Back issues
No 1499 12th October 2016
Trump degenerate but Hillary Clinton as bad, ready to continue endless blitzing, torture and starvation imposed on the Middle East. Syria and Yemen horrors solely imperialist responsibility – desperate to suppress rising world revolt inflamed by its own warmongering action as it squirms to escape the Great Catastrophe of inevitable economic meltdown - wallowing in stagnation and “austerity” viciousness since 2008. Blaming Syria and Russia is Goebbels demonisation of “others”, alongside “immigrants”, “the EU” “Chinese dumping” etc – readying for world war conflict, the only way out capitalism has for its crisis. Syria and Russia not the main target - other capitalist blocs are. Defeat for West backed forces in Syria is welcome but Putin’s crude apeing of the Western “war on terror” in general is part of the problem. Museum Stalinist acrobatic sophistry pretends Moscow oligarchism is “progressive” nationalism so it can capitulate to Western pressure to “condemn terror” and avoid revolutionary conclusions. Leninism vital to rescue world by overthrowing the private profit system
Degeneracy, warmongering depravity, and economic failure of the ruling class grows more glaring every day but still the fake-“left” of all shades refuse to call for the only possible answer to this epochal breakdown, the overturn of the vile capitalist system and a new way socialist forwards under firm working class control.
Instead they flounder and fluster about diversionary PC “principles”, capitulate to bourgeois bullying (over “anti-semitism” charges etc), feed bankrupted illusions in “democracy” and above all, join in with the “condemnation” of the worldwide pre-revolutionary ferment as “unacceptable jihadism”, and facilitating its war drive.
Liberal and fake-“left” “outrage” over Donald Trump’s caught-out sexual remarks 10 years ago underlines the complete hopelessness of their reformist PC posturing as imperialism’s Great Catastrophe unfolds.
It is not Trump’s crudities which are the “really horrifying” prospect, to quote the play-acting “vapours” hypocritically pretended by the monstrous warmonger Hillary Clinton, playing the “feminist” card for all she is worth (not much), it is the actual horrors which have been imposed on the Middle East, Afghanistan, Latin America and Africa during the Bush time and continued by the Obama presidency, and which are due to get far worse yet.
Clinton has been at the forefront, the main foreign affairs representative or central player for the US empire during the first four years of Obama’s sustained illegal drone slaughter and assassinations of alleged “jihadist enemies” (along with crowds of bystanding innocents or weddings parties almost every time), nazi-NATO invasion and devastation of Libya, occupation of Iraq, continued Guantánamo prison injustice and inhumanity, provoked civil war destruction in Syria, and street massacre fascist coups imposed on the world (Honduras, Paraguay, and Egypt among them). Troops still remain in the rubble of Iraq and the slaughter goes on too in Afghanistan:
dozens of people had gathered at the home of Haji Raees, to celebrate his return from the hajj pilgrimage.
At around half past three, a US airstrike hit the guesthouse where male guests were asleep, killing at least 15 people and injuring another 13.
That much seems uncontested. What remains a matter of dispute is the identity of those who died: according to the United Nations, at least 15 of those killed were civilians, but local authorities said the only victims were militants of Islamic State.
A statement from the provincial governor of Nangarhar said 18 Isis members were killed, and that no women or children were among the casualties.
However, when the Guardian visited Jalalabad provincial hospital on Friday, the nine casualties still receiving treatment included a 12-year-old boy and two elderly men.
Dozens of men gathered to visit the injured said all victims were civilian, and produced a list with names of 14 casualties.
“If we were Daesh, do you think we would get together here?” said Obaidullah, a university student, using the Afghan term for Isis.
One man, Zarghun Shah, recalled the incident from his hospital bed where he was recovering from leg wounds, alongside his 12-year-old nephew Bilal. After a night of conversation and feasting on grilled sheep, both had been woken up around 3.30am by the explosion, and were caught in a rain of shrapnel. Bilal was injured in his shoulder and legs. His father was killed.
Achin is one of four districts in Nangarhar province where Isis has gained significant control. Still, locals from Shadal Bazar insisted the militants never operated less than a mile from the village, and there were police checkpoints nearby the house.
“There is no Daesh in the village and every night the police go on patrols,” said another recovering victim, Mohabad Khan, whose lower body was paralyzed when shrapnel hit his spine.
While Nato’s combat mission in Afghanistan is over, the US has a mandate to kill or capture identified Isis or al-Qaida terrorists. While US airstrikes have put Isis on the defensive in Nangarhar, the military releases little information about drone strikes. Almost all are conducted in remote rural areas.
The provincial governor claimed that Haji Raees, the man whose house was targeted, was an Isis “facilitator”. However, villagers disagreed vehemently.
Haji Raees himself survived with minor injuries but was unavailable for interview as he was attending a funeral in the village for his son Hekmatullah, a school principal who was killed in the strike.
At least one other person working with the government security forces was killed, and a driver who had worked for the Red Cross for over a decade was gravely injured, according to villagers.
Moallem Mashoq, district governor, said the US military had not coordinated with local security beforehand.
The US military has yet to admit any wrongdoing. In a statement on Thursday, the US forces in Afghanistan said the incident was under investigation, but added that Isis puts civilians at risk by “deliberately surrounding themselves with civilians and dressing in female attire”.
Clinton remains a key supporter of an administration during which three countries have been reduced to rubble with hundreds of thousands killed and millions with lives destroyed in Libya, Syria and now Yemen, on top of the Iraq and Afghanistan blitzkriegs.
As well, the Palestinian nation has suffered at least two more horrifying genocidal blitzkriegs of the Gaza strip by the Nazi-Zionist occupation, fully backed and still financed with American aid, using such foul and war-crime techniques as high explosive bombings of schools and hospitals, flechette anti-personnel weaponry and bone-eating white phosphorus.
All those “rogue state” nations and the remainder of the entire region have also been kept in permanent terrorised thrall since by the non-stop patrolling of remotely operated aircraft and their long-distance Hellfire missiles, hugely intensified since 2008 from multiple US bases and stooge regime locations (and with British participation too).
This endless war blitzing and degeneration will get far worse yet as capitalism slides further into the greatest slump collapse of all history and the warmongering is eventually stepped up to all out world war.
PC moralising to “stop Trump” will solve nothing; the alternative is at least as bad.
Trump is a foul, racist, rabble-rousing big-mouthed demagogue pretending to challenge the “Washington” establishment by whipping up an atmosphere of violent scapegoating of Islamists, chauvinist isolationism and aggressive threats against China, the Middle East and Mexico among various demonised “threats” to “American interests”.
