Back issues
No 1472 30th June 2015
Dizzying Athens crisis speedup underlines sharpening class war in the unstoppable world capitalist collapse. Syriza referendum an opportunist copout, abandoning Greek working class to impossible contradictions without leadership and “not my fault” excuse-making. Revisionist KKE “leave europe” plan solves nothing but misleads too; the world outside is ravaged by the same crisis disaster. Workers need to understand the incurable collapse reality of the capitalist catastrophe and the only way out, complete takeover and common ownership of all finance and factories. That means fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat. “Stop austerity” by voting and “democracy” lies opens up counter revolution – overturn of the ruling class vital via dictatorship of the proletariat. Leninism urgent need
The total abandonment of any kind of serious Marxist understanding by the “left” groups of all kinds is being even more sharply exposed as the capitalist crisis begins to unfold with ever more dizzying speed.
Events are piling one on the other with not a shred of revolutionary perspective or consistent rational explanation from the “lefts” – be it on the slide towards class civil war facing the Greeks, the Nazi savagery in Ukraine or the significance of the huge upheavals in the Middle East – including the eruptions of “terrorism” now coming thick and fast and constantly threatening even the heartlands of the capitalist countries (see next article) in response to the endless warmongering “solution” which capitalism is imposing to escape its catastrophic crisis.
In Greece the working class has been left without any kind of perspective by the latest Syriza “referendum” move, these posturing “left” frauds essentially playing Pontius Pilate and washing their hands of the problems they are supposed to be tackling in a “new way”.
Having floundered ineffectually for five months with their preposterous bluster about “refusing the cuts” because “the people say no”, and reneging on all their bold declarations about repudiating the European debts etc etc, they have now given up completely, walking away from the unsolved mess and leaving the masses to their own devices in the teeth of the arrogant and callous financial savagery of the international monopoly capitalist bankers.
Their gross misleadership and fake-“left” play acting about fatuous “voting to stop austerity” was a total lie from the beginning, a posturing fraud which has dangerously misled the working class with its idiot nonsenses about “democracy”, leaving workers open and vulnerable to the counter-revolutionary manoeuvres of the rich.
It has left the working class without any answers, confronting a seemingly inescapable “choice” between a future of even deeper Slump impositions, forced on them by the callous money-grubbing arrogance of the bigger powers in Europe and the IMF, or the unknown plunge into potentially even worse financial chaos outside the Euro, subject to the wild turmoil of the international capital markets.
This is no choice at all just as there is no “democracy” anywhere in capitalism, just the hidden dictatorship of the big money rich and their capital, a brutal oppression which increasingly comes into the open as the inevitable failure of the capitalist system returns, the result of the accumulating contradictions and collapses built-in to the private profit way of doing things.
The arrogant haute-couteure perfumed indifference of the “elegant” IMF boss Christine Lagarde’s refusal to talk until there are “adults in the room”, i.e until grovelling acceptance is made to the slump savagery the ruling class demands – expresses exactly the real contempt of the ruling class, with the same inhumanity and disdain which Marie Antoinette made manifest in 1789, reputedly sneering when told the starving masses had no bread that they could “eat cake” instead.
Marie Antoinette’s aristocratic ancien regime was toppled not long after and Lagarde’s equally out-of-touch capitalist order is heading the same way.
But it can only be confronted by all out class war to end this capitalist dominance by overturning it and establishing the power of the working class, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
That demands conscious revolutionary determination, organisation and struggle, focused around a deliberately built party of scientific revolutionary leadership.
At present the working class is being left utterly unprepared for the near civil war savagery that is pregnant in the latest anti-authority demonstrations and the counter-revolutionary manifestations of the rich and reactionary forces, which will already be lining up the most sinister plans behind the scenes in Athens.
It is being left in a seemingly paralysed cul de sac of penury and despair with no way out.
For as long as capitalism continues there really is no way out, except by a jump to a new level of human society altogether, the collective ownership and control of all the means of production and finance, achievable with a workers state (and the spreading revolution everywhere else too).
This is the one central conclusion that the fake-“left”s never make clear.
Only explaining the need for the working class to take power and take over the banks and farms, industries and ports, now offers any kind of path forwards in Greece – or indeed anywhere else.
But that is what these multiple fake-“left” groups have studiously avoided for decades of posturing and pretences despite claiming all kinds of “Marxist” and even “revolutionary” credentials.
The working class is “not ready” they excuse themselves, evading their responsibility while at the same time preening and posing as a cut above the worker class and “in the know” (with a tangle of “knowing” conspiracy theories) – a middle class arrogance that may not rival Lagarde but is just as contemptible.
And of course they are not “there on the day (comrade)” as they like to sneer they will be, whenever they are challenged on the absence of revolutionary perspectives.
Even now as the crisis is hitting a brick wall such perspectives are not coming from any of the “left” groups.
Just the opposite, their careerist opportunism is light-mindedly leaving the working class to it with a “don’t blame me” shrug of indifference.
And the fake-“left” outside Greece is painted with the exactly the same brush, having cheered on and celebrated the election of Syriza in February and told the working class that this is a “new dawn” and a new way forwards, opening up new possibilities for struggle everywhere, from Podemos in Spain to the Peoples’ Assembly here.
It is nothing but the same old class collaborating reformism and “left” pressure that at best is a complete waste of time and energy, distracting the working class and feeding it yet more of the deadly illusions in democratic change that have seen tragedy after tragedy for the working class, not least in Chile in 1973 and in many other coups and dictatorships (including the Nazi Kiev regime now and the vicious pro-Washington pro-Zionist Sisi military in Cairo) – and at worst keeps workers tied to the anti-communist brainwashing that capitalism instils in everyone from cradle to grave.
Not even the “militant” Greek KKE revisionist communist party, whose multiple strikes and seemingly correct “opposition” to Syriza seemed to stand aloof, is any different.
Its perspective, for all its token statements about the need to rise up etc is only an alternative anti-European version of the same “democracy” nonsense, still failing to state sharply and clearly the need for all-out class struggle, keeping the perspective limited to Greece instead giving the world crisis analysis required, and pretending the problem is “Europe” instead of the entire capitalist system, which is collapsing and imposing its disaster both inside and outside “Europe”:
The government told lies to the Greek people. It promised them that they could be freed from the memoranda and austerity inside the EU and the capitalist development path and now it is trying to manage the collapse of this pre-election narrative.
