Back issues
No 1495 29th July 2016
Growing world turmoil and “terrorist” outburst is driven by one fundamental cause only, the ever deepening catastrophic failure of the entire capitalist world system, which is dragging the whole world towards deadly Slump, international hatreds and finally World War devastation (already well underway in the Middle East, Ukraine etc). Across the board fake-“left” condemnation of this deepening rebelliousness as “reactionary jihadism” is both treacherous, and a reactionary capitulation to imperialist demonisation and also fails completely to understand or explain the revolutionary significance of these eruptions. This is the stirring response of the great mass on the planet to the epochal collapse of the 800 year old capitalist order and its ever intensifying tyrannical exploitation. Declaring jihadism, Black Lives shootings, and European incidents “unacceptable” is both moralising humbug and petty bourgeois cowardice – lining up with Trump demagogery. “Left” elevation of useless class-collaborating Corbynism, leaves the working class exposed to new Allende dangers. Revolutionary theory vital need
The dizzying torrent of seemingly disparate and confusing world upheavals, from Turkey’s failed coup and populist Erdogan counter-coup; Dallas and Baton Rouge US anti-police shootings; the latest terror carnage in Nice, Rouen, Munich and the Bavarian train; the demented Nazi-stridency of Trumpism in America (and just as much the sinister reactionariness of the alternative Hillary “Lady Macbeth” Clinton); and the deadly Obama civilian-killing drone blitzings in the Middle East; are all facets of the same phenomenon, catastrophic crisis disintegration of the world capitalist order.
So too is the panicked reaction of the British ruling class to the working class upheaval around the EU vote, desperately short-circuiting “democracy” and Tory party election pretences to impose a new bourgeois “austerity” government, and so too is the Blairites’ in-your-face deliberate sabotaging of Corbynite “leftism”, because even that tepid, useless and potentially deadly disarming class-collaboration is deemed too potentially unsettling for an increasingly bitter and rebellious working class.
All these things can be understood and made sense of only with a perspective of epochal breakdown and conflict and are resolvable only with the revolutionary transformation of international society, led by the highest level of scientific understanding, fought for and developed constantly in open polemic battle by a purpose built party of revolutionary theory.
Without such a grasp there is only petty bourgeois handwringing hopelessness, like this despair poured out in a recent “left” feminist article (heavily cut):
Lately they say: “I have had to stop watching the news.” They feel completely overwhelmed and increasingly powerless: Orlando, Brexit, race war, Conservative hegemony, Nice, Trump. Everything is spinning so fast and changing so rapidly that they describe a kind of data vertigo: there is literally too much information, and just about all of it seems entirely negative. The feelings that much of this information evoke are so unbearable that it sometimes seems really better not to know. I feel this myself. The world is going to hell in a hand cart, so let’s have a barbecue – but don’t mention climate change, that really is a downer.
The option to switch off is, of course, not available to all, but I see so many caught between anxiety and withdrawal, and a mood of deep uncertainty prevails. Out of this flow consequences that we must seek to understand or, in future, we will have even less control than we fear. Some will say that this feeling of precariousness, of the rug being pulled away at any minute, of a future suddenly blotted out, is really only the middle class experiencing the fragility of working-class life, where nothing ever feels that secure anyway....
it looks like May will be in power for a very long time. We don’t yet know how her brand of authoritarian populism will work, but we do know that it is not only rooted in economic inequality but is a backlash against liberal social values. Liberalism itself is, of course, so often blamed for causing this general mood of anxiety in the first place.
Such defeatist gloom can only come from a world view that has completely given up on the idea of revolutionary change, never understood it in the first place, or most accurately stated, is terrified of such change and does not want to understand, let alone welcome it.
It cannot see that it is not “the world” which is “going to hell in a handcart” but the capitalist world, and while the masses are, as always, forced to take the brunt of the horrors and devastation, they are also being driven to the revolutionary fight against it.
The argument will be made that these outbursts are all different, and episodic, and that while the great jihadist insurgency in the Middle East may claim to have inspired as its “own soldiers” the individualist outbreaks of terror within the “advanced nations” the links are tenuous; that the “soldier-gone-wrong” outbursts in America are about anti-racism, are unrelated to Islamism and anyway carried through by disturbed individuals; that the semi-nihilist “Brexit” contempt from the working class in Britain is not related to any of it.
Of course these are all different, with many aspects specific to each which need analysis, but that simply proves a point.
Their very difference shows that there can be no glib demonising explanation for this growing ferment of rebelliousness, suicidal frustration and hatred now bursting out everywhere, and no ludicrous “war on terror” “destroy-them-all” solution.
This great upheaval is not caused by some new “evil” ideology, a “jihadism” suddenly appearing from out of the blue (an utterly unscientific notion) with some demented purpose only of damaging everyone else out of sheer hatred of “our way of life” (as if the whole world was not monstrously and tyrannously exploited non-stop by imperialism, and it were just “peacefully minding its own business”).
Nor is it wilful backwardness and crude racism which has driven the British referendum vote (though without a revolutionary perspective it is open to such deadly chauvinist diversions).
Nor even is it anti-racism driving the upheavals in America, for all that the class struggle is currently expressing itself that way, and likely to do so in part for some time.
Multiple and separately arising forms of struggle, from the Ukrainian resistance against the Western-backed Kiev fascist coup regime, the Black Lives Matter anti-racist (and anti-oppression) movement in America, as well as the disparate Islamic insurgency itself (arising in many different locations and forms from Afghanistan to Palestine to Nigeria) have a much deeper and more universal root.
That can only be the epochal failure and collapse of the globalised and world dominating capitalist imperialist system and its incapability any longer to satisfy human aspirations of any kind, driving the great mass of humanity to the point of desperation.
This is a world anti-imperialist upheaval, gruesome and tragic as it is for the hapless victims of the individual outbursts like Nice, or Munich or Rouen, – and far worse in Baghdad, Kabul and Istanbul – which despite its confusion and the limitations of a sometimes backward and/or sectarian ideology, just grows more and more determined to deliver blows back against an imperialism which routinely and daily imposes far worse massacres, wars, torture, destruction, and drone terror-from-the-skies on a scale beyond any comparison with such near random incidents or even the organised terror of the ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
The fake-“left” of all kinds pours out endless “condemnations” of the rising world anti-imperialist struggles all treacherously and cravenly written off as “just reactionary Islamism”, or “headbanging jihadism” or most slimily of all, as “all organised by the CIA really”.
What genuine Marxism sees in all this seeming chaos and agony is the transformation, into open resistance and revolt, of the long slow build-up of world wide proletarian resentment and anger at the callousness, unfairness and injustice of the inhuman exploitation brutally imposed on it for centuries, and now magnified by the unsolved 2008 crisis collapse.