He is a potential deadly threat to the whole world.
But so is Clinton.
Of course his sexist bragging is repellent, though not essentially for “crudeness” or “lack of respect for women” – how men (and women) might relate to each other and even sexually “objectify” the other is a complex social psychological question not solvable within the screwed-up alienation of capitalist society – but because of the bullying arrogance it displays and use of wealth and power to intimidate, abuse and take advantage.
But making this sexploitation a main issue now misses the point.
It is also one-sided hypocrisy.
Trump is right in this, pointing at the depravity and manipulation over Bill Clinton’s Oval Office depredations, and the lying cover-ups and pretences that followed, including Hillary Clinton’s own dissembling performance of the “forgiving wife” and the vomit-inducing “family prayer breakfast” reconciliation PR to head off his impeachment.
The “left” PC posturing which insists that Clinton is a “better choice” or anyway “least worst” ends up covering over for the moral degeneracy of the entire ruling class and its lying “Christian, happy family stability” image building, (a game Trump also plays in “apologising” and unctuously declaring his “respect for womenkind” etc etc.)
If his stridency is a step down the road to total fascism then so is Hillary Clinton’s.
She is a hardened practitioner, possibly one of the most cynical and clever opportunist capitalist system operators ever, completely in the pocket of big business and Wall Street finance, who has already overseen monstrous devastation, and even smiling with relish too, as when told on a morning TV broadcast that Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi had been killed, barbarically buggered by reactionary “rebels” with a steel blade, or watching and cheering the international law-breaking death-squad raid to summarily execute Osama bin Laden, another war crime.
Furthermore she has been part of the cynical and hoodwinking US electoral process for decades before that, part of the slick machine manipulation of the Democrat “soft cop” side of the Democrat/Republican double-act which monopolises all “politics” in the US and provides the public face for the bourgeois dictatorship which actually runs things (as in every capitalist state).
She is a past master in this most sophisticated of all “democracy” rackets, dominated by billions of dollars spent on TV, sophisticated public relations and advertising lies and brainwashing “persuasion” to build the “family”, “godfearing” and “homely” images that make up the fraudulent content of all bourgeois democracy rackets, permanently hoodwinking and scamming the population with the idea that they somehow have “a say”.
She was a key element in the previous Bill Clinton presidency, once described in the EPSR (No 980 05-01-99) as:
The Clintons Incorporated...a huge big-business racket which Democrat Party big money sank huge investments into a long time ago as a potential future Presidential couple. They are both ruthless grasping opportunist crooks.
Personally they hate each other. Their marriage is a total sham. Their domestic scrapping is closer to the ruthless internal discipline of a mafia ‘family’ demanding accountability for how the ‘family business’ is being managed, than the ups and downs of a man and wife.
That previous Clinton presidency was itself an instigator of massive welfare cuts, and barbarous bombing attacks on Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq where it also imposed the long running sanctions which killed two millions, including half a million children dying from lack of medicine and other necessities.
It was also the inheritor and continuer of the American imperialist domination of the world, achieved in the last two great world war imperialist shake-outs, a domination that has seen non-stop oppression, invasion, blitzkrieg and torture brutality for the entire post-war dollar credit “boom” period (as well continuing four centuries of Western imperialist colonial genocide, slavery, and oppression before that) with over 250 major and lesser interventions to secure the compliance, control and ruthless exploitation of dozens of countries across the entire planet.
Only those which established workers states, the USSR and the post-war socialist and anti-imperialist revolutions it inspired, held it back and defended themselves from the slave-level exploitation imposed throughout the Third World, at least for a time, with a few still continuing like viciously blockaded Cuba, constantly threatened and vilified North Korea, and to a major extent the workers state, albeit revisionist-led, planned economies of China and Vietnam.
But everywhere else there have been dozens of coups, overturns, disruptions, assassinations, occupations and invasions, directly and by the installation of pet stooge reactionary dictatorships, from Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Habré in Chad, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Mobutu in the Congo and the Haiti Papa and Baby Docs, to the Schools of the Americas trained thugs and butchers of most of the rest of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, killing, massacring and repressing on an industrial scale.
Among them are such overwhelming horrors as the (minimum count) one million communists and suspected communists (mostly innocent) brutally killed in the 1965 military takeover massacres in Indonesia (with CIA direction) as shown in the still excellent Act of Killing film; the three million bltitzkrieged and blasted during the Korean War to overturn the peninsula’s post-war wish for communist independence, splitting off the grotesque reactionary stooge South Korea to maintain vast nuclear armed American bases to threaten it (and China) ever since: the four million pulverised and massacred in the Vietnam war, and the endless repression in Central America, including the outright invasion of little socialist Grenada, gruesome mass slaughter in El Salvador and Guatemala, the CIA-plotted military “disappeareds” horrors in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and the indescribable rightwing paramilitary atrocities and butchery imposed on the poor workers and peasantry of Colombia, with mass US-directed and funded bombing of the heroic FARC revolutionary fighters under the lying pretence of a “war on drugs”.
Mexico has been brutalised and driven into the mafia-cartel drug war savagery that kills tens of thousands, with state suppression of any efforts to resist or fight back.
And all that excluding “routine” sweatshop and plantation slavery that leaves tens of millions starving, dying of unnecessary disease or just left in desperate poverty, illiteracy and desperation everywhere.
The cretinous nonsense that Clinton and this record of imperialist savagery would be “preferable” to the “horrifying” manic Trump is the real sin of the PCers and the fake-”left”, continuing to feed illusions in “democracy” to the working class everywhere that somehow choosing one or the other can head off the worst of the oncoming aggression and foulness being generated by the now rapidly spiralling down capitalist crisis.
It is the same disarming fatuousness that sees some of the “lefts” once again calling for a vote in the upcoming French presidential election for the reactionary French Republican Nicolas Sarkozy to “keep out the fascist Marie Le Pen” just as the French Trotskyists wanted to stop her father in 2003 by voting for Chirac.
But to repeat the point made then, it is not what Le Pen (or Trump) stands for which is poisoning life, it is what Sarkozy, or Hollande, Clinton, or even Sanders, stand for which is the problem, the continuation of the entire capitalist system and the pretence that it can be regulated, modified, controlled and reformed.
It cannot, it is imploding into the greatest economic and political catastrophe in all history.