The people must say no to both of them in every way and using every means available. They must reject the plan of the creditors and also the plan of the government. They must rise up and fight for the only realistic solution for their own interests, which is rupture with the EU and with the current path of development.”
So what does “every means available” actually mean????
Such mush is the complete antithesis of Leninism, and its duty to clarify and explain things as clearly as possible.
It may be a phenomenally difficult task but there is an entire library of the Collected Works of Lenin and Marx and Engels to build upon and the constantly polemicised battle for such understanding that has been continued by the tiny numbers of Leninists in modern times (including the EPSR and its significant achievements in understanding the poisonous anti-communism of Trotskyism, the revisionist philosophical retreats which underlie the liquidation of the USSR, Grenada, the lie of “anti-semitism used to defend the Zionists, the great victories of the Irish nationalist struggle and much more, including the crucial polemical method of Marxist leadership itself).
And in what way does “rupture with the EU” solve anything at all????
Greece will still be capitalist, and actually subject to a far greater pressure from international “market forces” than ever.
Why is there not a word about taking over the economy, and the productive resources, ports factories and farms??? About working class control???
Too soon and the working class is not prepared??? Well who’s fault is that??
The non-revolutionary “left” itself.
This is hopeless, just like the rest of the entire spectrum of fake-“lefts” everywhere.
There is not a word from any of them giving the working class a clear perspective of the total worldwide and intractable failure of the monopoly capitalist order and the inescapable need it confronts the working class with now to end its tyrannical and exploitative dominance completely if the world is not to slide into the greatest Slump and war disaster in all of history.
Nor is there any attempt to go back over the vital questions about the devastating history of Greece itself and the savagery which it has already suffered, from the Metaxa fascist dictatorship of the 1930s, and the brutal World War Two famine oppression of the German occupations, to the four-year-long year civil war which was then waged against the staggering heroism of communist partisans by the British (under the Labour Government of “left” Clement Attlee, so eulogised by the fake-“left” in groups like Ken Loach’s laughably censorious Left Unity) knowingly using the very same Greek Nazi collaborators that had starved and tortured the population for the Germans in the war, and then the 1960-70s colonels’ junta dictatorship which the ruling class imposed because its pretend post-civil war “democracy” was useless and collapsing.
These are crucial issue for the masses in Greece right now, not least in understanding and avoiding the past errors made by the political leaderships, above all the KKE which despite its staggering sacrifices and heroism fought the civil war with its hands tied by Stalin’s illusions in a deal with supposedly “non-aggressive” imperialism, part of a catalogue of errors made by Moscow’s revisionist leadership (long before the usually-blamed Kruschev incidentally).
They are crucial issues everywhere for workers – part of the great disentangling of past confusions and mistakes, most of all the retreats by the leading revisionist world leadership, of the USSR, which led eventually to the giving up on the mighty Soviet workers' state, liquidating its enormous, painfully built and still growing achievements in favour of illusions that “free market” methods would speed up its steady if somewhat boring and sluggish growth (in fact an enormous achievement, for all that bureaucratic Stalinism had proved uninspiring, producing fair, planned development that exploited none of the far flung masses throughout the USSR’s disparate republics, all with jobs, housing, food, education, sport and culture (excellent) and opportunities wherever they were, if not quite receiving the glitz and glitter that capitalism pretended was available – as long as no-one looked at the sweatshop and plantation slavery of the Third World, paying for all the consumerist delights, such as they are and such as they are distributed anyway, leaving many in even the richest countries in total deprivation and persecution – see the black working class in the US eg and even many “white trash”).
Workers in Greece and outside are being misled even further by the “left” failure to make clear that the crisis is not just concentrated in Greece, for all it is being used as a vicious “example” at present by the European ruling class to deter everyone else.
All workers in all countries face these same desperations hitting the Greeks.
The complacent petty bourgeois acceptance of supposed “upturns” and the notion that austerity is “just done for ideological reasons” and can therefore “be resisted” by “saying no” is a giant criminally misleading posturing lie.
It is Leninist science alone which explains this is an epochal spiralling incurable catastrophe, and warns the working class about it in the teeth of complacent petty bourgeois scepticism deriding “old hat cranky Marxism”.
But the point is even better made when the bourgeois press fearfulness itself confirms it (as now almost daily):
The world will be unable to fight the next global financial crash as central banks have used up their ammunition trying to tackle the last crises, the Bank of International Settlements has warned.
The so-called central bank of central banks launched a scathing critique of global monetary policy in its annual report. The BIS claimed that central banks have backed themselves into a corner after repeatedly cutting interest rates to shore up their economies.
These low interest rates have in turn fuelled economic booms, encouraging excessive risk taking. Booms have then turned to busts, which policymakers have responded to with even lower rates.
Claudio Borio, head of the organisation’s monetary and economic department, said: “Persistent exceptionally low rates reflect the central banks’ and market participants’ response to the unusually weak post-crisis recovery as they fumble in the dark in search of new certainties.”
“Rather than just reflecting the current weakness, they may in part have contributed to it by fuelling costly financial booms and busts and delaying adjustment. The result is too much debt, too little growth and too low interest rates.
The BIS warned that interest rates have now been so low for so long that central banks are unequipped to fight the next crises.
“In some jurisdictions, monetary policy is already testing its outer limits, to the point of stretching the boundaries of the unthinkable,” the BIS said.
Policymakers in the eurozone, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland have taken their interest rates below zero to support their economies, contributing to a decline in bond yields.
The decline of bond yields into negative territory is the “most unusual development” of the last year.
Extraordinarily low interest rates are not a “new equilibrium” said Jaime Caruana, general manager of the BIS, rejecting the theory of so-called “secular stagnation” which some economists blame for the continued decline in global lending rates.
The BIS report described the threat of a new bust in advanced economies as a “main risk”, with many reaching the top of the economic cycle.
The economies worst hit by the last crisis are now suffering the costs of persistent ultra-low rates, the organisation said, which could “inflict serious damage on the financial system”, sapping banks and weakening their balance sheets and their ability to lend.
