Back issues
No 1504 12th January 2017
Bizarre CIA attack on Trump reveals profound fear and division within ruling class over future as the gigantic Great Catastrophe of monopoly capitalist crisis rolls towards total meltdown and war. Populist bigotry and bellicose trade war is another step to fascism, the open repressive form of the hidden bourgeois dictatorship which always calls the shots. But stripping away even threadbare pretences of bourgeois democracy and reversing past reformist sops which keep the working class quiet, is easier said than done and delivers major lessons in the reality of capitalism and its oncoming Slump collapse. Hysteria from the fake-“left” about fascism as some special “other” form of rule needing to be “stopped” sends all the wrong messages implying what went before is less objectionable and Obama-ism more progressive. Trumpism reflects failure and defeat of already fascist “shock and awe” imperialist onslaught, pushed back and defeated by Third World “jihadist” revolt, and relentless slide of economic disaster. All capitalism must go. Anti-communism is the working class’s biggest enemy. Leninism needed
The fake-“left” of all shades continues to disastrously mislead the working class around the Brexit issue, and over the Donald Trump election in the states.
Either they feed the backward and dangerous nationalist protectionism of the Leave lobby, defending “British” (or “American”) jobs or alternatively they berate the working class with useless and high-handed “anti-racist” moralising and fatuous liberal sloganising to “welcome all immigrants”.
Neither is an answer to the disastrous austerity and collapse facing the working class as monopoly capitalism heads ever deeper into its unfolding Great Catastrophe, dragging the whole world into an ever more obviously fascist Slump disaster and cutthroat international conflict.
Only the overturn of the entire stinking mess of capitalist world domination by the mass working class, led by a party of disciplined conscious revolutionary agitation and theoretical development can possibly overcome the disintegration and chaos which is escalating daily and due to get far worse yet – all the way to Third World War.
Defeat for each and every ruling class, particularly by the working class in its “own country”, is the starting point.
The fighting of the class war to establish workers states, under the firm control of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and from the building of planned socialist society and economies worldwide, is the follow through.
It requires a complete reconsideration and re-assessment of the twentieth century and the giant class achievements of the workers states, constantly challenging the anti-communist brainwashing which cripples the working class struggle (including from much of the poisonous reformist and Trotskyist “left”), while facing up squarely to the revisionist flaws and errors made by these first titanic experiments in socialist society.
But such leadership will not be delivered by the 57 varieties of fake-“leftism”, from the remnants of traditional “Labour Movement” reformist opportunism to the twin facets of “revolutionary” pretension, the Trotskyists and the revisionists.
Just the opposite. In practice all are cowed by the fascist and chauvinist atmosphere that the ruling class is desperate to create as it slides ever deeper into trade war bitterness and cutthroat rivalries, every bourgeoisie trying to undermine and destroy the others to survive the deadly crisis collapse of the world system.
On the one side they directly feed into this trade war hostility and its “anti-foreigner” scapegoating, (or at a minimum, tepidly and opportunistically go along with it, as the Labourites do like the careerist Andy Burnham, and even the Corbynite Labour “left” ineffectuality, with its “some restrictions on migrant workers” havering opportunism).
But these idiocies about “saving British jobs” and “heading off unfair competition”, are no better than the “trade barrier” nonsenses which rapidly ratcheted up international hostilities in the early twentieth century – ending up in two unprecedentedly horrific world wars as the great powers fought it out for influence and the biggest shares of the (collapsing) world markets.
It is not “EU bosses” as such who are the problem for the working class – it is all bosses everywhere, and for every big business imposition from Brussels there is a similar one, or worse, being imposed from the multinationals outside the European boundaries.
Amazon-type warehouse tyrannies, Google and Starbucks tax avoidance, and concessions for big corporations, giant banks and international finance houses, effectively plundering the British (and European) economy and ruthlessly exploiting workers inside and out of the EU, will continue whatever Brexit arrangements are made.