And nothing will stop it, least of all reviving the corpse of already bankrupt parliamentary or presidential “democracy” with yet further promises of change, even as the working class is being driven backwards into ever greater austerity and can see only too well that far worse is to come as wages are slashed, jobs lost, welfare and health services collapsed and uncertainty and desperation mount higher.
None of this is solvable by voting, but only by the revolutionary class war of the working class to completely overturn this foetid and rotting system, constantly dragging the entire world down into ever greater deprivation, while the tiny ruling class grows ever and more grossly rich and powerful, wallowing in obscene indolence and luxury as the world burns, now imposing real “horrors” on the world in its pursuit of a non-stop war “solution” to intractable economic failure.
But far from taking up the fight for this understanding, and struggling for the conscious building of a party to constantly develop the Leninist revolutionary grasp of the material world, vital for the leadership of the working class to finally take power, the “left” has even gone into reverse.
Much of the Trotskyist fakery is now liquidating itself as “entryists” one way or another into the Labour Party and the supposed “left” revival of the Corbynistas, which is increasingly obviously nothing but the same old “left” reformist posturing and opportunist treachery that has always been there, feeding out the illusions that “one day Labour can win the socialist changes that we all want”.
This “left” wing prop, has always been a total lying fraud to help keep the working class pinned to the parliamentary confidence trick and is being given a last-gasp run now to head off the genuinely rising discontent and disillusionment which the “austerity” impositions of the catastrophic world collapse have already generated.
The various remnants of the revisionist wing of the fake-“left” are no better, variously cheering on the Corbyn uplift even as it abandons all its supposed “principles” (thin enough gruel in the first place) like the Eurocommunist CPB does, or promising that it can at least be “won over” if only everyone piles in to “fight for changes” as the increasingly Trotskyist orientated CPGB does in its Weekly Worker.
It is the most unseemly opportunist scrabbling yet from these 57 varieties of pretend-“left” actual anti-communists always looking for another back to ride for their squabbling factionalising, avoiding actually getting on with building revolutionary grasp and leadership themselves.
Even those, mostly museum-Stalinist, “lefts” who still stand aloof, declaring notionally that Labourism is an opportunist fraud, still hold to social-pacifist “left pressure” notions of “restraining” capitalist warmaking, and of “step-by-step” advances towards a supposed eventual socialist nirvana (including the laughable notion that the “break with Europe” is one of those steps, a capitulation to the narrow horizoned Little Englanderism that saturates the petty bourgeois and bureaucratic TUC labour-aristocracy circles).
All these attitudes were on show last weekend for example with the 80th anniversary celebrations of the 1936 Cable Street battle against the Mosleyite Blackshirt movement, heralded by cosy coterie of assorted “lefts” as “the moment the working class stopped Britain becoming fascist”.
It is a comfortable myth.
The battle at the time was a genuine and valuable feat of working-class heroism (and CP-led), but it entrenched misleading ideas ever since, firstly that fascism is something separate which can be fought against within capitalism (thereby falsely implying too that capitalism is “not so bad”) and secondly becoming:
an impossible-to-dislodge prop forever after of the core Revisionist international theoretical nonsense that unrelenting ‘left-reformist’ ‘democratic’ pressure internationally, supporting Moscow’s ‘peaceful coexistence’ determination to allegedly ‘make it hard for imperialism to start new world wars’, would eventually see socialism dropping into the lap of the working class in country after country.
It was crap then, and it would be even worse crap now. The entire Marxist understanding of the essential revolutionary driving force of all historical change got lost in this whole swamp of ‘left reformist pressure’ illusions.(EPSR 1085 17-04-01)
Cable Street did not permanently stop Britain becoming fascist, it simply led the ruling class to conclude that it would be too costly and risky to impose at that moment, given that it had other options of continuing its rule through still widespread illusions in “democracy”, using the still massive super-profit resources brutally extracted from a widespread empire to deliver the “crumbs from the table” that had corrupted great layers of the British working class in the past, and allowed reformist notions to penetrate deeply.
Worldwide, meanwhile the pre-war capitalist system was able to generate as much fascism as was needed (in Germany, Italy etc) to get into the destructive warmongering it required to wipe out the surplus capital clogging its economy in the (real) horrors of 1939-45.
A critical point to make is that “fascism” is not an external to “normal” capitalism imposed by a “takeover” by special fascist parties, (thereby implying some more “reasonable” and normal condition to “democratic” capitalist society that has to be “defended”) nor is it the product of “bad and aggressive imperialism” versus some alleged “good imperialism”, the disastrous illusion fostered by Stalin’s retreats from revolutionary perspectives already extant in the 1930s (around the Spanish civil war and consolidated by Moscow’s leadership after the Second World War).
It emerges from capitalism itself and its crisis as the current filthy depravity of the slaughter imposed by Washington on the Middle East demonstrates, and domestically in the deliberate tapping of working class fears about the real impact of immigration on jobs and services, to stir chauvinist backwardness and to whip up a frenzy of anti-foreigner hatred.
It is capitalist society which generates and encourages an increasingly racist jingoistic atmosphere as the rise of UKIP demonstrated (heavily and deliberately promoted on TV etc with the most favourable of coverage for the “chummy” Nigel Farage).
With Trump in America and even more with the Tories in Britain the turn to vilest of racism and jingoism is not even coming from outside “fascist” parties, but from the mainstream bourgeois parties and culture themselves.
The “new direction” being set by the unelected Teresa May at the Birmingham Tory conference has all the ingredients in embryo of the 1930s Nazi agenda, a populist “new politics” mixing a pretence of “reining in the elites” with backward chauvinist hatred, scapegoated minorities, denunciations of the “left”, and aggressive military warmongering.
Trump’s anti-Washington rhetoric plays the same games.
In the 1930s the lying pretence by ultra-reactionary nationalism was that it would tear up the “old stuffy privilege on behalf of the workers and the poor” to hoodwink and mislead with a pretence of change.
Hitler’s twisted mirror image of communism was National Socialism, or Nazism for short which pilloried “international financiers”, manipulated populist “referendum democracy” and pushed through “state investment” corporatism to rescue the bankrupted private profit economy.
At the same time it whipped-up street aggression against communists and trade unionists, beat-up minorities and built up the military with ever more aggressive war adventures (creating more state spending to do it).
Once in power, the Nazi Brownshirt “worker leaders” were assassinated (in the notorious “night of the long knives”),the SS instigated heavy state surveillance, censorship and repression, and the regime imposed savage work discipline and repression of all class resistance on behalf of the big industrialists and capitalist state forces who had funded it in the background.