And the continued misallocation of resources during busts prompted by central banks’s rockbottom interest rates has also hammered productivity growth, the BIS said, as a prolonged reliance on debt had been used in its place.
...politicians have relied too much on temporary growth boosts by using debt, rather than making painful choices, said the BIS.
Mr Caruana said that during booms, workers and capital are shifted to slow-growing sectors, with a “longlasting negative” impact on productivity growth. “Misallocated labour needs to move from these sectors to other parts of the economy,” he said.
The BIS said that the current turmoil in Greece typified the kind of “toxic mix” of private and public debt being used as a solution to economic problems, rather than making the proper commitment “to badly needed” structural reforms.
“Structural reforms” is code for squeezing the working class even harder with speed-ups and longer working hours.
These bankers are warning the ruling class everywhere that it has to be more savage if it is to survive the oncoming disaster and keep its wealth and grotesque privileges.
But everywhere the capitalist bosses and politicians are fearful of the explosive revolutionary implications if they push things too far, exactly as the British Tories have constantly backtracked from imposing all their threatened cuts, even increasing borrowing to feed the housing boom etc and to sustain “welfare” supplements to wages for a moribund British industry that cannot keep up even with the other major capitalist powers – all themselves hammered by the crisis.
The entire capitalist world is heading for the impasse being expressed in Syntagma Square because the capitalist system has reached the end of an epoch, its once progressive historical class property relations and entrepreneurial profit seeking, which dragged the world out of stifling feudal agricultural backwardness and aristocratic land wars, now hamstrings human development in its turn with endless trade and shooting wars and intractable financial collapse.
Uncontrollable meltdown conditions that erupted in 2008 have not gone away and nor could they - this is a collapse built into the very fabric of capitalism as Marx painstakingly analysed and explained in the great masterwork of Capital’s three great volumes (and as subsequent developments of his understanding have further explained like Lenin’s Imperialism - the highest stage of capitalism) all highly important reading for the working class.
A new eruption of the crisis – and far worse than the pants-wetting domino bank credit failures seven years ago, for having been deferred – is due any minute if not already here:
The Governor of Puerto Rico, Alejandro García Padilla, has announced that the country will not be able to pay its £46 billion ($72 billion) of debt.
The news was confirmed in a public announcement by the Governor on Monday. The price of Puerto Rico’s bonds dropped during the day following the announcement, with some declining as much as 12 per cent.
“The debt is not payable” Governor García Padilla said in an interview with the New York Times. “There is no other option. I would love to have an easier option. This is not politics, this is maths.”
The Governor said that Puerto Rico’s economy is in a vicious “death spiral” and that it must either defer payments of its debt for as long as five years or seek concessions from many of its creditors, or both.
The creditors, most of whom are from the US, must negotiate or else they “will be shooting themselves in the foot”, the Governor said.
As a US commonwealth territory, Puerto Rico – like the 50 states – cannot declare banctruptcy under federal law.
In June last year Governor García Padilla proposed the Puerto Rico Debt Enforcement and Recovery Act which was passed by the Legislative Assembly in one day and would allow the country to default on its debt, which equates to nearly 70 per cent of its expenditure.
However, on 6 February this year, Judge Francisco Besosa of the US District Court in Puerto Rico struck down the new law.
It is possible for US states to declare sub-sections of their government, like utilities or municipalities, bankrupt and for whole municipalities to file for bankruptcy under Chapter 9 of the Federal Bankruptcy Code.
Cities such as Detroit, Michigan and Stockton, California followed this route last year, allowing them to reorganise their debt while paying back some money to creditors.
This is not currently an option, however, for US commonwealth territories such as Puerto Rico.
Economic analysts from the Wall Street Journal estimate that the Puerto Rican government will run out of money as soon as July which could leave to a government shutdown and further crisis.
An unconfirmed report from former IMF economists which was released today, said that “a crisis looms” for the commonwealth. “Structural problems, economic shocks and weak public finances have yielded a decade of stagnation, outmigration and debt”, the report said.
The report, which was commissioned by the Government Development Bank, called for a full-on approach to the situation which addresses together the “faltering economic activity, faltering fiscal and debt sustainability, and faltering policy credibility”.
Argentina is constantly on the edge of similar collapse and even the biggest countries constantly on the edge; Japan has now seen over two decades of stagnation.
The rest of the world is just as close to the abyss of complete disaster with war the only answer it has.
The working class more and more urgently needs to take power which means more and more urgently building a revolutionary party.
Build Leninism
Don Hoskins
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“Extremism” hysteria after Tunisian attack is aimed to whip up capitalist crisis war fever chauvinism and scapegoating, and prepare capitalist dictatorship censorship against working class to clamp down on the revolt the ruling class knows will erupt as it imposes Slump
The tragic mayhem wrought by lone “terrorists” on the beach bathers in Tunisia, in France and Shia worshippers in Kuwait, has once more ratcheted up yet again a frenzy of “kill-them-all” denunciations of “evil” and self-righteous humbug throughout the well-off Western nations.
The lurid front pages of the bourgeois press deliberately play on the emotions of ordinary people as if such events are “out of the blue” and “for no reason at all” picturing agonised signs with “why?” scrawled on them to play upon the supposed random poignancy of it all.
It is a monstrous dissembling fascist LIE.
The personal agony and bereavement for all families and friends of the individuals involved in these random attacks is a tragedy.
But these events are a tiny part of the massacring horror that is now non-stop in the Middle East, east Ukraine, Somalia, Congo, Pakistan’s mountains, Mali, Libya and more.
Pushed to one side for example, even in the “intellectual” press, is the current US-approved Saudi blitzkreig of Yemen which has blown thousands of innocent people apart over the last three months, including many women and children burned and dismembered with the latest hi-tech weaponry and planes, purchased at huge expense from the West and indiscriminately bombing and maiming day and night.
Where are the personal interviews and anguished accounts of bereavement and suffering from Aden and Sanaa?
Forgotten and buried away are the murderous barbaric blitzkriegs rained down on the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and the Middle East – all supposedly to “stop terror” after the 9/11 attacks and doing exactly the opposite, as anyone with half a brain was already saying at the time.