As identified long ago by Karl Marx, a system which evolved through hijacking the enormous social production output of the whole of mankind to the private gain and accumulation of a tiny few “owners” (entrenching their privilege with every addition to their piles) could only ever be a transient stage in history.
However much “entrepreneurship” (and piracy) drove progress at the beginning, the internal contradictions of production for private profit mean it must eventually become a deadly and destructive fetter on mankind’s development needing to be burst through to release the great talents of billions of people.
Some eight centuries on from its own turbulently revolutionary beginnings (turning over the stifling war-ridden feudal society which went before), capitalism has long since reached that point, as two great world wars have already proved with destruction, slaughter and horror on a scale never seen before and even worse non-stop imposition of coups, invasions, tinpot fascist dictatorships, genocidal massacres and torturing oppression ever since – over 400 such incidents from Haiti to Guatemala, Chile to Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia to Grenada, Colombia, the Philippines and Pakistan and dozens more, slaughtering and butchering tens of millions to maintain the exploitation and suppress any resistance to it.
And all that before the world hit the buffers of the greatest contradiction of all, the mother and father of all “overproduction” crises plunging towards appalling Slump and world war devastation far beyond anything yet seen if the world does not stop it.
Blitzing of Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq (non-stop), the Yemen, Somalia, Libya and eastern Ukraine, and the deliberate provocation of the dirty sectarian civil war to destroy Syria are just the beginning, warming the world up for the total conflict that the crisis will inevitably bring (and which Donald Trump’s Hitlerite demagoguery is a prelude to).
But the world’s masses are increasingly in uproar against this unbearable and insane destructiveness, the deliberate and desperate “way out” being imposed by the arrogance and greed of a ruling class that has no other answer to its failure and incompetence.
The embryo beginnings of the most gigantic upheaval of all time is what all these events signal, however far they are yet from a conscious revolutionary fight for socialism.
This often crudely sectarian and often self-defeating movement, is carried temporarily by all kinds of limited and even at times reactionary ideologies, filling the great vacuum left by the long Stalinist and subsequent Trotskyist revisionist retreats from revolutionary theory.
Mostly in the Middle East it is using adapted militant forms of Islamism, but elsewhere also re-warmed Soviet Stalinism, laced with backward Russian nationalism, and militant black nationalism in the States.
Even subjectively hostile to scientific communism, as is the apocalyptic sectarianism of the ISIS, or Boko Haram, or Al-Shabaab, these outbursts are all driven by the contradictions and disintegration of capitalism and are hostile to it (the “decadent West”).
Eventually all this will and must begin to resolve its contradictions and forge a conscious class-war understanding, (or be overtaken by better grasp because its leadership has proved insufficient), at which point this world revolt will begin to coalesce into an unstoppable mass communist movement which can overthrow capitalism for good and end all class exploitation and inequality.
A huge conscious effort to re-examine all the great struggles of the past is needed, and most of all to understand the triumphant and brilliant achievements of the 20th century workers states, as well as their disastrous philosophical retreats from revolutionary perspectives which led to the eventual liquidation of the Soviet Union, its vital dictatorship of the proletariat planned economy abandoned under the illusions of the “free market”.
It demands the greatest fight of all against the anti-communist brainwashing deluge which has saturated brains for the entire period (more or less openly abetted by fake-“left” poison) and against all the sophistry and misguidance of the fake-“left” of all kinds.
Meanwhile the lessons of the crisis and deliberate imposition of ruthless world bullying terror on the planet by dominant Washington first and foremost – to make clear that it is the rest of the world which must continue to pay for its grotesque privilege and exploitative consumption of the planet’s resources and labour output – will massively escalate this Third World upheaval and draw the rest of the working class towards revolutionary struggle.
The ruling class has even finally admitted as much in the deliberately long delayed and still limited, partial-whitewash Chilcott report (blaming all on the sacrificial figure of Tony Blair and his immediate circle rather than the entire colluding establishment (Labourites included) and ignoring all the other non-stop world imperialist warmongering which British imperialism continuously participates in, or initiates, or sells arms to, with the collusion and approval of the entire parliamentary circus (including the “left”)).
Chilcott concedes that the monstrous and deliberately imposed lying Iraq war and other Middle East interventions have hugely magnified and accelerated this “terrorist” response, recruiting tens of thousands into the jihadist ranks, including the formation of ISIS as every rational brain could see would happen from the very beginning.
And it goes on. The “war-ending” and “progressive black presidency” of Barack Obama, supposedly a giant step for social advance and equality, was allegedly withdrawing from the Bush adventures.
But that was only because the imperialism Obama continues to run and was always going to run for the ruling class was forced out by rolling defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he has since imposed endless airborne death squad terror, totally arbitrarily, without any supposed “democratic sanction” or “rule of law” base and on a scale even Bush did not imagine:
Barack Obama has claimed that drone and other airstrikes, his favored tactics of war, have killed between 64 and 116 civilians during his administration, a tally which was criticized as undercounted even before Friday’s announcement.
The long-promised assessment acknowledged that the government itself does not always know how many civilians it kills and that it may revise its death tolls over time.
Between 2009 and 31 December 2015, the administration claimed that it launched 473 strikes, mostly with drones, that killed between what it said were 2,372 and 2,581 terrorist “combatants”.
The assessment presents the White House’s account of the death toll from a method of warfare that defines Obama’s legacy in many parts of the world. The White House released its long-awaited drones report the afternoon before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, having pledged transparency on the drones issue for years.
Yet the count is also incomplete, leaving out the civilian toll from drone strikes in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Nor did the administration go into detail about where the strikes occur, citing what an official told reporters on Friday were “diplomatic sensitivities”, even as it presented the assessment as a significant advance in transparency.
The upper limit of the civilian death toll from drones stands at more than 800 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, during the time period Obama’s drones tally covered. But that and similar accounts are imprecise, owing to both official secrecy and the difficulties of fact-finding and verifying in some of the world’s most dangerous places. In some cases, human rights groups have found that strikes intending to kill specific terrorist leaders killed many more people.
In 2013, senior Republican senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said that drone strikes had killed 4,700 people, some 2,000 more deaths than the upper limit the administration released on Friday.
Accompanying the release of the death statistics was a new executive order Obama issued to effectively codify his counterterrorism strikes for the next administration, a process his aides have debated since at least 2012.
A goal of the executive order is to “take feasible precautions in conducting attacks to reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties” through training, “technological capabilities” and holding off on strikes to limit civilian deaths.