May’s backward divisiveness on schools etc, deliberate anti-foreigner scapegoating, and risible posturing about “making companies treat workers fairer” is just the same mixture, especially seen alongside Prevent “anti-extremist” censorship, moves to scrap legal redress for torture or murder by British troops (numerous cases from Iraq and Afghanistan), to encourage war and the ongoing barbaric slaughter imposed by British arms and “technical aid” in Yemen, Libya and Syria, alongside the US forces and interventions.
This degenerate warmongering is the opening of the Third World War conflicts to come.
But is a sign of ruling class weakness that it is needed, and is even more desperate than in the 1930s, when imperialism was facing worldwide collapse after the 1929 Stock Exchange Crash and the Credit Anstalt induced wave of bank failures, and needing urgently to get back into war, corralling a reluctant public opinion despite the “never again” mood which followed the First World War’s industrialised killing.
Hitler’s Germany was a huge industrial power still on the rise, a hemmed in imperialist giant straining against the competition of the other major power WW1 “victors” which had beaten it down; eighty years later the Tories are the spent fag-end of a degenerate and worked-out imperialism that barely got through the two previous world wars (even with US help) and has now completely lost its Empire and most of its competence and capability.
Even Trumpism in the much more powerful United States is a reflection of an almost burnt out system, its call to “make America great again” an expression of historic bankruptcy and failure.
All the “upturn” pretences are so much hogwash, a smoke-and-mirrors illusion built on valueless QE Mickey Mouse credit creation which itself will implode soon.
The 2008 global economic disaster which was hours away from shutting down all ATM cash machines, which Alistair Darling declared would mean a “nuclear winter level of chaos”, has not only not been solved but is about to return with even more devastating consequences as the international bourgeois institutions are warning non-stop:
The International Monetary Fund has urged governments to take action to tackle a record $152tn debt mountain before it triggers a fresh global financial and economic crisis.
Warning that debt levels were not just high but rising, the IMF said it was vital to intervene early in order to mitigate the risks of a repeat of the damaging events that began with the collapse of the US sub-prime housing bubble almost a decade ago.
It said that new research in its half-yearly fiscal monitor covering 113 countries had shown that debt was currently 225% of global GDP, with the private sector responsible for two-thirds of the total.
Vitor Gaspar, the director of the IMF’s fiscal affairs department said: “$152tn is a record high. In places around the world we have excessive debt. In some places we have debt, in particular non-financial corporations’ debt, growing very fast.
“A crucial message from the fiscal monitor is that when private debt is on an unsustainable path it is important to intervene early on in the process to make sure financial crises and recessions can be prevented.”
The IMF says fiscal policy, the power governments have over tax and spending, could help. It suggests government-led programmes to restructure debt and tax breaks to persuade creditors to lengthen repayment periods.
Central banks have borne the brunt of attempts to boost growth for the past eight years, but the IMF said more active use of fiscal policy would provide a better mix. Excessive private debt was making global recovery more difficult and had increased the risk of financial instability. Rapid rises in private debt often led to financial-sector triggered recessions which were longer and deeper than normal downturns.
Gaspar said debt was unevenly spread and concentrated in the advanced countries of the west and some of the big emerging market economies such as China. He advised countries where it posed a risk to financial stability to be proactive and intervene early.
The IMF’s report shows that the overall debt level has not fallen since the financial crisis and recession of 2007-09, despite the fact that the most severe downturn of the post-war era was the consequence of too much reckless borrowing.
Debt levels were high at the end of the second world war, but decades of strong growth and moderate inflation led to a steady decline in debt to GDP ratios.
Gaspar said that the reason debt levels were now higher than they were before the 2007-09 crisis was that economic growth had been so weak. Faster US expansion since the crisis had resulted in a much sharper decline in private indebtedness than in the eurozone, he added.
Some countries, including the UK, have seen a decline in non-financial private sector debt since the world economy fell into recession in 2008. But the IMF expressed concern about the rapid growth of China’s private sector debt to GDP ratio, up 70 percentage points between 2008 and 2015.
“China is so large and the debt of non-financial corporations is growing so fast that it is having significant effects on global trends,” Gaspar said.
*******
Global central bank policymakers have turned world financial markets into a casino with their unprecedented monetary policies, the bond investor Bill Gross has warned.
Gross, who oversees the $1.5bn (£1.2bn) Janus Global Unconstrained Bond Fund, recommended bitcoin and gold for investors who are looking for places to preserve capital.
“Our financial markets have become a Vegas/Macau/Monte Carlo casino, wagering that an unlimited supply of credit generated by central banks can successfully reflate global economies and reinvigorate nominal GDP growth to lower but acceptable norms in today’s highly levered world,” Gross said in his latest investment outlook, titled Doubling Down.
“At some point, investors – leery and indeed weary of receiving negative or near zero returns on their money – may at the margin desert the standard financial complex for higher returning or better yet, less risky alternatives,” Gross said.
He has been lambasting ultra-loose central bank policies for hindering global economies by keeping so-called “zombie” corporations alive and inhibiting “creative destruction”.
For several years, Gross and others have warned that zero and negative interest rates not only fail to provide an easing cushion should recession occur but also destroy capitalism’s business models.
“A commonsensical observation made by yours truly and increasing numbers of economists, Fed members, and corporate CEOs (Jamie Dimon among them) would be that low/negative yields erode and in some cases destroy historical business models which foster savings/investment and ultimately economic growth,” Gross said.
“Our argument is that NIMs (net interest margins) for banks, and the solvency of insurance companies and pension funds with long dated and underfunded liabilities, have been negatively affected and that ultimately, the continuation of current monetary policies will lead to capital destruction as opposed to capital creation.”
Gross said central bankers had fostered a casino-like atmosphere that presented “a Hobson’s Choice, or perhaps a more damaging Sophie’s Choice of participating (or not) in markets previously beyond prior imagination. Investors/savers are now scrappin’ like mongrel dogs for tidbits of return at the zero bound. This cannot end well.”
You can say that again.
But the fake-“left” will not say any such thing.
And until it is said, and the revolutionary implications are drawn, sharply stated and fought for in the working class, the world will continue to hurtle towards the abyss.
Despite the occasional “theoretical” articles on “crisis” academically setting out a wooden version of Marx, (usually to modify it, or denature it and draw its uncompromisingly revolutionary sting) such a perspective remains notably absent in all the rest of their piecemeal analyses.
Not capitalism, but just a “bad” version of it is to blame, “neoliberalism” perhaps, or “unregulated” banking, which just has to be modified and tamed (as repeated for over a century).