Or the total destruction of Libya by nazi-NATO invasion on a “massacre” pretext - even thinner than the stunted-up lying non-“massacre” in Yugoslavia’s Racek (which was no massacre at all but a deliberate pretence, as the later unpublicised UN forensic investigation essentially admitted), used as the excuse for the NATO blitz of Serbian Kosovo, – the completely nonsensical lie that there was a “threat of” massacre against Benghazi which never happened and never was going to happen - the only butchery being the nazi-NATO blitzing itself.
Now, outrageous, barefaced lies are poured out as if these subsequent hate-filled “terrorist” eruptions against the West have got nothing to do with over twenty years of more or less continuous, horrifying, torturing and indiscriminate war and destruction waged on the Middle East by Washington-led capitalist imperialism (beginning with 1991’s Gulf War), destroying country after country in pursuit of an utterly meaningless “war on terror”, the excuse for Western imperialism’s crisis driven escape plan from its disastrous bankruptcy.
And as if, behind that, there was not centuries of accumulated Third World colonialist suppression and tyranny that has seen non-stop atrocities through dozens of massacres, wars, coups, invasions and genocides (literally wiping out whole nations like the Incas, the Aborigines, and multiple Native American tribes, as well as millions of Indians, Chinese etc).
The real mayhem and terror in the world comes from the industrial scale of destruction wreaked for more than two decades, still continuing in non-stop drone killing and butchery and being readied again for when the crisis breaks through once more in worldwide financial disaster.
Since the post-WW2, inflationary, printed-dollar boom began to falter in earnest, millions of civilians, women and children and desperate local resistance fighters have been killed, maimed and bereaved, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya and Syria, and now Yemen, turned into homeless and desperate refugees, reduced to penury, starvation and daily terrorising, their cities and heritage wiped out, culture devastated, and painfully built community fragmented.
A whole generation of the Middle East has been raised in alienated trauma, knowing nothing but pulverised buildings, missing relatives, torture, bereavement, flesh-shredding Hellfire missile attacks and hovering drone terror, the ghastly reality of the mind-numbing computer game fantasy scenarios the rich kids are taught to play with in the imperialist heartlands.
And at the heart of the Middle East the routine and regular genocidal “smiting” of the Palestinians has continued non-stop, with Western aid and approval, the Nazi humiliation of a total 7 million people driven from their own land by the most brutal and fascist ethnic cleansing terrorising, forced into eternal refugee exile or penned into besieged concentration camp conditions in Gaza, to be starved, deprived and continually and repeatedly persecuted with all the might of the most sophisticated and barbaric weaponry in the world (supplied by the US) by a “chosen people”, land-theft, artificial state which long ago lost any pretence of abiding by laughable “international legal standards”, the Geneva convention or the supposed principles of the Hague war-crimes investigators.
In their wildest fundamentalist dreams the ISIS and such groups could not begin to achieve the levels of destruction which have seen four whole countries torn to shreds and pulverised into the ground.
Nor even does the jihadists' deliberate use of publicised terror come anyway near the atrocities and horrors imposed by capitalism throughout its two centuries of colonialism and right though into the modern times.
Beheadings - ask the FARC fighters and trade unionists in Colombia where the US trained death squads long ago were regularly using total dismemberment of trade unionists and beheadings to intimidate all organisation by the working class; ask the Greek communists about their decapitated fighters slaughtered by the wartime Nazi-collaborators who were released and recruited by the British led civil war forces in 1945-49; or the Algerians and others in the French colonies, also beheaded on a large scale; ask the tens of millions slaughtered in Africa including the Congo where the Belgian colonialists tallied kill-number payments for counter-insurgency mercenaries with baskets full of severed hands, and which has seen non-stop Western imposed butchery and slaughter ever since.
Genocidal frenzy? - Ask the current Rwandan regime of Paul Kagame, best buddy of Tony Blair, and responsible for the 1993-4 800,000 butchery which Western capitalism lyingly calls a “Hutu-led genocide” but which was exactly the opposite, a slaughter mostly of Hutus by the US Pentagon trained Kagame’s Tutsi army, invading to a carefully planned timetable from US-stooge neighbour Uganda, itself previously run by the monstrous killer dictator Idi Amin, Sandhurst-trained and British installed and supported.
(All this as detailed in the excellent book The politics of genocide, in an almost never-seen BBC This World documentary last year, and to be explored further in a subsequent issue as the Spanish arrest warrant proceeds against Kagame’s spy chief, just visiting Britain on a sinister secret mission to meet the MI6 boss).
Bombs – ask Barack Obama, the liberals’ darling who signs-off completely illegal death warrants every Tuesday morning to sanction the long-distance drone kill operations run by the CIA out of Afghanistan illegally into Pakistan, from Saudi Arabia into Yemen, (operated from Arizona and the UK), which repeatedly “take out” dozens of bystanding civilians as well as the desperate local fighters who are anyway doing nothing more than trying to drive imperialist invasion and domination from their countries.
Barbaric torture – see never closed Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib and more – or just the decades long imposition of inhuman solitary confinement on prisoners within the US (EPSR last week).
But that is not enough – following Tunisia yet more demented calls have been pouring out again to “kill them all” or “send in the SAS”.
But that is the problem, not the answer.
Nazi-minded “punishment” blitzkrieg or even “more efficient” “boots on the ground” killing, has done nothing to stop this ever growing “terrorist threat” since 9/11.
Not will it, but will just add to the oppression, creating yet more “jihadis”, further great rivers of refugee migrants into Europe, further deprivation, hatred, suffering and turmoil.
What it will succeed in, is to recruit tens of thousands more into the ranks of the rebellion, exactly as the last two decades have done.
The Third World is in total ferment and lashing out in all directions because the masses everywhere are in desperate agony.
Alienation and despair is everywhere and the masses increasingly driven to suicidal desperation.
Of course they are going to keep on doing it, desperately flinging themselves to certain death in order to attack and damage their tormentors.
