept by a new “hatred of Jews”.
It is a complete falsehood designed to tap self-lacerating liberal guilt about “being racist” to head off and undermine any support for the very real and justified hatred among the world’s masses of the Jewish occupation of Palestine and its routine fascist attacks on the surrounding Arab and Middle Eastern countries, and above all the non-stop genocidal persecution of the Palestinian people, increasingly dispossessed of even the tiny fragments of their own land left to them by the ethnic cleansing colonialist occupation imposed on them from 1947 onwards.
To call this “anti-semitism” is to pretend that such anti-imperialist feelings, generated by the monstrous barbarities and oppression by the Zionists for the last 70 years are equatable with the deliberately whipped up capitalist scapegoating in the 1930s to distract attention from the Slump and build up the fascist hate frenzy among the European petty bourgeoisie that was eventually turned into the open warmongering of 1939 onwards.
It is a vile and irrational slander and should be confronted head on as the imperialist Goebbels trickery it is, not pandered to, lining up this “left” Labour Movement assembly with imperialism and its support for and alliance with Zionist atrocities.
So too should the notion of separating “anti-Zionism” from hostility to the overall world Jewish freemasonry spread throughout the Western imperialist countries and intertwined with its reactionary world oppression, save in the tiny minority of cases where Jewish people reject the existence of Israel and its imposition on the Middle East.
But that is a fraction of a percentage and most Jews in the world, including those who declare themselves “anti-Zionist”, accept the existence of this occupation as a “country” and accept the benefits it delivers including their dual passports and “right of return” to go there at anytime and settle on the stolen lands of the Palestinian people.
This wave of “anti-semitism” accusations is similar to those when the Iraq war was begun as the EPSR said then:
Since the armed Jewish colonisation of Palestine began, what further use is the old distinction between “Jew” and “Zionist” since the number of Jews who do not believe in their right to a homeland in “Israel” are no longer worth counting as a significant international or domestic factor in politics.
All that the vast majority of “anti-Zionist” Jews want to do is separate themselves from the vicious Nazi-aggression tactics of the non-stop warmongering which has created their “Israeli national home” from the very beginning.
But an utterly negligible number come out to agitate for an end to the foul nonsense of an “Israel” altogether.
In which case “Jew” and “Zionist” are now completely interchangeable.
Nevertheless, there is clearly still a “racist” element in the terrorist attacks on synagogues in Istanbul, for example, or on Jewish schools in France, or Jewish cemeteries anywhere.
But what can be done about that, and what deserves to be done about that, in the light of the conscious deliberate international NAZI-aggression role that has been played by the Jewish colony to constantly be the tail wagging the US imperialist dog towards ever-more-escalated warmongering tyranny against Arab and Muslim nationalism throughout the whole of the Middle East and beyond???
Are not these anti-Jewish terrorist “outrages” exactly like the “outrages” committed against American subjects abroad everywhere????
There is obviously not a scrap of humanity, justice, or justification on any “rational” basis, in any one of these acts of terrorist vengeance perpetrated against innocent individuals just because of their nationality or their religion.
But there never has been. There was no such rational “justification” for the Twin Towers attack on Sept 11, or for any of the IRA bombing casualties in many London and Ireland “atrocities” in the past.
Nor for any of the attacks on Red Cross or UN personnel going on in Iraq now, etc, etc, etc.
But what hypocritical line is being drawn here?????
The Jewish homeland can butcher the Palestine nation all it wants in total NAZI blitzkrieg and concentration-camp style for 55 years and NOTHING has been done about it BY ANYONE, or will be done. (EPSR 1209 18-11-03).
When one exceptional Rabbi did speak out in Manchester recently to declare Israel’s existence the cause of Palestinian mayhem, his car was attacked in the Jewish neighbourhood he lives in. Nothing was done about that either.
Placing this slogan on the banners is not really about “fighting oppression” but about sending a signal to the ruling class that despite the notional “opposition”, no real challenge is being mounted.
None of this “left” posing has done anything about the crisis for the last five years of Tory savagery, with only the most desultory attempts at infrequent marches and strikes.
That is because there is nothing to be done through old-style reformism. Only revolution can change things.
Build Leninism
Don Hoskins
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