The whole Corbynite racket and its forever compromised train of Trot and CP opportunism, even continues to pretend that “austerity” is “just an ideological choice” which can be solved with a bit of “borrowing here” and a “bit of investment there” to “boost industry”.
Who are they kidding? Even if the backward and inefficient British economy were to miraculously take off and outpace such industrial and technological giants as Germany, Japan and even the US itself, to whom would it sell its marvellous new products??
The world is glutted with output which noone can sell, with great lakes of ever accumulating surplus capital (or credit) which noone can invest and with raw materials from iron ore to oil which nobody wants anymore because none of the factories are working.
World prices have plunged and would plunge even more if not masked by massively inflationary Quantitative Easing.
When “black nationalist” careerist fraud Diane Abbott, newly appointed “shadow Home Secretary” sneeringly asks “how will the Tories manage the economy” it is a knowing and calculated lie to the working class, pretending that capitalism can be “managed” by someone else and in their interests to boot.
What a sick trick to pull!!!
The pathetic conference promise of a £10 living wage from John McDonnell instead of the £9 promised a week later by the Tories (!!) sums up the complete ineffectuality and pointlessness of the supposed “left” reformist revival which avoids all the real questions and certainly all the real answers.
Its support is mostly petty bourgeois “left” dismay at the crisis, which does not want to face the revolutionary issues and its purpose is to lull their brains into quiescence.
Any awkward questions reflecting the crisis-driven proletarian debate now erupting are suppressed with PC censorship (as also in the “safe spaces” subjective individualism of the now redundant “Left Unity”).
This repression of vital debate is now even entrenched by “rules” devised ostensibly to counter entirely specious and bullying “anti-Semitism” accusations made by reactionary Zionist influence to head off all discussion of the violent post-war colonialist occupation of Palestine, and to impose the lie that the “state” of “Israel” has a “right to exist”.
Instead of rejecting this fascist mind control outright – the only response it deserves – it actually suits anti-communist Labourism (itself well penetrated with a Zionist-Jewish fifth column) to go along with a pantomime of “rooting out (non-existent) racist anti-semitism” giving its craven opportunism an excuse to “discipline” any emergent veering “too left”.
Hence of course the rich rewards to sinister “civil libertarian” careerist mountebank Shami Chakrabarthi whose Oscar winning performance of an “inquiry” has set up the procedures and who now gets elevated unelected to shadow Attorney-General via a place in the House of Lords(!!!!).
As the popular phrase has it “you couldn’t make it up”!
All this is a deadly delusion danger just as the “democratic socialism” path has always been, most obviously in Salvador Allende’s Chile where failure to educate the working class in the need to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat cost thousands of lives as a CIA programmed coup overturned things, and in many incidents since.
And the biggest question it consciously covers over is the degenerate human hell which continues to be unleashed on the Middle East, and which is the very essence of the unfolding crisis, the means by which dominant US imperialism is attempting to intimidate the rest of the world and prevent any challenges to its bankrupt order and the prelude to the even greater and widespread chaos that crisis-raddled capitalism is heading for.
The crude cynicism and hypocrisy of its warmongering interventions grows more glaring day by day, its Goebbels lying gruesomely illuminated by the latest atrocity in the mostly hidden war in Yemen.
Here British and Americans are not only supplying $billions in hi-tech weaponry directly (unlike the proxy interventions in Syria) but are running the horrific blitzing on behalf of the completely incapable and backward reactionary Saudi Arabian tribal-monarchy whose playboy degeneracy and indolence has always relied on bought-in expertise for everything.
Their corrupt uselessness has been pandered to by the greed-ridden Western bourgeoisie, and kept in power for most of the 20th century, to serve their interests. The bourgeois reports are larded with the usual excuses and platitudes but the sick depravity of it all is barely hidden these days:
Saudi Arabia has agreed to investigate an air raid on a funeral in Yemen that killed 140 people, as the US said its support was not a “blank cheque”.
In one of the deadliest attacks of the country’s civil war, which Saudi Arabia entered in March 2015, airstrikes on Saturday hit a funeral hall packed with thousands of mourners in Yemen’s rebel-held capital, Sana’a. More than 525 people were wounded.
The Saudi-led coalition has not acknowledged responsibility for the attack, even as it announced an investigation, but is the only force with such air power in the conflict.
The White House issued a statement saying it had begun an “immediate review” of its support for Saudi Arabia in Yemen.
The US, like the UK, supplies arms to Saudi Arabia and practical military advice, even though the precise extent of that advice is disputed.
The UN has put the death toll in the war at more than 10,000, many of them civilians. Dozens of emaciated children are also fighting for their lives in Yemen’s hospital wards, as fears grow that the war and a sea blockade are creating famine conditions in the Arabian peninsula’s poorest country.
More than half of Yemen’s 28 million people are already short of food, the UN has said, and children are particularly badly hit, with hundreds of thousands at risk of starvation.
The Saudi-led coalition issued a statement saying it was aware of reports about the “regrettable and painful” bombing of the Great Hall in Sana’a. The coalition expressed its deepest condolences and support to the families of the victims of hostilities in Yemen since 2014.
The statement added: “The coalition confirms that its troops have clear instructions not to target populated area and to avoid civilians. The coalition will immediately investigate this case along with Joint Incidents Assessment Team (JIAT) in Yemen.”
A call for an independent UN-led investigation into general breaches of humanitarian law in the 18-month conflict were last month fended off by Arab states at the Human Rights Council in favour of a compromise that allows the UN to advise a national inquiry.
White House national security council spokesman Ned Simon said: “We are deeply disturbed by reports of [the] airstrike on a funeral hall in Yemen, which, if confirmed, would continue the troubling series of attacks striking Yemeni civilians. US security cooperation with Saudi Arabia is not a blank cheque.
“Even as we assist Saudi Arabia regarding the defence of their territorial integrity, we have and will continue to express our serious concerns about the conflict in Yemen and how it has been waged. In light of this and other recent incidents, we have initiated an immediate review of our already significantly reduced support to the Saudi-led coalition and are prepared to adjust our support so as to better align with US principles, values and interests, including achieving an immediate and durable end to Yemen’s tragic conflict.”
The UK foreign office minister Tobias Ellwood also called for the Saudis to urgently investigate. Reuters quoted Saudi officials as denying any strike and insisting its air force has clear instructions to avoid such targets. The Foreign Office has insisted UK arms export licences to Saudi Arabia do not need to be revoked since there was no serious risk of a breach of humanitarian law.