And they will do so not because they are “brainwashed” or “radicalised” or “possessed by demons” or just “evil” – nor even because of their own superstitious unscientific and subjective beliefs in the religious nirvana they might think they are doing it for – but because life has become more and more intolerable, absolutely as the world monopoly capitalist crisis drives them further into poverty and deprivation than ever before, and relatively as the billions of tyrannised, exploited and dispossessed see the ever growing unfairness and greed of the capitalist world, wasteful, fatuous and corrupt and above all stifling the enormous possibilities offered by modern human technology and capacities.
It is all about to get much worse as the Slump savagery of the capitalist catastrophic world breakdown returns, forcing penury, desperation and starvation onto even the “richest” nations as the Greek working class is facing (see opening article).
So the scapegoating and demonisation of the ferment already boiling in the Middle East, aims to distract attention.
The monstrous hypocrisy and humbug of the Western politicians is just to cover up this material crisis cause of the chaos in the world as their warmongering catastrophe deepens ever further.
France’s president François Hollande and David Cameron could hardly wait to get away from the paralysed and intractable Greek financial crisis meeting in Brussels, – the fulcrum and expression currently of the incurability of the capitalist meltdown crisis – in order to pur out the usual sanctimonious pomposities about “standing by our democratic values” and defending “our way of life” along with enough faux outrage and “heart-searching” to make an onion weep.
What “British values” (or substitute “French values”, or “American values” or just “hypocritical posturing humbug values”) of “prosperity, freedom, peace and the rule of law” are they talking about???
The “values” of capitalist imperialism are exactly those of total exploitative tyranny of the world and always have been.
These monsters could not care less about the fate of ordinary people, whether they are “British” or “French”, and certainly not if they are Greek workers, Arab labourers, African migrants, Latin America child workers or Bangladeshi women textile sweatshop slaves.
Their only purpose in the wake of the tragedies is to turn up yet another notch the poisonous demonisation of Islam and the alleged Svengali-like persuasion powers of “hate preachers”, feeding the idealist excuse-making scapegoating nonsense by capitalism that the chaos and destruction in the world is down to “extremists” and “brainwashing”.
It all serves to further wind up the world warmongering atmosphere in preparation for the gigantic slump war conflicts to come, while simultaneously justifying yet more Nazi surveillance and police state repression domestically, preparing for the real upheavals that the soon-to-return devastating Slump conditions will cause.
It is not “jihadists” that are their real concern but the eruptions of the working class once the Quantitative Easing smoke-and-mirrors credit tricks run out and “global financial collapse” returns – one hundred times worse than before bringing the desperate bank shut down conditions already seen in Athens to all the capitalist system again, just as it was teetering on the edge of, in summer 2008.
Far from wanting to stop this chaos and find a way to end the mayhem and devastation, capitalism wants war.
To escape its greatest end-of-an epoch catastrophic economic and political failure, the ruling class wants destruction, wants blitzing and wants mindless scapegoating violence.
This is the lest resort “solution” that this private profit system has always used to confuse the great multitude by whipping up chauvinism and hatred, setting up scapegoats, and distracting attention from its own responsibility for the great historic crisis that is built into the private profit system.
It is deliberately setting out to confuse the ordinary people everywhere, diverting them from the real terror and destruction in the world which is on a far greater scale and more horrific than anything lone gunman can achieve or even the deliberate terrorising atrocities the ISIS has learned to do.
So they pretend that “bad people” are the cause of the world’s problems, denying and suppressing all scientific and clear explanation of the concrete material realities of the world and the contradictions of their own corrupt and greed ridden private profit system.
And this frenzied whipping-up of mystic hate emotion, chauvinism and scapegoating will solve absolutely nothing, just as endless smiting and blitzing has solved nothing at all since the turn of the century when the US empire started its insane and meaningless non-stop “war on terror”.
Just the opposite capitalism endlessly demonises them to turn attention from the real problem in the world, and the real solution, the revolutionary defeat and overturning of capitalism to allow the building of socialism.
The “why” question on the placards has to be answered with rational and scientific understanding about the crisis and the total epochal collapse of the capitalist system and of the need to overturn it.
That does not come by joining the “unequivocal” denunciations and condemnations of the great rising revolt that pour out from the fake-“left” every time there is another incident, just as they have since 9/11.
It only helps feed the capitalist war atmosphere and lines the “left” up with imperialism, undercutting all its protestation “against warmongering and blitzing” since if this is all just an unjustifiable aberration, then imperialism’s declared intent of “scourging it from the face of the earth” cannot be argued against.
Even more significantly it fails to see the enormous revolutionary significance of these Third World movements, which whatever their subjective confusions and even unhelpful tactics, have been driven to the surface by material factors, and hostility to imperialism.
If they are locked into weird and religious ideologies, sometimes self-defeating methods, and riven with damaging sectarian infighting, and clearly sometimes open to Western intelligence agency manipulations, then that is down to the absence and failure of the objective revolutionary leadership that Marxism should provide.
Decades of Stalinist retreat from all out revolutionary perspectives has left a giant philosophical vacuum in the world filled for the moment with the jihadists’ creeds and adaptations of Muslimism which millions have adopted because they seem to offer a fight against the West (the basic motivation expressed in numerous bourgeois press interviews with the various runaways from the Western countries who have gone off to join ISIS etc etc).
As Lenin long ago made clear in his brilliant Guerrilla Warfare essay (see EPSR 1248, 14-09-04) the only way past the confusions and limitations of such anarchist (or religion based) ideology is to provide a much better and clearer leadership with a sound objective grasp of the world crisis and the forces within it and their constant shifting relations – including of course the entire Middle East and spreading Third World rebellion.
But the fake-“left” capitulated long ago to the Western propaganda hurricane, helping feed demonisation of the Middle East upheavals as driven by “evil”, or reactionary Islam, or “headbanging jihadism” laced with sneers about “psychotics”.
It joins them with the worst and most vile petty bourgeois reaction being expressed by the likes of “liberal” Zionist Jonathan Freedland on the ultra-anti-communist Guardian, pouring out an instant “explanation” of the Tunisian Islamist attack as a “new level of evil” in the world, a deranged medieval mysticism near certifiable in the modern scientific epoch and embodying pure counter-revolutionary bile – as did another piece in the same paper declaring the attacks to be the work of “anti-semitism and homophobia” as if the international imperialist plunge towards total world war is driven along by “gay rights” and as if widespread hatred of the Israeli colonialist occupation is nothing to do with its nazi-oppression of the Palestinians.