The great network of worldwide (and largely British) tax “havens” was set up over half a century ago, some even under the supposed “great left” Attlee post-war government.
The working class will always lose out and the crisis go unchallenged.
On the other hand, some “left”s wag their fingers at the working class as “racist” because of their quite justified fears about undercut wages and ever declining social resources (seeing the virtual collapse of the NHS this winter for example), and berate them with posturing “principles” built on diversionary liberal single-issue nostrums, from “militant feminism” to “gay (LBGT) rights”, which just ends up driving them into the same disastrous direction.
The racism and chauvinism which has penetrated deep into the working class in the “advanced” and privileged nations over centuries of worldwide exploitation is damaging and deplorable and has to be confronted.
But mere high-handedness and moralising sanctimoniousness offers no useful answers at all about the daily realities and difficulties imposed by austerity.
And it fails to recognise the stubborn mood of rejection by the working class of capitalist “democracy” and elitist manipulation which was signalled by the Brexit vote, and which shows that the crisis is beginning to open up possibilities for the great struggle for revolutionary understanding, by a determined enough party (which means very determined at this stage).
Instead the effect of this petty bourgeois holier-than-thou-ness pushes workers away from serious revolutionary theory, leaving a giant vacuum in mass understanding, to be filled by reaction and backwardness like UKIP, Trumpism or a dozen other flavours of similar primitivism.
It thereby helps the backwardness, albeit indirectly.
Equally, panic about a “new fascism” is the wrong approach, not because that is exactly what is happening but because feeds all kinds of false illusions in “democracy” and reformism by suggesting that there is some special and different character to the crude jingoism, belligerence and sheer nastiness of the Trumps and the assorted nationalist and fascist-minded reactionary movements in Europe.
But they are only a further notch on the ratchet of capitalist torturing war and destruction which has been unrolling for two decades.
It is the whole of capitalism itself which is sliding down the road into depravity, chauvinism and warmongering, and has been overtly doing so from the blitzkrieg on Yugoslavia through endless Middle Eastern warmongering since.
Telling the working class to “vote for Hillary” (or Labour opportunism) after the eight years of drone assassinations, continuing war destruction of Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan, endless anti-Russian provocations, and unclosed Guantánamo and other torture centres by the Obama presidency, is just as treacherous as feeding anti-Mexican chauvinism.
And votes for the pseudo-socialist “left” Bernie Sanders were no better, advocating the same trade war protectionism as Trump and then calling for a Clinton vote anyway.
What all this useless “left” posturing does above all is avoid any mention of the real and only cause of the devastating austerity and decline facing workers everywhere, including in the “richest” of countries like the US, the EU nations and Britain itself.
That is the epochal crisis failure of the entire production for private profit system.
Even where a few groups offer some academic account of the crisis (including “explanations” of Marx’s Capital etc), the real living revolutionary implications are always evaded, most especially around the warmongering chaos created in the Middle East where all the “left”s capitulate to the “war on terror” meaninglessness which is the central excuse and lying “justification” for imperialist blitzkreig and terrorising.
Their “condemnations” of the great wave of terrorist and jihadist upheaval, the early if still confused signs of world anti-imperialist turmoil are craven treachery, putting them on the same side as the imperialist blitzkrieging.
But this turmoil is driven by the Great Catastrophe of capitalist collapse, as long analysed and consistently warned about only by Leninist politics, and now confirmed by its eruption into the open since the globalised credit failures of 2008.
Despite a temporary lull from the insane inflationary money printing of Quantitative Easing, and the hype about supposed “recovery” the entire outmoded private profit system continues to head for massively intensified cutthroat battles for shrinking and collapsing world markets.
Whole industries and in fact entire countries are already on the edge of utter disaster and bankruptcy, such as Brazil, Greece, Venezuela, Spain, Portugal and Italy and far worse is to come.