In an unexpected twist, Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks even though it is thought the deaths were caused by an air raid, and Isis has no access to aircraft.
The dead and wounded from Saturday’s attack include senior military and security officials from the ranks of the Houthi rebels fighting the internationally recognised government of president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, as well as their allies – loyalists of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Ambulances rushed to the site to ferry the wounded to hospitals. In radio broadcasts, the health ministry summoned off-duty doctors and called on residents to donate blood. Rescuers, meanwhile, sifted through the rubble in search of more casualties but a fire hindered their efforts.
The funeral was for Ali al-Rawishan, the father of the interior minister Galal al-Rawishan, an ally of the Houthi movement and Saleh.
Witnesses and medics said a missile hit the hall in the south of the capital, destroying the building.
Saudi Arabia intervened in the conflict in March 2015 to support the Yemeni government against Houthi rebels in control of Sana’a. It has faced repeated accusations that its campaign has breached international humanitarian law and last month the Guardian published data indicating that more than a third of the coalition’s airstrikes had hit civilian sites such as schools, hospitals, markets, mosques and economic infrastructure.
...The issue is embarrassing for the US since it has decried the Russian failure to be more open about its role in the air attack on a UN convoy in Syria a fortnight ago, and it will face allegations of double standards if it allows the Saudis to delay an inquiry.
*********
The United Nations’ chief has demanded accountability for the “appalling conduct” of the war in Yemen amid mounting outrage and calls for an international probe into the bombing of a funeral service over the weekend by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia.
“Aerial attacks by the Saudi-led coalition have already caused immense carnage, and destroyed much of the country’s medical facilities and other vital civilian infrastructure,” Ban Ki-Moon said on Monday. “More broadly, there must be accountability for the appalling conduct of this entire war.”
Earlier, the UN’s human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein had called for an international investigation into war crimes in Yemen, describing the weekend attack that killed more than 100 people and wounded over 600 “outrageous” and warned of a “climate of impunity” surrounding the war.
Just an inquiry? Some tutting over the “conduct” of this monstrous carnage? There’s a “polite” way to do war? Embarrassment?
Last week’s instant finger-pointing over the aid convoy bombing in Allepo, blaming the Syrians and Russians, looks sicker than ever and John Kerry’s absurdity that the Russians ‘don’t care about international law and we do’ even more so.
The West’s “democracy and rule of law” pretences are shot to pieces and nowhere more than with the nasty little US pocket puppet Ban Ki-moon at the United Nations pompously declaiming “bombing hospitals is a war crime”.
So we shall soon see Kerry, Michael Fallon and the Saudis in the dock at the Hague???? Blair?
It took over two years of forensic evidence collection and analysis to allegedly “prove” Malaysian passenger flight M17 was “shot down by separatists using a Russian supplied missile” over eastern Ukraine*.
So how come it needed only one hour to declare definitively that a UN aid convoy into eastern Aleppo was “clearly bombed by Russian and Syrian” planes, when there is no evidence available, no chance to collect it and certainly no way to get a fair-sided witness account from the partisan, Western-backed “anti-government rebels”?
The only analysis possible, from a post-raid video, shows not a bomb raid but more likely a ground attack, as the Russians pointed out, from absence of cratering and intact axles on the vehicles.
Such a false attack would be in line with past provocations by the “rebel” forces, constantly trying to demonise Assad to force the hand of their Western backers to make a direct intervention.
(*Even the Dutch Ukraine inquiry claims are highly suspect, based as they are on an assembly of circumstantial detail, partisan witness accounts and a biased and one sided investigation. It just happened to include on its team, members of the Ukrainian reactionary “government” installed by the CIA-funded and organised 2014 “Orange revolt” pro-imperialist coup, whose openly fascist supporters, operating as freelance killer squads in the region, are one of the main suspects, but excluded the other side, the Russians allegedly in cahoots with working class “rebels”.
And in any case, this demented “war crime” posturing pays no attention to circumstances.
Why, in particular, was a passenger plane deliberately guided by Kiev air traffic control on a flight path above a known war zone where a stream of atrocities and civilian blitzing attacks had been carried out by freelance Nazi groups unleased by the coup-installed reactionary government, and where dozens of military overflights and missile attacks had been made against the “separatists” (or rather the working class anti-Nazi resistance)?.)
The great cloud of Western great lies now includes constant assertions as “fact” that “Russia is carrying out cyber-attacks” (technically unprovable – and the only one ever actually admitted was Western, by the Zionists’ Stuxnet on Iran’s nuclear facilities); that “Assad used chemical weapons” and “started the war”, is “responsible for 95% of the deaths in Syria”.
But the entire fake-“left” has spread total confusion on this centrally important question, either capitulating entirely to the lying imperialist demonisations of Iraq, Libya and now Syria, (and more recently Russia too), and even calling for Western bombing and invasion, as Blairites like the treacherous opportunist Hilary Benn do, and the most off-the-wall Trot groups like the incredibly named Alliance for Workers Liberty, the pro-Zionist reactionaries who even make Trump look moderate on occasion, – or failing to expose its reaction and offering only ineffectual anti-war “protest” bleating which is worse than useless (as Corbyn’s “free vote” on Syrian bombing was).
This is the rankest of opportunism only serving imperialist interests.
Others play the “peoples revolt” card as the anti-theory impressionism of the SWP and others has done, as usual willingly taken in by Western propaganda whenever their petty bourgeois instincts pick up the underlying anti-communist message, however remote it might be, against a “rogue state” victim like Libya or Syria (even though both were a long way from actual communism – picked on more for erratic failure to comply with imperialist needs than any immediate danger of promoting communist understanding).
They now all find themselves lined-up with the demagogue “buffoon” Boris Johnson and the disgusting Labour reactionary Anne Clwyd unbelievably calling for demonstrations (!!) against Assad or the Russians.
Others swing wildly the other way, like the museum-Stalinist Lalkar/Proletarian and the maverick ex-Healyite Trot Socialist Fight group, declaring outright support for the flaky bourgeois nationalist Damascus regime, the Iranian Ayatollahocracy and oligarch-pandering bonapartist Russian interventions backing it up.
This is just as misleading, spreading the illusion that there is a way forwards with Putin’s balancing act between the billionaire gangsters who have plundered and still now exploit Russia into the ground, and the still lingering traditions from 73 years of brilliant socialist achievements, despite his overtly declared hostility to communism and ridiculous cosying up to the feudal backwardness of the restored Russian Orthodox Church, or that the Syrian Ba’athist capitalist nationalism can take the working class there either.