But the “left”, Trots and revisionists, do nothing themselves to challenge and expose all this bilious petty bourgeois unreason.
In recent times this has led them into a knotted mess of contradictions, explaining nothing about the great turmoil of the Middle East and with assorted “left” groups supporting some Muslim causes while denouncing others.
Many of the Trots have been backing the foulest of massacring ethnic cleansing violence unleashed in Syria by the likes of the Western funded and armed “Free Syrian Army” declared insanely to be supposed “street revolution”, – the inexplicable funding, arming, training and media support of which by imperialism they simply ignore while lining up with Western war provocations against Russia (which has a military base in Syria).
But other museum Stalinist revisionists conversely cheer on Iran’s theocratic Ayatollahocracy as a progressive way forwards for the world’s masses and denounce the Islamic attacks on Syria as all instigated by the West.
But then they run into problems explaining why ISIS is in turn bombed and blitzed by American imperialist fighters.
Of course all these theories make no sense. For example:
Why would the CIA/other Western powers create the deliberate mayhem of Islamic “extremist” movement Boko Haram in Nigeria, threatening the stability of an already well established Western stooge power (with Western collusion many times in military coups and strong corporate exploitation of oil and other resources nicely stitched up) and, on top of that, then go to great but risky trouble to help slide one of the ex-military dictators in as president in the manipulated elections this April, all in order to wage a brutal military suppression of its allegedly own creation??
What would that be for????
Or ditto in Somalia with al-Shabaab. Why would the West create or use such a movement (as in the “they are all western paid headbangers” theories) in the first place, having tried already to suppress Somalia’s Islamic Courts forerunner using the reactionary next door Ethiopian government, which definitely was installed by the West via a deliberately engineered ten year “self-determination” stunt war against the communist sympathising Mengistu revolution of the 1970s and 1980s???
It becomes astonishingly convoluted and risky a project to suppose Langley carefully deposed the previous Islamists in Mogadishu solely order to install an even more extreme and maverick uncontrollable version, and then spends the next years trying to blitz and bomb that one, directly and via the reactionary and deeply corrupt Western stooge Kenya next door, which in turn has suffered a string of destabilising attacks from Al-Shabaab and is now building a hugely expensive border wall to hold it back.
What would all that be for???????
The only obvious answer surely is that it is not for anything and these are simply movements which have erupted because of the agonising contradictions of the crisis.
Then there are the difficulties that the Proletarian - paper of the CPGB-ML offshoot from Harpal Brar’s Lalkar group – has got itself into over Hamas for example.
The Brarites declared their total support for Hamas as the leadership of the Gazan Palestinian struggle some years back, having been caught out in their previous eulogies for the Mahmoud Abbas Palestinian Authority leadership (and petty bourgeois opportunist Yasser Arafat before that), when assorted revelations emerged about PA collusion with imperialism, including the acceptance of Zionist and CIA money, training and cooperation for the PA security forces, and the corrupt betrayal of basic principals in peace negotiations with Zionism.
But this new allegiance has itself run into trouble.
Hamas has declared itself opposed to the Assad regime and fights against it, even while Proletarian calls for outright support for the Syrian government and the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon on Assad’s side.
And this tangle gets even worse; the arising Sinai al-Qaeda fighters who have been attacking the Zionists and also the Cairo dictatorship, and are lined up in support of the Gazans, are also denounced by the Brarites.
They are “paid instruments” of Western imperialism says the Proletarian, because its wooden non-dialectical position supporting Assad, (instead of only calling for defeat of the imperialist onslaught) makes it declare all enemies of Damascus to be such – including Hamas logically - and Hamas' parent, the Muslim Brotherhood.
But Lalkar continues to support Hamas - it being too obviously a reactionary position to stand against the Gazans - but without explaining anything.
Cascades of these constantly shifting self-contradictory conspiracy theories have poured out of the “lefts” in various combinations, asserting CIA backing for first this movement and then that, often completely opposing each other, the denounced ISIS attacks of the last week being a major example, since they were carried out against imperialism by the same ISIS inspiration which was allegedly set going by and is under the control of the CIA. Why??
A core reason for the great tangle of CIA theories is to get all of these groups off making any more complex analysis of the great upheavals as being driven by the crisis and particularly avoiding having to say that their destructiveness is an expression of the complete breakdown of the world order.
They hate the idea of breakdown because their petty bourgeois souls really crave the continuation of the existing world and their little comfortable complacent niches in it, protesting only against the occasional bit of grit in the shell.
They are ultimately hostile to the unsolvable contradictions which are leading to revolution because it upsets this cosiness.
Leninism says the breakdown cannot be stopped because it arises from huge incurable and constantly developing contradictions in capitalism - as understood by Marxist science; attempting to hold it together by denouncing the assorted rebellions is not only pointless but actually plays into capitalism’s hands and its war-fever preparations.
The Lalkarites are not the only ones in a tangle. Virtually all the “left” groups are caught up in knotted skeins of conspiracy theories around the Middle East and Africa, all rooted in the great Grandaddy of conspiracy nonsense still doing the rounds at “left” meetings, that the World Trade Centre attacks in 2001 were “really done by the CIA”.
But if such uprisings are “all controlled by the CIA” then it is “permissible” for the “lefts” to denounce them, getting off the hook and able to join the great imperialist led typhoon of moralising denunciation.
There is a more complex answer - there have been non-stop Western attempts to manipulate the jihadist movements, as is clear from the very nature of capitalist control and the existence of the CIA, and from numerous clear cases from use of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to help entrap the Soviet Union’s aid and support to the 1980s socialist government, and more lately around the deliberately provoked and instigated civil war in Syria, where some of the anti-Assad “revolution” (in fact counter-revolution as is obvious to all but the shallowest of biliously anti-communist Trotskyists) is openly admitted to be funded and supplied by the Gulf Arab feudalists and ultra-reactionary Saudi Arabia.
But partial and attempted manipulation is one thing; wooden one-sided theories about the CIA being in complete control of the various movements with a deep-seated puppet master plan to control the Middle East is another.