The US has killed people whose identities it does not know, for fitting into what it considers patterns of life associated with terrorism, an anonymous method of killing known as signature strikes. But despite the executive order’s emphasis on steps to “ensure military objectives and civilians are clearly distinguished”, senior administration officials indicated that Obama will permit signature strikes to continue.
“We continue to reserve the right to take action not just against individual terrorist targets but when we believe we have, for instance, a force protection issue or information to suggest a continued imminent threat,” a senior official said when asked about signature strikes.
Drone strikes outside of declared war zones are the province of the CIA and the US military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command. The administration has treated them as an official secret, and for years would not even utter the word “drone” or any of its associated acronyms. No entity outside the administration reviews the strikes.
To critics, the secrecy has for years permitted Obama to conceal the damage in human lives inflicted by what he calls “targeted killing”, insulating him politically from the consequences of lethal decisions that the president has decided can occur anywhere on earth for an indefinite duration.
The White House and the CIA, which pioneered the strikes during the George W Bush era and dramatically accelerated them during Obama’s presidency, have claimed without evidence that drone strikes are an antiseptic solution for terrorism and downplayed the civilian casualties, political destabilization and life-changing consequences described by strike survivors, witnesses, relatives and foreign officials.
...Survivors of the strikes and relatives of the dead consider drone strikes to be proof that the US is waging an indiscriminate war on their largely Muslim countries, precisely the opposite of how Obama and his surrogates prefer to view their “targeted” counter-terrorism. Several have told the Guardian that the threat of the strikes have created an ever-present fear in their countries amongst civilians while having a negligible impact on the terrorist groups they are meant to contain or destroy.
Survivors also resent the lack of official apology, acknowledgement and compensation from the US for mistaken strikes, and bitterly note that Obama was quick to take responsibility for an errant 2015 strike that killed two westerners.
Rafiq ur-Rehman, whose mother was killed and children seriously injured by a 2012 drone strike in Pakistan, told the Guardian this year: “In my opinion, America treats us worse than animals.”
The US military is reviewing an airstrike or airstrikes in northern Syria that a leading human rights group alleges has killed 56 civilians, among them 11 children.
The aerial bombing, termed a “massacre” by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) on Tuesday, occurred near Manbij, an area where US proxy forces are engaged in a fierce fight to oust the Islamic State militant group (Isis).
Senior US officials consider Manbij a way station to capturing Isis’s Syrian capital Raqqa. Defense ministers in the anti-Isis coalition are set to discuss Raqqa’s capture at a meeting in Washington on Wednesday.
According to the SOHR, US-led coalition airstrikes hit the northern countryside of Manbij, killing 56 and wounding “tens” more, some critically. The group claims that since 31 May, coalition strikes have killed a total of 104 civilians, including 29 children, 16 women and eight prisoners.
An official release of airstrike information from US Central Command early on Wednesday did not include the claims of civilian deaths, but instead said that three of its airstrikes near Manbij on 19 July destroyed Isis fight positions, 12 of its vehicles and a command “node”.
Overall, the US military has confirmed 36 civilian deaths from its airstrikes since summer 2015, a figure independent observers consider too low to be credible, considering the daily barrage of air-delivered US ordnance for nearly two years. The independent group Airwars estimates the US to have caused the deaths of a minimum of 1,422 civilians in Iraq and Syria during the campaign. Central Command is investigating other civilian-casualty allegations as well.
Manbij is often cited by US officials as a success story for the ongoing war. On Tuesday, the US military said that its ground-force proxy, the Syrian Arab Coalition, had captured an Isis headquarters fashioned as a hospital in the western part of the city. It claims that Isis is under assault from four fronts in Manbij while holding territory in the city center.
Suicidal individual massacres and attacks are a response to this endless tyranny, whatever elements of “unstable” psychology, or “criminal and violent backgrounds” might be attached to any one of them, or probably all of them, or whatever alleged “radicalisation and brainwashing” might be blamed as supposedly the cause of the outbursts.
Why now and why so many such eruptions is the question?
It is the contradictions and alienation of all capitalist society, being driven to crisis levels of intensity, which tip individuals or oppressed sections over the edge (undoubtedly affecting the most unstable and psychologically damaged).
Such eruptions will not be stopped by repressive crackdowns, “kill-them-all” blitzkrieg or the sanctimonious moralising and “not the way” prescriptions already filling the papers and websites of the fake-“left” over Dallas etc.
There is some kind of anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist political content in most of these outbursts and clearly so for most, like the obvious rage at American police state repression killings triggering the Dallas and Baton Rouge incidents after a stream of glaring police killings of innocent black workers (and it should be said, white poor and dispossessed too, despite the added racism increasing the black toll) and even more the non-stop wave of suicide bombings and massacres in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Even the apparent right-wing outburst of the Munich attack with its Brevik (Norwegian fascist killer) worship, contains an agonised contradiction in the pleading of the shooter that he was “a German” when he was of Iranian parentage and therefore not qualifying for “pure Germanic blood” ideas (and constitutional principles) that still run through German imperialist bourgeois society long after Hitler, possibly one element of the bullied isolation he appears to have suffered at school (where he was also bullied for not being Arabic too).
Of course there is psychological speculation in this, and for all these outbursts there is not any kind of straight line to socialist revolution; it would be a brave individual who tried to argue for communism in the middle of ISIS territory.
But neither is it anything but the most craven opportunism by the fake-“left” – all of their pretences exposed – to continue to denounce this huge ferment with moralising or high-handed pseudo-Marxist “principles” and prescriptions for the “proper way to fight”, especially while they are all piling in behind yet more of the parliamentary racket, filling the air with self-obsessed single issue reformism from “LBGT” “rights” to strident feminism and evading precisely the revolutionary questions thereby.
(All such super-reformist single issue politics is hostile to communism and often mobilised for the most bilious reaction, picked up by the establishment for its own anti-communism – it is no mistake that both Obama and Cameron have held out as their great achievements the instigation of “gay marriage” and the extraordinary “Gays for Trump” detachments have shown even further where such issues are going, as has the shameless playing of the feminist card by the grotesque fascist Hillary Clinton, fresh from bombing Libya, setting the Syrian civil war in train and backing the Honduras coup).
All this single-issue diversion helps the fake-“left” evade any recognition of the revolutionary movement in the world which is already breaking past the initial terrorist forms and small group guerrilla war attacks like 9/11, taking on a more organised form, in the ISIS, Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram and Taliban revolts etc.
Beyond that, more obvious anti-imperialist content is seen in great mass revolts like the huge spontaneous street movement toppling of the Western stooge dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in 2011, in the east Ukraine anti-Nazi resistance, and in the growing Black Lives ferment in America, as well as continuation of the greatest and most heroic of all these struggles by the Palestinian nation, the most persecuted, benighted and genocidally oppressed peoples of the entire post-WW2 period.