All of them fail to see the overall perspective, and instead analyse this degenerate mess piecemeal, as a “war in Syria”; failing to connect it with the Great Catastrophe, or with Libya, with the huge Egyptian revolt or even Yemen, treated as “another war” with its own causes.
All of them, more significantly play into imperialist hands with their “condemnations” of “terrorism” and “jihadism”, settling definitively on the wrong side, as they have ever since 9/11, taking sides against the turmoil, which for all its chaotic backwardness (not advocated as such by Marxism) is the expression of growing world revolt that will eventually transform into conscious anti-imperialism and the fight for communism, however many setbacks and contradictions its confusion must agonisingly go through initially (not least the sectarian infighting).
To even begin to untangle the seeming intractable confusion of the Syrian war and the Middle East in general, fed by both deliberate Western media confusion, disinformation and muddying of the waters, (disguising and diverting from its degenerate barbarity), it needs to be firmly identified as the responsibility solely and completely of the US led world capitalist system, and its wriggling and squirming to escape its own historic collapse and failure, keeping the war on the boil to habituate the world atmosphere for the ultimate world war that it requires.
That is, it needs a revolutionary world perspective of crisis and failure, not the piecemeal, episodic and limited posturing that “Yemen” is a “war for oil” (in the middle of the greatest glut in history!!!!!!) as the Brarites have declared (returning to their limited and narrow “explanation” of the Iraq war) or that Syria is about “mercenary jihadists created by Washington” (does that include the “jihadist” anti-Zionist Palestinians, the anti-Cairo Sinai “jihadists”, the anti-Western Boko Haram, the anti-Western Al-Shabaab in Somalia, the anti-imperialist fighters in the Philippines? etc etc etc?)
Syria is an extension of the great warmongering which imperialism has been ratcheting up for twenty years, beginning with Bill Clinton’s attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan and the nazi-NATO blitzing of Serbia’s revisionist nationalist remnant of the Yugoslavian workers state, and its fullscale turn to “endless war” with Afghanistan and Iraq.
The purpose has been to bully and intimidate the whole world and pre-emptively head off the huge challenges that would arise once the capitalist crisis broke, which the cannier sections of the by-then bankrupt US ruling class already knew was coming.
While Iraq and its thuggish bourgeois nationalist dictator Saddam Hussein was an easily demonisable victim (already rapped on the knuckles with sanctions for ten years) to gain public opinion support, the real point was for Washington to demonstrate its turn to brutal ruthlessness to the rest of the world, suppressing both anti-imperialist rebelliousness and major inter-imperialist conflict as cutthroat trade and currency war escalated (as especially since 2008).
The George W Bush presidency even made explicit that the US would deal the same way with any regime where it saw even a hint of military and technological development that might “threaten its interests”.
Iraq was just the most suitable of any number of possible “rogue state” targets, almost selected at random as a demonstration piece.
But that was already going sour within a year, the occupation of Baghdad a disaster, Afghanistan an endless quagmire, with the Taliban turned from a one-time anti-communist tool into an anti-American nationalist insurgency and the Middle Eastern rebellion not just unsuppressed but massively escalated, with tens of thousands of new recruits for the jihadist ranks and particularly the anti-American resistance in the central, mostly Sunni, part of Iraq.
War-weariness and bottomless economic costs, essentially brought down the Bush aggression, and Blair too with the British forces humiliated and driven out of Basra despite using the most barbaric brutality and torture to try and suppress the resistance.
But Washington cannot really pull out if it is to maintain its topdog role and has been trapped ever since.
Instead of direct war the use of CIA subversion, and the foulest of “dirty war” death squad techniques (imported from El Salvador etc) were used in Iraq to stir Shia-Sunni sectarian hatreds and try to keep the insurgency from coalescing or uniting against the real enemy.
Obama-ism was supposed to be a new liberalism that would “wind-down” this failed warmongering, and the disastrous impact of its slow defeat at home, rescuing the presidential system which was almost entirely discredited by 2008 (a massive confirmation of the Leninist understanding of defeat for imperialism being the main door-opener for revolutionary change).
But Obama is only another face of imperialism, tapping PC illusions to keep in power, and has been keeping the warmongering going albeit in reduced form, still with troops in Afghanistan and massive bases in Iraq, and a corrupt stooge regime in Baghdad.
Without the debilitating impact of PCism, continued “left” illusion mongering in “democracy”, and above all the craven capitulation of the entire “left” to the “war on terror” idiocy, this new racket would have toppled too.
But the world rebellion has continued to grow, exploding once more in 2011 with the huge Arab Spring revolts, spreading rapidly from Tunisia to giant Egypt, and on into Bahrain and Yemen, toppling Western stooge dictators like Mubarak.
It was a huge spontaneous outburst by millions, which represented a new level of anti-imperialism and shocked the imperialist world order, by now grappling with the full impact of its world economic crisis, still unrolling.
Everything since has been a desperate firefight by imperialism using every dirty trick in the book to try and suppress and contain this potentially enormous upheaval, which threatened to spread rapidly and the more so given Egypt’s overwhelming population and historical and cultural significance and sooner or later starting to find a consciously revolutionary and eventually socialist direction, once it can overcome the disastrous effects of deadening revisionist influence. Unstoppable debate is already stirring.
All the subsequent war horrors have been generated by the need to head off this eruption, to ensure US imperialism’s continued prestige as topdog and intimidate any challenges.
Long laid subversion and counter-revolutionary plans were activated in Libya and Syria, both hated “rogue state” regimes already in Western sights, and both usefully next door to Egypt and therefore able to head it off, triggering bogus “extensions of the Arab Spring”.
These were no such thing but more of the now routine reactionary middle class “colour revolutions” stirred by intelligence agency guidance and coordinated Western media propaganda onslaughts, larded with lurid and always unverified “regime atrocity” stories, to inflate the impact of thin paid-for “crowds of demonstrators”, as obvious from them being directed against “left” bourgeois nationalist regimes rather than the repressive feudal dictatorships of Egypt and the Gulf (and potentially Saudi Arabia).
So thin was this stunt using stooge opportunist petty bourgeois and monarchist flag wavers, that Libya’s “revolt” fell flat on its face, and Obama-ism was forced to invade, hiding behind the pretence it was a “European led” NATO operation which destroyed a thriving and relatively egalitarian society (its ludicrous pretext of “saving Benghazi from a potential massacre” even admitted recently to have been a Goebbels fabrication).