It reflects a complete defeatist view of imperialism in total control rather than in the disastrous mess and panic it is, setback by quagmire defeats, huge expense, and shattering war weariness as the body bags have come home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mind bending convolutions are required to suggest that the failings and breakdowns and collapses now being witnessed are all part of some grand imperialist strategy “to break up the Middle East” perhaps; supposedly helping maintain Western control of the world.
ISIS itself is obviously one fly in the theoretical ointment - why “create” a movement like this only to have it then turn on the other carefully nurtured anti-Assad movements like al-Nusra and Al-qaeda, ruining the campaign to destroy Assad and also turn on, and almost overrun, the US-embassy-installed stooge Maliki’s Baghdad, and continue threatening it even when Maliki was replaced by an alternative US approved Shia stooge?
Again what is the point of such mayhem disturbing the control that the US had managed to gain in Iraq???
And why does the US and the West then start bombing ISIS killing thousands of them?
It is all so contradiction ridden (meaning not making any sense) because the fake- “lefts” have all taken their eye off the ball of imperialism’s crisis as the overriding factor driving all these events along.
Their eagerness to condemn the Islamist movements which imperialism is scapegoating leads them in to outright reaction.
The strongest and most shameful expression of this is the way all of the “left” cheer on the most vicious massacring dictatorship in the region, the US-funded and armed General Sisi regime in Egypt, installed by a “populist” coup in July 2103 based on a carefully orchestrated “mass movement” of the better-off middle class and military elements. This one did have all the hallmarks of the coordinated “colour revolutions” which have become the stock in trade of the CIA, backed with a deluging positive Western media coverage exhorting support, as well as political interventions of sinister US-stooge Tony Blair.
It was obvious poison for the working class and subsequent developments make clear.
Sisi’s regime is daily ever more clearly reactionary, not least because of its inclusion in an alliance of Saudi-led military forces blitzkrieging Yemen; in seeing massive Washington arms and finance aid restored after a suitable US pause for a cosmetic rap over the knuckles for the coup; and most of all the restored collusion between Cairo and the Zionists to isolate the desperate Gazan Palestinians, shutting down the lifeline smuggling tunnels along the Palestinian-Sinai border just before last summer’s genocidal Zionist blitzkrieg killing of thousands of men, women and children and cracking down generally on any sympathetic response to the Palestinians.
The repression internally in Egypt has been so grotesque – including the incredible savagery of street slaughter in cold blood of thousands of unarmed protestors, and ensuing judicial death sentences passed en masse against the democratically elected opposition – that even the bourgeois press feels obliged to let through the odd admission, aware of how further exposed is the bourgeois lie of “democracy”:
This week, the gradual purge of this first democratic government in Egypt took a darker turn. The Sisi regime, buoyed by the clear apathy of its international partners, upheld a death sentence handed down in May to Morsi and more than 100 people. The trial was nothing but a farce. Amnesty International called it a grossly unfair charade, which demonstrated a “complete disregard for human rights”.
A military coup – followed closely by the mass detention of the former government and the planned execution of Egypt’s first elected head of state – would usually precipitate a country becoming an international pariah. But remarkably, this has all come at a time of a thawing in the relationship between the west and Egypt. This includes the reopening of a multibillion-dollar American arms deal, and ever more cuddly diplomatic language.
The Morsi death sentence was met with some condemnation from Sisi’s newfound friends. Last month the EU’s top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, said the judgment “was not in line with Egypt’s obligations under international law”. Yesterday the US said the sentence was “deeply troubling”, a predictably nebulous response considering the Americans’ overt flirting with the Sisi regime this year.
The reluctance to stand up to this new wave of authoritarianism sweeping Egypt is based on a false premise. The west sees Sisi as a bulwark against extremism, a strongman in an otherwise rudderless region saturated by insurgent groups and quasi-failed states. Sisi believes mass arrests of Islamists and political opponents are a demonstration to the world that he is the man to bring stability to the region.
Yet taking this stance is playing with fire. The brutal crackdown on the former Muslim Brotherhood officials and supporters – as well as civil society and the media – will only serve to isolate and radicalise a restless core of Egypt’s voters and jettison them from the political mainstream. After the 2011 revolution, young Islamists finally believed political engagement in the new post-Mubarak Egypt was a reliable outlet for their concerns. Now, with nowhere to turn and with the grievances of jailed friends and relatives bearing down on them, the potential for a new, radical, political lexicon abounds. It will create dangerous ideologies based on resentment, injustice and hatred.
Sadly, this phenomenon is already been played out. In Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, a nascent branch of Isis has grown in ferocity since the 2013 coup, finding a fruitful recruiting ground in a corner of the country that has long been neglected. The regime’s reaction, to unilaterally punish communities by bulldozing and shelling entire neighbourhoods in Rafah, is in clear breach of international law. Intentionally or otherwise, the fear is that Sinai will now be a hotbed of extremism, fuelled by the brutality meted out by the regime.
This is also having a direct impact on the Mediterranean migrant crisis. After the Arab Spring, hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees found a haven in the new Egypt. Wrongly, Egypt’s new rulers saw Syrians in cahoots with the Brotherhood. Within days of the coup, regime-sanctioned xenophobia meant these same people were violently expelled, later to emerge on the southern coasts of the Mediterranean in their thousands.
The hypocrisy at the heart of the west’s approach will soon filter through to the disenchanted and excluded on the streets. The EU campaigns for a moratorium of executions across the world, yet the half-hearted response to the Morsi judgment means grievances will soon be directed beyond Cairo, and toward Brussels or Washington. Those that hold on to the ideals of the 2011 revolution – freedom, democracy and fairness – must surely be nurtured, and not so readily abandoned. If not, what does that say about the deep malaise at the heart of Middle Eastern policy in western capitals?
...they will only create another tinderbox of grievance in the Middle East.
While this is the first death sentence for Morsi, courts have handed out hundreds of similar sentences against Islamists in mass trials since his 2013 overthrow and a mass crackdown on dissent in Egypt.
The ruling, which will be automatically reviewed by Egypt’s highest appeals court, brought no immediate outcry on the streets as thousands remain imprisoned, though the country faces threats from Islamic extremists, including an affiliate of the Islamic State group.