As Lenin made very clear in his 1906 Guerrilla Warfare article (see quotes in EPSR 1147 06-08-02), while these tortured and tragic incidents may be a long way from the development of mass consciousness and understanding to guide the all-out class-war revolution, which would be Marxism’s central methodology, joining in the imperialist scapegoating and demonisation is outright capitulation. As explained 14 years ago:
But the class-war battle for the world’s opinion largely revolves around this symbolic matter of whether the Third World guerrilla war/terrorist attempts to fight back against imperialist military tyranny are to be “condemned” or not.
The entire Third World cheers on every such blow struck by FARC, Hamas, Nepal Maoists, al-Qaeda, or whoever. The entire forces of bourgeois-liberal ideology on earth, - desperate to destroy all idea of REVOLUTION as a way forward for civilisation - tries desperately to keep up the pretence that UN ‘democracy’, and Human Rights, and the ‘rule of law’, etc, etc, etc, will still eventually, one day, deliver justice, and equality, and ‘freedom’ for all, etc, etc, etc, - in which case it is therefore only “reasonably obvious” that such “blind, gratuitous, reactionary violence, playing into the hands of the US imperialists”, etc, etc, “should be condemned”, etc, - - playing up the issues that “backward Islamic nuttiness” inspires the suicide bombers; that the victims were “innocent New York workers”; and lying that “Marxism is against terror anyway”, etc, etc.
It is certainly true that the terror weapon would seldom be first choice tactics for Marxist REVOLUTIONARIES, but what idiotic posturing are these fake-‘lefts’ indulging in who have no wish to stoke up a REVOLUTIONARY struggle anyway????
The issue is guerrilla WAR. Effectively, the entire Third World is under military DOMINATION from well-guarded US imperialist firepower sources, KILLING the Third World people with abandon whenever and wherever the fancy takes it.
Collective punishment of Palestinian homes, Afghan villages, Sudanese medical facilities, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc - all are targets and it will never stop until US imperialism (and its Zionist and UK and other stooges) is defeated.
It is total WAR on millions of innocents from imperialism’s side, only interested in one thing - remaining the WORLD DOMINANT power at all costs.
So how can this well-guarded US-Zionist imperialist WAR machine be fought back against if not via total WAR against everything American or Zionist, as far as spontaneously-erupting Third World guerrilla-war terrorism is concerned??`7?
Lenin specifically dismissed fake-‘left’ attempts to use ‘moral’ or ‘tactical’ posturing arguments (for condemning terrorist spontaneity) as a “degradation of Marxism”.
More shame on the ‘Marxist revolutionaries’ Lenin added, if tactically ill-judged spontaneous terror was becoming dominant to the organised socialist revolution’s cost.
The only solution that was even thinkable, Lenin goes on, is for the Marxists to organise a more effective revolutionary uprising themselves, - in other words to capture the LEADERSHIP of the violent response to ruling-class tyranny.
In particular, Lenin insisted that very specific historical analysis of ALL the conditions of any action against imperialism was needed, not trite labels stereotyping anarchists or terrorists for immediate dismissal,.. [long Lenin Guerrilla War quote follows]
Specific analysis of concrete conditions is precisely what has not been forthcoming from the “left”s - who in various forms put out a blanket condemnation of the Islamic struggles as “reactionary Islam” etc or, equally cravenly, declare all such outbursts to be from nothing but “headbangers” (a crudely offensive and unscientific unMarxist term in the first place) and “American mercenaries”, to avoid being seen too obviously lined up with the imperialist nonsense of a “war on terror”.
Now they are caught out, over the Middle East mayhem in general and the ISIS revolt for example, which is more and more obviously turned against the West and is not “playing a role” for Washington at all, – whatever it might have been manipulated into at the beginning of the Syrian war.
American imperialism is bombing, droning and slaughtering the ISIS Sunni, via both its installed Shia Iraqi stooge government in Baghdad and directly in Syria alongside “moderate” Kurdish forces (and alongside the Bonapartist oligarch-supporting Putin and the flakey opportunist bourgeois nationalism in Damascus).
Either these “condemnations” leave the “lefts” lined up alongside the Washington blitzing and ground troops, as the Trots find themselves – or their unthinking outright “support” for the Assad regime puts them there equally, as the Stalinists have found themselves, declaring with Assad that all the opposition is nothing but “terrorism”.
Leninist understanding has said from the beginning that the civil war in Syria was clearly set going using a stirred up Islamic Sunni rebellion by the Washington-Zionist war machine, its purpose mainly to head off the great 2011 Egyptian mass revolt (as was the equally bogus Libyan “extension of the Arab Spring”) and to topple a troubling “rogue state” that did not fully comply with its diktat.
While the imperialism skulduggery should be defeated there could be no faith placed in the opportunist bourgeois nationalism of the Damascus Ba’athists.
Assad’s regime has always been capable of doing “deals” with imperialism when it suited and certainly is no future path for either the Syrian masses nor any kind of example for the working class worldwide, and especially so as the world crisis grows sharper. It is not heading for communism, the only future.
While defeat was called for against the stirred up sectarianism at the beginning while it was clearly being used and funded by the West and its feudal gulf allies, the situation changed once the ISIS “blowback” had emerged, itself now turned against the imperialist plotting (albeit with its own barmy religious rational) and in turn being blitzed and massacred by imperialist forces (and Putin’s equally unthinking crude intervention).
But far from re-thinking its understanding the “lefts” have got even further into tangles, denying what is in front of their eyes, such as the presence of US troops on the ground in the onslaught on the ISIS strongholds.
Challenged with such evidence the museum-Stalinist Lalkar/Proletarian has turned to ever more convoluted sophistry to explain them away. It begins with an attempted explanation of the Orlando killing but could apply to any:
an official line (is) of Islam turning people to terrorism, but a truer explanation would be that imperialism, through its attacks on countries (which just happen to be Muslim) for the purposes of robbery and domination has created resentment among many Muslims and provoked a backlash.
So far so (apparently) clear. Not “headbanging” but the world rebelling against imperialist tyranny as Leninism says. But er..no, not really...
This backlash imperialism, be it of the US, British or European variety, is managing to channel back against the countries it wishes to suppress by demonising the governments of those countries and then mobilising the disaffected Muslim youth to join its puppets Al Qaeda, Al Nusra Front and ISISAS/ISIL to facilitate ‘regime change’. They are made to fight for imperialism in the belief they are fighting against imperialism.