The endlessly exploited Third World has already been facing the additional savagery of developing slump conditions, and so too does much of the working class everywhere as euphemistically named “austerity” has been imposed. Even the bourgeois press occasionally shows the impact here and there in the odd article (without grasping or explaining the full significance or tying it to other developments):
globalisation is a two-way street. At one end there’s the factory worker thrown on the scrapheap because it is cheaper to outsource production to a low-wage country. At the other there are workers making the trainers and the T-shirts. And many of them are children who should be playing with toys rather than making them...children as young as 10 were working 45-hour weeks.
That, though, is the reality according to a new report on child labour and education in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The report by Maria Quattri and Kevin Watkins for UK thinktank, the Overseas Development Institute, found child labour rife in the slums, in part because families were desperate for the extra income...and because the poor quality of education meant dropout rates were high.
Dhaka is one of the world’s fastest growing mega cities. Migration from rural areas to the cities has been a big part of Bangla-desh’s economic development, but urbanisation has been accompanied by rapid growth in slums.
It found a high incidence of children working from the ages of six to 14, with an average rate of 15% from across the eight survey sites. Another 15% were neither in school nor working. The overwhelming majority of working children were out of the school.
[G]lobally agreed rules drawn up by UN body, the International Labour Organisation, allow children from 13 (12 in the poorest countries) to do light work provided it doesn’t affect their attendance at school – up to 14 hours a week.
But the ODI study revealed almost all in the Dhaka slums were in what the ILO classify as child labour, with hazardous work featuring prominently. Almost all were working more than 42 hours a week, with child labour levels rising steadily from 8% at the age of 10 to 45% by 14. Two-thirds of girl child labourers were employed making clothes...Some of these are direct suppliers for foreign brands. They tend to be the bigger operations, but they sub-contract work to a large – less well policed – informal sector.
“First, with over 60% of working girls and 13% of working boys reporting employment in the garment sector, this is the single largest source of employment in our sample. Second, the operations of direct and indirect exporters, and formal and informal suppliers, are deeply integrated. Widespread sub-contracting renders it highly probable that children are producing clothing destined for international supply chains.”
The ODI report found that children are entering the labour market having had on average four years of schooling, typically of a poor quality. Basic literacy and numeracy skills are low, meaning that the children who drop out of school are on course for a life in lowly-paid jobs.
One thing is certain: Bangladesh will pay a price if it fails to crack down on child labour. It is recognised that having a well-educated workforce is vital for economic development, which is why the UN has made universal secondary education one of its sustainable development goals to be achieved by 2030. This won’t happen in Bangladesh (and plenty of other countries)
if child labour was wrong in the London of the 1820s, what makes it right in the Dhaka of the 2010s?
Nothing makes it “right” at all, of course, but without the “superprofits” generated by this slave-level exploitation, which is not new at all and which is even worse in many other countries for adults and children alike (such as on the Sri Lanka tea plantations, Latin American banana farms, and Congolese mines etc etc etc ), even the “austerity” conditions brutally imposed in the “rich” countries since the Crash would be unsustainable.
And the discontent and frustration there, is already reaching the surface, as the latest strike wave indicates and the Brexit vote before that. The memory of city riots five years ago is still fresh too and in the States the turmoil of movements like Black Lives Matter constantly grows:
Nearly a decade after the crash, and nearly four decades into the devastation of Britain’s industrial towns and cities, the UK has become so unequal that it can no longer be talked about as one unitary economy.
...Even while David Cameron and George Osborne were boasting on camera of a record-breaking recovery, on the road I noticed two things: hardly anyone I spoke to outside London and the south-east believed that there was any such recovery; and hardly anyone I interviewed within the M25 believed the recovery was based on much more than house prices and debt. Whatever else we might talk about, those two themes were constant.
Mention recovery in Newport and locals would laugh at you. Mention it in north London and most people would add a seasoning of scepticism, or a jibe about estate agents. But in neither place did people believe the recovery was real – or that it included them.