Syria, the second half, caught fire more easily using the sectarianism which the Allawi dominated Assad regime had never really dealt with (and which could not be dealt with while the universal antagonisms of capitalism continue particularly within the arbitrary boundaries set by imperialist colonialism) and which had already been inflamed in next-door Iraq.
Fed with reactionary sheikhdom Gulf and Saudi money and Western arms and sabotage training, this has been the main instigator and perpetrator of violent civil war, as it has been from beginning in 2011, when the artificially stunted up anti-Assad demonstrations were first initiated.
But while Western imperialism has successfully used the backwardness of the religious ideologies to stir the war into existence (as it did initially in Afghanistan) and escalated it with deliberate provocations, sinister special forces and intelligence interventions, and encouragement for the foulest of atrocities and ethnic cleansing, (which imposed appalling horrors on the major cities early on) it has also seen this backfire disastrously, most of all with the breakaway of the ISIS, turned against the West.
Its gruesome terror methods and apocalyptic religious barminess are nothing to do with Marxist understanding but this is now a different phenomenon altogether to the “moderate” Islamist “resistance”, in Aleppo and elsewhere, trained and in the pocket of US imperialism, deliberately set up in bogus opposition stunt after stunt like the “Syrian National Coalition”, and packed with petty bourgeois opportunism looking for a chance to benefit from service to the West.
Like the shifted character of the Taliban, turning from imperialist tool against the Soviet intervention to anti-US occupation movement, this has been transformed dialectically by the impact of imperialist crisis into something else.
The national liberation ambitions of the central Sunni region stretching over both Iraq and Syria which have merged with the earlier Iraqi anti-US occupation fight, and have rejected the imperialist post-World War One borders drawn by the Sykes-Picot secret treaties divvying up the plunder in the Middle East, are as valid as any other.
Its anti-imperialist character is clearest in Iraq where it advanced on and almost took Baghdad, a complete stooge for the US, with a sectarian Shia government installed with US embassy approval, (replacing a former US stooge mired in so much corruption that he was threatening to stir anti-government revolt even among the Shias), driven back by the direct intervention of US forces (and UK bombs and drones) as well as the Iraqis and Iranian Shia forces.
And this all poses huge complications for the grasp of the entire unfolding struggle and its confusions and complexities in the Middle East.
US and Zionist imperialism’s undisputed use of Islamic sectarianism to stir this mess, including initially most of those elements that went on to join ISIS, has gave a new lease of life to the wilder conspiracy theorists and their rotten notions damning the whole rising tide of Third World revolt as just “terrorism” or “jihadism” (usually declared to be “headbanging”).
Such theories, posited particularly after the 9/11 attacks have become accepted dogma in whole swathes of the petty bourgeois and revisionist “left” - unthinkingly trotted out as a comfortable explanation of the world turmoil.
It capitulates entirely to the “war on terror” ideology which is now a mainstay of capitalist stampeding of public opinion behind its war drive, deemed “necessary” to “eliminate this threat to ‘our way of life’”.
The mostly Trotskyist part of the “left” simply condemns the Islamists straight out, declaring them to be another kind of reaction in the world, a completely unscientific notion but one leaving the Trots free to side with imperialism, untroubled by having to stand up to the deluge of stampeded, panicky or vengeful petty bourgeois public opinion which wants to see some “smiting” to make its problems go away – the same scapegoating backwardness now tapped into by Trump who very clearly declares that US policy should concentrate on “destroying ISIS” even if it involves siding with Assad.
But this creates major problems, particularly when the more poisonous of them also want to go along with imperialism’s victimisation of the Assad regime, like the CPGB Weekly Worker, declaring that Assad, Iran and ISIS are all “the enemy”.
And what should be done about it all? - they don’t say, desperate to avoid being seen to side overtly with imperialist bombing and pretending there is some other “viable force” needed to “oppose Russian and American intervention”.
This is the same “perfect revolution” fantasy that always emerges from such Trot or crypto-Trot elements.
What a fraud! And the same applies to the “neither Washington nor Moscow” Trots, hopelessly avoiding drawing any conclusions, behind a pretence of Bolshevik defeatism.
But even were it correct, such a parody of Lenin’s brilliant World War One strategy, requires a clear perspective of revolutionary civil war struggle to defeat your own ruling class, totally missing from these accounts. And it is anyway wrong, not because Russia is not now a counter-revolutionary restoration of billionaire thug oligarch capitalism - it is - but because that is not all it is.
Putin’s state regime also reflects the still extant socialist tradition in much of the population, treading a Bonapartist line to rein in the more overt excess of the oligarchs in order to defend itself against Western skulduggery
That does not make the opposite line correct, as taken by the ponderous museum-Stalinists supporting Syria and Russia as if they are “steps on the road” to socialism.
This fosters disastrous illusions in both the flaky Damascus regime and in Putin – so painfully so that the Lalkar has just published an unbelievably logic bending analysis pretending that Russia is no dominated by oligarchs but has become a “bourgeois nationalist state” - a completely new process of Marxist transition about as valid as the old Trot ideas about a “new caste” ie not at all, designed to get them off the hook of supporting an obviously capitalist regime with a disastrous past record of imperialist rampaging in Chechnya.
More detailed analysis is needed on this but for the moment the point to note is that, like all the other “lefts”, this outright support in turn allows them to join in the “condemnation of terrorism” which both Assad and Putin blame for the chaos - instead of imperialism.
For good measure Lalkar also goes along with the conspiracy theorist notion that all the “terrorism” is anyway a creation of imperialism, and just one of its tools - “mercenaries” according to this view who were acting for the West even when they bombed Paris and Brussels!!!
This allows them to pitch into the general petty bourgeois “condemn them” flow without too obviously standing with imperialism because “clearly” they are “just opposing forces organised by imperialism.”
Convenient. But failing to say why part of the fighting in Syria sees US ground troops allied with the petty bourgeois Kurdish forces of the PYD for example fighting ISIS; or why imperialism has been droning and bombing ISIS in Iraq alongside its stooge Baghdad government.
Leninism calls for defeat for all the forces being used by imperialism to stir this seemingly confused mayhem, including the stooge “moderates” in Aleppo, but without one scrap of political support for Putin or Assad, the line that the Bolsheviks followed in 1917 when Tsarist general Kornilov attacked the bourgeois democratic Kerensky government. Stand against the common enemy but no confidence in Kerensky’s treachery, nor Putin and Assad.
Only revolution can overcome the disastrous slide into world war now underway.
The struggle for Leninism needs to begin.
Don Hoskins
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