Humpty-Dumpty in Alice Through the Looking Glass could not manage a better piece of twisted sophistry. Words and facts mean what Lalkar/Proletarian wants them to mean it appears. The disaffected youth who have left Europe in droves are actually fighting for imperialism!!!!!!!
And just in case anyone should think the presence of American troops fighting ISIS (and months of US bombing and drone attacks and the entire Iraqi army attack by the US installed Baghdad government) might indicate that Lalkar/Proletarian has got it wrong, there is an “explanation” for that too.
It’s all a devious trick so the Americans can “take the credit” for fighting ISIS (instead of Putin and Damascus) say the Brarites, failing completely to say why the Americans want credit for fighting and destroying what are supposedly “its own” “mercenary” jihadist forces. Why would the US even “contribute”?:
It is no accident that some of the acknowledged 300 US special operations soldiers should have chosen this moment to get themselves photographed, showing them tooled up with Kurdish and ‘moderate’ forces to the north of Raqqa, ready to stake the Pentagon’s claim to a victory to which the US has to date contributed little (and which has yet to be won)’ (Eric Schmitt, US Commandos work with Syrian fighters in push toward ISIS stronghold, New York Times, 26 May 2016).
Incidentally the presence of these troops has only become “acknowledged” by the Brarites because it was pointed out to them by the EPSR.
That leaves the uncomfortable fact (for Lalkar/Proletarian) that ISIS and the jihadism elsewhere has made its anti-Westernism very clear and especially in Europe. Again grudgingly “acknowledged”:
Of course, every so often imperialism’s beasts of murder and oppression slip their leash and do in fact attack imperialist interests, resulting in a hit against imperialism’s own: hence for example the crimes committed by deranged ‘jihadis’ against ordinary people in imperialist lands.
But they are supposed to be well-trained “mercenaries”!!!
The fact they have “slipped their leash” as the Brarites glibly try to play down this turnaround - (“every so often”!!!) – is the whole point; the attempts by imperialism to use these jihadi forces has gone badly wrong (as it did in Afghanistan) and they have turned into the opposite, to anti-imperialism.
But the mechanical Stalinism of the Lalkar/Proletarian cannot grasp any such dialectical shifts and movement and works only by the most ponderous “logic”. Point A the war bent capitalist system attacks a maverick and not-quite compliant “rogue” state, disliked anyway and a useful victim after Saddam (another earlier case) for its drive to war, generally to escape its crisis, and to help suppress the terrifying Cairo Spring popular revolt.
Point B, says the black or white view, imperialism is bad therefore Assad must be good.
Therefore everything Assad says and does must be good and a “step forwards” (and all his allies).
Therefore any opposition arising against Assad must be bad, whatever it does and to be labelled unchanging “terrorist”, as it is by Damascus.
But ISIS now has its own agenda, anti-everything imposed on the region since the Sykes-Picot lines divvied it up for imperialist plunder in 1917, anti-American backed Baghdad and anti-Assad too.
The mass of disaffected youth in Europe migrating there has seen it differently, attracted in droves because it has become a fight “attacking imperialist interests”, as the Brarites admit above.
That does not fit the rigid thinking of the Stalinists either, so things are turned upside down again with a nasty slur:
The truth is, however, that they are merely helping to mobilise public opinion to support imperialism’s wars of domination and its suppression of all dissent among the oppressed and downtrodden at home.
This is the same treacherous argument used over and over by the all the fake-“left” (Trots and Stalinists) in their condemnations of anarchists and those who do not follow the approved path of “step by step” left-pressure according to their idealist prescriptions of the “correct way to proceed”.
Marxism is critical of provocations, and backward or incorrect ideology, but says it has no right to tell others how to fight – it simply believes that only the scientific understanding of the world and mass revolutionary education and grasp, will prove successful.
But, for example, the Genoa Black Bloc anarchists were scummily fingered by the “lefts” during the anti-capitalist demonstrations of 2001, foully declaring that the indisciplined and posturing anarchist provocations were either part of the murderous police violence (as paid agents) or at least responsible for it.
So once again as the revisionists say, the barbaric breakdown of capitalism into fascist demagogic warmongering could be held back if only everyone behaved responsibly and “did not give them excuses”??????
What a monstrous self-righteous evasion!
And what revisionist delusions it reveals, trapped in the notion that the world will be changed in a step-by-step movement forwards just so long as no one to “rocks the boat” too much – the same “don’t provoke them” delusions that saw Moscow restrain one after the other of the post-war revolutionary movements and which deep down really believes in a “democratic path” forwards, which led across the world to the Stalinist supported “parliamentary roads” abandoning the Leninist insistence that only with the dictatorship of the proletariat established by the total overthrow of bourgeois dictatorship, could socialism start to be built.
These are the assumptions which followed from Stalin’s notorious 1952 revision of Lenin in the Economic Problems of Socialism, that post-war imperialism was hamstrung by the war and the expansion of the Soviet state, and could be “contained” by “peace struggle”, overcome by the growth of the socialist system and falling step-by-step as the obvious advantages of socialism become ever clearer (see EPSR Books Vol21, Against museum-Stalinist revisionism).
Such delusions have seen deadly counter-revolutionary coup after counter-revolutionary coup imposed, notably in Chile with Salvador Allende in 1973 and currently unravelling throughout the Latin American “Bolivarian Revolution” of left bourgeois nationalist parliamentarianism, still “hailed” by the fake-“lefts” as a “step forwards” even as imperialist skulduggery is sabotaging everything and preparing outright coups.
The same illusions in “secular democracy” as the “next step”, and wooden condemnation of Islamism as “just as reactionary as imperialism” duped the petty bourgeois sections of the huge Arab Spring in Egypt, which had toppled Washington’s stooge dictator Hosni Mubarak.
They fell in behind the CIA-Zionist manipulated, western press backed, bogus “further revolution” – in reality a coup - in 2013 which toppled the new (democratic) Muslim Brotherhood government, slaughtering 1000s of civilians in cold blood when they protested.
The whole “left” denounced the MB and cheered on the obviously petty bourgeois “secular democrats” (the Stalinists even “hailed” the military itself!), all blind to the difficulties that the revolt was causing imperialism (for all that its MB ideology is itself an obstacle to Marxism).
And where are those vociferous “secular” democratic illusions now? Rotting in prison or worse, while the General Sisi regime collects its lavish Washington subventions and military aid, and releases the old Mubarak regime figures:
Egypt’s security services have forcibly made hundreds of people disappear and tortured them in the past year to try to tackle dissent, a rights group says.
Students, political activists and protesters - some as young as 14 - have vanished without a trace, according to a new report by Amnesty International.
Many are alleged to have been held for months and often kept blindfolded and handcuffed for the entire period.