It is not clear if Morsi will be executed. Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who led the military’s ouster of Morsi, repeatedly has defended the independence of the judiciary, though their mass rulings have faced international criticism.
Meanwhile, former autocrat Hosni Mubarak, overthrown in Egypt’s 2011 revolt and detained since, has seen a number of the cases against him dropped. Mubarak now only faces a November retrial on charges over the killings of protesters after initially receiving a life sentence.
Morsi, who served a year as Egypt’s first freely elected president, appeared in court Tuesday in a blue prison uniform, enclosed in a cage separate from other defendants held in a glass-covered cage covered in mesh wire. He first raised his arms to cameras and those in the courtroom. He listened to the verdict with a slight smile, but said nothing.
Judge Shaaban al-Shami, who led a panel of three judges, issued the ruling after he consulted with Egypt’s Mufti, a religious authority affiliated with the judiciary. The Mufti’s opinion must be sought in all capital punishment cases.
“The court panel has unanimously agreed that there is no room for leniency or mercy for the defendants,” al-Shami said. He said the Mufti sanctioned the death sentences under crimes of “haraba,” an Islamic term for banditry, bloodshed and waging war on God and society.
The judge also confirmed death sentences for five other imprisoned leading members of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, including Mohammed Badie, the group’s leader, and Saad el-Katatni, the head of its short-lived political party. Another 21 imprisoned defendants received life sentences in the case, which in Egypt is equivalent to 25 years in prison. Another 93 defendants were tried in absentia and sentenced to death, though they will be automatically retried once they are in custody.
Defendants in the case were found guilty of conspiring and attempting to kill police officers in the mass breakout targeting three Egyptian prisons, enabling some 20,000 inmates to flee, causing chaos in Egypt and breaching its borders with the Gaza Strip. Al-Shami said the prison break received help from the Palestinian Hamas movement, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Sinai militants.
The breakout freed Morsi, who had been arrested soon after the 2011 protests started. He later rode on the Brotherhood’s popularity among conservatives and Islamists in Egypt to become the country’s president in 2012. Morsi is already serving a 20-year sentence for his part in the killings in 2012 of protesters outside his palace when he was still president.
Earlier Tuesday, the same judge sentenced Morsi to life in prison over charges of conspiring with foreign groups, including Hamas. That sentence also can be appealed. Al-Shami also confirmed death sentences against 16 other Islamists in that case, including three jailed senior Brotherhood members. The other 13 were tried in absentia. Morsi was among 17 defendants sentenced to life in prison in that case.
Morsi’s supporters quickly criticized the decision, calling it the “nail in the coffin for democracy in Egypt.”
“This cannot be ignored any longer,” said Amr Darrag, a former minister under Morsi who is now in self-imposed exile. “We call the international community to realize how grossly wrong it is to support such a bloody regime.”
Another former minister in exile, Yehia Hamed, said the verdicts and the crackdown on dissent are likely to increase the violence already plaguing Egypt.
“We reject all violent means of protest,” Hamed said. “However, (el-Sissi) is forcing many within Egypt to believe violence is the only way to counter his regime.”
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, whose country’s leadership has supported the Brotherhood, said the sentences against Morsi would be a test for Western governments who have supported Egypt since 2013 despite the crackdown.
“We shall see what they will do, faced with the leader of a political movement which never engaged in violence, being forced to walk toward execution,” Davutoglu said.
The Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists called on Egyptian authorities to end the imposition of mass death sentences in “grossly unfair” trials.
“Egyptian judges are once again contributing to egregious violations of the right to life instead of protecting against, preventing and punishing arbitrary deprivation of life,” said Said Benarbia, director of the commission’s Middle East and North Africa program.
Egyptian rights lawyer Nasser Amin, a member of the state-sanctioned National Council for Human Rights, said he expected Morsi’s appeals to go on for a couple of years before a final verdict is issued. However, he lamented the mass death sentences issued in recent months, which by some estimates number 1,500. In 2010, there were no more than 93 death sentences issued, all in criminal cases, he said.
The “left” groups have gone very silent on Egypt as the fascist nature of its renewed Western colluding regime has become clear, barring the out and out loopiness of petty bourgeois Sons of Malcolm black-nationalist poseurs who actually celebrate the Sisi government and its freeing of the previous pocket-lining gangster-dictator Mubarak, and even support its Saudi alliance its bloody interventions into the warlord chaos that has been made in Libya.
But Egypt is critical. It was the great spontaneous eruption of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Cairo which kicked off all these manipulations.
Tahrir Square 2011 was a genuine revolutionary movement. How to be so certain when declaring 2013 to be a Western provocation, or Syria or Libya.??
Because unlike the other events this was against a Western stooge gangster dictator Mubarak, with giant numbers on the street overnight in a way the CIA could never have managed, without the obvious Western press deluge hyping up Libya and Syria and the generals’ counter-demonstrations later, this time against a figure that did not suit the West (despite at-the-time further conspiracy theories that Morsi was a CIA tool - all those suddenly forgotten too).
Egypt was a giant shock to the West, a post-2008 crisis eruption in by far the biggest and most dominant population in the Middle East, with past anti-imperialist form and a leading role that would pull the whole of the region behind it - and pose a serious threat to imperialism’s Zionist rottweiller regional attack dog.
Libya and Syria were desperate moves in the wake of that, to try and hem it in – stirred up pretend “Arab Spring” rebellions which were anything but that, being against anti-imperialist figures, US-hated ones at that.
The media onslaughts against Gaddafi and Assad prove the point – Mubarak was never so attacked and lied about (albeit such a corrupt rogue it was difficult even for the bourgeois press to say much that was positive.)
And Libya’s pseudo revolt fell flat on its face - requiring a rescue by nazi-NATO blitzing (reluctantly by the US, desperate to pretend there were “no more interventions", one basis of Obama’s fragile support).
Syria was more successful, the cross border disruptions and sniper interventions setting a sectarian civil war on fire – but now in turn badly backfiring as the deadly civil war destruction blows back in the out-of-control ISIS and the huge migration refugee turmoil.
What imperialism wants? Only in the sense that it wants war, not that it is establishing “control”.
What workers want is Leninism. Build it.
Steve Tudy
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