Egypt’s government has denied it uses enforced disappearances and torture.
More than 1,000 people have been killed and 40,000 are believed to have been jailed since President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi led the military’s overthrow of Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected head of state, in 2013.
Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa director, Philip Luther, said enforced disappearances had become a “key instrument of state policy” under Mr Sisi and his Interior Minister, Magdy Abdul Ghaffar, who took office in March 2015.
Citing local non-governmental organisations, Amnesty said that on average three to four people per day had been seized, usually when heavily armed security forces led by the National Security Agency (NSA) stormed their homes.
Hundreds of people were thought to be held at the NSA’s offices, inside the interior ministry’s headquarters at Cairo’s Lazoughly Square.
Mr Luther said the report exposed collusion between the security services and judicial authorities, who he alleged had been “prepared to lie to cover their tracks or failed to investigate torture allegations, making them complicit in serious human rights violations”.
One of the cases in the report is that of 14-year-old Mazen Mohamed Abdallah, who was taken from his home in the Nasser City district of Cairo by NSA agents on 30 September and accused of being a member of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and participating in unauthorised protests.
Mazen said that after he denied the charges, interrogators repeatedly raped him with a wooden stick in order to force him to “memorise” a false confession, applied electric shocks to his genitals and other parts of his body, and threatened to arrest his parents if he retracted the confession.
The boy retracted the confession when questioned by a prosecutor, but was still charged and only released from custody on 31 January to await trial, Amnesty said.
Another of the cases featured in the report is that of Italian student Giulio Regeni.
The 28-year-old Cambridge University PhD student was found dead on a roadside on the outskirts of Cairo in February, his body bearing signs of torture.
The Egyptian authorities have denied any involvement in his killing, but Amnesty said its report had found “clear similarities” between his injuries and those of Egyptians who had died in custody.
The failure to see the anti-imperialist content of the giant movement in the Middle East is part and parcel of the craven capitulation by the entire fake-“left” to the imperialist “war on terror”, and their wooden idealism which judges phenomena by the ideas in their heads rather than by any material analysis of the great movements of class forces.
Such are the tangles that the Lalkar/Proletrian-ites still effectively support the Cairo regime (even quoting its representatives on occasion!) because, among other things, it carries out “anti-terror” suppression against the Sinai jihadists, woodenly categorised as “terrorists” by Damascus (and therefore the Brarites too) even though they have a record of anti-Zionist and anti-coup struggle, allied with the Gaza Palestinians (also “headbanging Islamists” Lalkar/Proletarian???????)
The latest expression of this cravenness is in the fake-“left” reaction to the bungled Turkish coup against president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mostly they have not been caught out overtly supporting the reactionary military (with a long history of previously bloody coups) – which, like the Egyptian military, pretended it wanted to bring Turkey back to “secular democracy” meaning pro-Western policies, – instead supporting “a victory for democracy” (itself a giveaway about the petty bourgeois anti-Marxist democracy delusions of the Trots and revisionists).
But all the subsequent liberal “left” commentary has been one of appalled shock against the Erdogan regime’s counter-moves, with a between-the-lines sneaking wish the coup had succeeded (as did the entire world bourgeois response during the coup, the bourgeoisie biding its time until it had clearly failed, before issuing the usual humbug about “upholding democracy” etc).
Since coming to power a decade ago Erdogan has served reactionary Western needs, in particular keeping Turkey within the NATO war machine.
But he is riding on top of a similar shift towards Islamism as elsewhere, sitting on the edge of the explosive Iraqi and Syrian chaos and with an underlying potentially anti-Western content that imperialism has been wary of ever since – and not least when Turkey broke joint military links with Zionism after the Gaza 2009 peace convoy.
But even recent “rapprochement” with Zionism is not all it seems – the Zionists had to make significant concessions on aid to the Palestinians:
Israel is planning on Monday to announce a reconciliation deal with Turkey ending a six-year diplomatic standoff that started when Israeli naval commandos shot dead nine Turkish activists travelling on an aid flotilla making for the Gaza coast.
A deal negotiated in Rome yesterday is expected to restore full ambassador-level relations, provide for about $20m in compensation for the families of those killed and wounded aboard the Mavi Marmara in 2010, and clear the way for potentially lucrative contracts for Israel to transmit natural gas to Turkey.
After agreeing to halt all proceedings in domestic and international courts against Israeli forces, Turkey is expected to be allowed to ship aid for Gaza through the Israeli port of Ashdod and to build a power station, hospital and desalination plan in the blockaded Strip.
Assuming such a package is ratified by Israel’s security cabinet later in the week, it will mark a return to what has been the longest standing, if often chequered, relationship between Israel and a Muslim country. In 1949 Turkey was the first Muslim nation to recognise the new state of Israel.
...Most of the recent negotiations have been over Hamas-controlled Gaza. Turkey shelved its earlier demand for an ending of the blockade, settling instead for a humanitarian aid package that will be delivered through Ashdod under Israeli supervision. And while Hamas will be allowed to retain an outpost in the country, Ankara has reportedly given assurances that the Islamic faction’s Turkish base will not be used for armed operations against Israel.
The planned deal has sparked sharp protests from the families of two Israeli soldiers, Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin, who were killed during the 2014 war in Gaza. The families wanted any deal to provide for the return by Hamas of the soldiers’ bodies.
Reactionary Greater Turkey nationalism, and particularly the continuing barbaric suppression of the legitimate 100 year old Kurdish national movement, keeps the growing discontent diverted (with a blind eye turned by Western imperialism to the brutal slaughter).
But how long that will continue is a major concern for the West – and underlies the takeover attempt, echoing the Egyptian coup.
It is the failure of the “left” to understand the crisis context of this growing upheaval which means they miss all of the anti-imperialist and revolutionary significance of this admittedly complex world turmoil (which demands much more debate and discussion).
It reflects the petty bourgeois defeatism expressed by the opening piece and is totally anti-revolutionary.
“How will you ever persuade the working class to make revolution” has been one of the constant refrains of the complacent and cynical petty bourgeoisie expressing a shallow hostility to theory which smugly convinces itself that the world will always continue as it is, more or less.
And it now increasingly gets its answer – no-one “persuades” anyone, nor could they, save the crisis itself and the concrete reality of ever more desperate and deadly conditions imposed on the great majority, forcing them into movement to end this stinking and outmoded degenerate capitalist system.
It is happening, albeit not in a straight line and laced with confusion and much counter-productive sectarianism.
But blame that on the missing revolutionary leadership to identify and make conscious the emerging struggle and the balance of class forces within it, and the necessities it imposes on everyone to build a disciplined and coordinated movement to overturn the ruling class and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This anti-theory misses the significance of the British events too.
The nonsensical idea that the Tories will “be in power forever” comes from the inability of such “lefts” to really understand the crisis and its utterly intractable nature
Do these hand-wringing petty bourgeois truly believe that the working class will let itself be driven into the floor for a half century or more? Do they really think the world economy will stagger on that long?
Only the narrowest of minds stuck with the long class collaborating traditions of the Labour movement, and its step-by-step reformism and “left pressure” could believe so – failing to see that the relentless unrolling of the capitalist catastrophe gives workers no choice but to take up a completely different kind of struggle if they are to survive the oncoming disaster.
The real story revealed by the sudden short-circuiting of all the “election” pretences within the Tory party and nationally too, dictatorially imposing a completely new reactionary government in Britain after Cameron’s humiliating resignation, is one of total weakness and fear.
The stitched-up sudden imposition of a completely new government without even a pretence of a “mandate” (in as far as such a preposterous fraud of “democratic choice” would mean anything anyway), indicates a ruling class already rocked backwards by the economic crisis and the ever growing Third World revolt which its warmongering has already unleashed.
It is stunned by the class rebelliousness suddenly expressed in the Brexit vote.
It knows this will deepen hugely as it imposes further and deeper “austerity”, as already indicated by the first cold-blooded pronouncements of the Theresa May government.
And there is no choice in this for the ruling class if it is to survive the deadly and ruthless international trade and currency wars which are driving the capitalist world towards more cutthroat and ruthless competition for collapsing markets.
The very basics of Marxism need repeating against all the nonsense about “economic upturns” and the possibility of “less stringent” austerity or of “boosting investment” to “rebuild the British economy”, all so much hogwash.
The world is collapsing into the greatest overproduction crisis of all time, exactly along the lines first explored by Karl Marx in his towering work Capital and in the Communist Manifesto he wrote with Frederick Engels.
There are no mysteriously untapped “key markets” anywhere into which some mystically newly efficient industry and commerce can suddenly start selling; just the opposite, the world is awash with multi-trillions of spare cash dollars, all desperate to find these Holy Grail investment opportunities but all backed-up in offshore deposits etc because “opportunities” don’t exist.
Latest bourgeois press economic reports make it very clear that the great disaster which reached surface in the global credit failures of 2008 has never gone away, exactly as constantly warned of by the EPSR against the dilettantism of the Trots and Revisionists, who for all their occasional allusions to “the crisis” have not got the remotest grasp of its universal and overwhelming significance.
The same reports make clear that this underlying turmoil long predates Brexit, which is not a cause of economic chaos (for all that it might have helped trigger the latest pound collapse etc) but a reflection of it, expressing the bitter antagonisms which cannot help but erupt between all the capitalist powers:
This week the International Monetary Fund and the European commission slashed their forecasts for UK growth. The referendum result had “thrown a spanner in the works” of the global recovery, the IMF said. It now expects the UK economy to grow by 1.3% in 2017, compared with its 2.2% prediction in April. The commission’s projections were, at best, 1.1% growth next year and worst case, a 0.3% contraction.
Both sets of forecasts look optimistic. It seems almost inevitable that the UK is heading for recession. The Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, had clearly signalled that his monetary policy committee (MPC) would cut rates at its July meeting, but it didn’t. Hopefully, its members will make up for this big mistake at their next meeting in August.
Even before the referendum there was evidence of slowing in the UK economy. The Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) report on jobs, for example, had noted a fall in permanent staff placements in June. Further, a survey at the start of July found a collapse in consumer confidence; there has not been a sharper drop since December 1994. Worryingly, the biggest fall was in the expectation of the economic situation over the next 12 months. Early indications from surveys by the Institute of Directors and Deloitte suggest that some businesses are beginning to delay investment projects and postpone recruitment. The latest Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) survey on the housing market has pointed to a significant weakening in expected activity. Here we go again.
The Bank’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, has talked of a “sledgehammer” of measures. Economic policymakers need to get their retaliation in early. It is no good waiting for a house to be entirely engulfed in flames before calling the fire brigade; they need to be called at the first sign of smoke.
There is no chance the data over the next few weeks is going to suddenly improve. The minutes that were released after the MPC’s meeting this month were apocalyptic. The committee members gave lots of reasons why they should try to stimulate the economy but none, as far as I could see, explaining why they didn’t pull the trigger. Dither and more dither: their inaction damages their credibility – which, to be honest, isn’t that high to start with.
Broad hints were given that an economic bazooka was going to be fired next month with a suggestion they were looking at doing a “package of measures”. The likelihood is that this means more quantitative easing (QE), and probably also involves a rate cut by 0.25 or even 0.5 points from the current 0.5%.
This takes time, as the Bank needs permission from the Treasury – which it obviously couldn’t get in time, given the fact that Philip Hammond had been chancellor for less than 24 hours when its decision was released. It is unclear how much QE the MPC will authorise. There is some prospect down the road that rates could even go negative – as they are already in Sweden, Denmark, Hungary, Japan and the eurozone.
.. it takes a long time before the hard data confirms how an economy is performing. Especially hard is working out when a recession has started. We now know that the UK went into recession in April 2008 but the earliest release of the data for that quarter, in July 2008, estimated that the economy had grown 0.2%; the latest estimate we have shows it actually shrank by 0.6%. Policymakers don’t know where they have been, don’t know where they are, and have little idea where they are going.
But there were indicators that did tell the story in 2008, which were largely ignored at the time. These qualitative indicators are timely, being released within a few days of being collected, and they don’t get revised. For example, by the spring of 2008 GfK’s key consumer confidence index was falling fast and was well below its historic average; the Bank of England agents’ monthly scores on investment and employment intentions had also tumbled. Right now, these very same indicators are flashing amber again.
*********
Let’s be clear. The economy is fragile. It was slowing down even before the referendum date was fixed and it is ill-prepared for the shock of Brexit. The UK has a budget deficit of 4% of GDP, a balance of payments deficit of 7% of GDP and the worst recent productivity record of any G7 country bar Italy. The idea that George Osborne “fixed the roof while the sun was shining” is fatuous.
What’s more, it is easy to sketch out the reasons why things are going to be difficult. Traditionally, investment is the swing factor in any economic cycle. When businesses are upbeat about the future, they spend more on new kit, boosting national output. When they are cautious, as they are certain to be now, they mothball spending plans and GDP weakens.
Consumer spending will also be hit by the squeeze on spending power caused by the higher inflation that will result from the impact of the falling pound on the cost of imports. The flipside is that exports become cheaper, which will help boost output, albeit not by much, unless global demand recovers from its current depressed level.
A slowdown, therefore, seems inevitable. The extent and duration of that slowdown will depend on the actions taken by the Bank of England and the Treasury, and how long it takes the government to sketch out what a Brexit Britain is going to look like.
None of this is a surprise. The notion that the economy would struggle after a leave vote was strongly argued during the referendum campaign, but did not carry the day. Hence the view that those who voted for Brexit didn’t understand what was at stake.
Yet the evidence suggests that many of those who voted to leave knew that there would be a short-term hit to the economy, but decided that they were willing to take the risk. They weighed up the pros and cons – as did US investment banks, the CBI and universities – but came up with a different answer.
A speech given last week by Andy Haldane, the chief economist at the Bank, helps explain why so many people were unmoved by George Osborne’s argument that the UK would be voting for a DIY recession if the country opted for Brexit. On a visit to Nottingham, Haldane said he was struck by the fact that for many people, the recession that followed the financial crisis of 2008 had never ended. When he talked about economic recovery, he was stopped in his tracks by a “forest of furrowed brows”. The message was simple: there had been no recovery. As Haldane went on to explain, this was not a case of false consciousness. The economic facts are plain: the economy is simply not delivering for millions of people.
Earnings are 7% above where they were when the recession ended in 2009, but still 5% below the peak once rising prices are taken into account. This is the longest period of flat or falling real wages since the mid 19th century.
UK national wealth, measured by the value of assets such as property and pensions, has increased by an impressive sounding £3tn since 2009, but the gains have been skewed towards those who owned their own homes or had sizeable pension pots.
Only in two UK regions of the UK, London and the south-east, is GDP per head higher than it was before the recession. Everywhere else, it is lower – strikingly so in some parts of the country.
The argument deployed by the remain side, that the only real risk to Britain’s economic renaissance was a vote to leave the EU, worked in the more affluent parts of Britain, where the recovery was tangible, but fell on deaf ears elsewhere.
During the campaign, Osborne put out figures showing that households in the UK would be £4,300 a year worse off on average by 2030 in the event of Brexit, because the economy would be six percentage points smaller. This had zero impact. In part, that might be because voters were rightly dubious about the Treasury’s ability to make such long-term economic forecasts. But it seems that even those who did think that the economy might be a bit smaller by 2030 took the view that the additional six percentage points of GDP would accrue to rich people living inside the M25 and not to them. All the evidence suggests that this was a perfectly logical assumption.
In essence, the referendum divided Britain between those who were doing well out of the status quo and those who weren’t. The latter group wanted change and appear to be willing to risk a recession to get it.
And change there has certainly been. Osborne has been fired, his ludicrous idea of a post-Brexit “punishment” budget has been scrapped, and the idea of balancing the budget by the end of the parliament rightly abandoned. The Treasury has been told to put growth before deficit reduction, a change of tack that is long overdue, and will have to work with a business department that has the crafting of an industrial strategy as part of its remit. A stimulus package will be announced by the Bank next month.
Brexit has also forced the rest of the EU to have a rethink, with a debate under way between those who think that the response should be a drive for closer integration and a more powerful group, which believes that the dream of political union is dead in the water. As in the UK, budgetary rules will be loosened, and not before time.
None of this should disguise the enormity of the challenges ahead. But Britain’s economy is dysfunctional and needs to be fixed. The same applies to the eurozone, only more so. Brexit provides an opportunity to try alternatives to failed policies. There is no guarantee that this opportunity will be seized. However, when the remainers talk of themselves as a persecuted minority and embrace the idea of recession with such relish, they should be aware of how they might sound to the people that Haldane spoke to in Nottingham: pampered, vindictive and unable to accept that they lost.
It is not only “Britain’s economy” which is dysfunctional but capitalism itself of course.
And there are no “alternatives” that will work either outside or inside Europe – capitalism must impose the Slump if it is to survive – far worse is coming than seen so far.
The other side of this brazen Tory parliamentary coup is the unparalleled dirty skulduggery and shameless character assassination sabotage of the “left” Corbynistas by the grovelling, class-collaborating Labourite MPs, staggeringly willing to shoot down the wave of popular support that has temporarily given the entire Labour Party a huge boost, and all backed with a deliberate, carefully coordinated and relentless media onslaught and gross manipulation of middle class opinion.
Both indicate the sheer fearfulness of the British capitalist order and total fragility of the Teedledee-Tweedledum parliamentary racket, used for two centuries to bamboozle the working class and hide the dictatorship of the rich (which alone calls all the shots that actually matter, like Slump imposition, worldwide war bullying, and ever escalated state surveillance and repression).
So near the edge is the crisis that the ruling class cannot tolerate even the half-hearted, ineffectual and completely useless fake-“left”ism of the Corbynites for fear of what might be stirred up behind it once the working class begins to debate questions in earnest.
Even the Corbynites’ grovelling willingness to renege on every one of the “principles” that won a surprise surge of left support last summer is not enough to call off this deliberately organised campaign as Corbyn’s mumbling “team” of opportunists and “left” careerist Labourites has repudiated the Irish republican struggle, “denied” St Peter-style the genocidally oppressed Palestinian fightback, joined the anti-democratic secret state Privy Council, (and sworn allegiance to the parasitical Royalty and its “loyal” military); joined in the demonisation of the Middle Eastern rebellion as “just terrorism”; effectively abandoning anyway hopeless pacifist principles to support, in effect, the vilest warmongering by allowing a “free vote” first on bombing ISIS in Syria, and now another for the Trident nuclear arms renewal.
This thoroughly bourgeois Labour opportunism has always gone along with capitalism including running the entire imperialist racket (all shades of its careerist MPs and officials), the occasional “conscience” vote or “left protest” by the Corbyns and Abbotts providing a cover for this treacherous class collaboration.
It is “liberalism” and reformist leftism which have kept capitalism propped up for “a very long time” and without them as a safety valve and hoodwinking cover for the continued unchallenged rule of capital, the ruling class will be facing the raw hostility of a working class finally seeing the unstoppable degeneracy and collapse of capitalist rule, as it is forced ever downwards into living conditions and levels of exploitation imposed as a norm on the Third world.
And behind the Labourites the fake-“left” props things up even further – most plunging into this deadly fraud, abandoning their “revolutionary principles” just at the point when the crisis has sharpened and when the working class needs total clarity.
Instead it is building up this “democratic left” illusion, which will be a deadly danger to the working class, just as Allende was before and a dozen barbarically overthrown examples since.
The Corbynites most fundamental nonsense is the deliberate pretence that capitalist economic collapse can be solved by “anti-austerity”.
There is no solution while capitalism continues – only world war and Slump.
The great debate and polemic on all these things needs to open up - with building a Leninist party at the core.
Don Hoskins
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