And Haldane knows this. A week after residents in the Welsh steel town of Port Talbot voted to leave the EU, he gave a speech there called Whose Recovery?. He began by mentioning a visit to community groups in Nottingham where, he noticed, the “language of recovery simply did not fit their facts”. He went on to show why, pulling out one of the most revealing graphs I have seen in any discussion of the post-crash economy.
Putting together official figures and the Bank of England’s own calculations, it looked at regional GDP per head from the capital up to Scotland. And it showed that only two regions of the total 12 were actually richer than they were before the credit crunch. Those two regions were London and the south-east. Nearly everywhere else was poorer than in 2007 – sometimes, as in Northern Ireland, a lot poorer.
... On statistical aggregates the UK is enjoying a recovery. But in reality this has been a recovery for owner-occupiers in London and the south-east. It has locked out those without big assets, such as the young, and those renting in the capital. It has penalised the poor. And it has impoverished those who have been forced on to zero hours or bogus self-employment.
The end result is that the recovery constantly boasted about by the Tories was so partial, so patchy and so dedicated to putting money in the pockets of the already wealthy that it makes a mockery of Theresa May’s speechifying this week about a “shared society”. As the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change argues, it also renders any discussion of unitary issues such as GDP or jobs almost meaningless.
Margaret Thatcher is famous for claiming that “there is no such thing as society”. Cameron’s legacy will be that there is no such thing as an economy – but a series of regional economies with vastly different prospects. A state-subsidised boom for inner London; a neglected pauperism for the Humber.
If there is to be a rebirth of economics and economic policymaking, my guess is it won’t come from within the discipline. It’s more likely to come from a son or daughter of that woman in Newcastle, looking to fix things after realising they’ve been shafted, while others have gained riches simply for being the kids of London homeowners.
There is no “rebirth” for anything while capitalism lasts.
For the moment, the manipulations of QE and reduced interest rates, and lying capitalist economic propaganda may have covered over the worst of the crisis, forcing the burden out onto other weaker countries’ economies (and also onto those which have accumulated huge trade surplus) by devaluing the dollar and the pound, underpaying owed debts thereby and cutting export prices to fire-sale levels to outcompete rival capital, but this will and does only attract retaliation such as Japanese and European QE, and solves nothing – in fact it greatly multiplies the eventual collapse as national public and private domestic debts inexorably rise.
Only by totally destroying massive amounts of the “surplus” capacity clogging the world trade arteries can this production for private profit system hope to revive its long-term fortunes (eventually, and then only after destruction and devastation far beyond anything yet seen in history – almost certainly the onrushing disaster is the terminal crisis of the entire system, now stretched across and penetrating the entire world and rotten ripe for replacement).
World War is the ultimate end point, in a frenzy of chauvinism, hatred and destruction, already long warmed up by the Middle East devastations imposed by Washington (and sidekick the UK) under the lying pretence of “saving the world from terrorism” (which is a result and reaction to imperialist war and oppression not its cause).
But now the target has to be the great rivals for the markets who are “causing all the problems”, the big competition such as the European bloc dominated by Germany, the Japanese, China, and even increasingly, new powers like India, Brazil and Russia.
Monopoly capitalism is desperate to escalate the warmongering atmosphere in the world, by whipping up as much scapegoating, victimisation and chauvinism as possible.
Hence the turn to the crudest nationalist populism, blaming “terrorism”, “foreigners” and “unfair competition” for the chaos, breakdown and destruction, as witnessed ion the rise of extreme right groupings across all the major capitalist countries.
More is discussed below on how far down the road this is to outright “fascism” for what the term is worth; and in fact how much it differs, except in tone, from the bloody warmongering barbarities already inflicted on the world by Washington and its henchmen since the onslaught on Serbia in 1998, the B52 pounding of Afghanistan, the lying and deliberate blitzing of Iraq in 2003 onwards, still continuing 14 years later as Mosul is pounded into a totally flattened urban desert, the destruction and dismembering of once prosperous Libya by nazi-NATO and of Syria by Washington funded or approved proxy civil war, and the gratuitous and utterly barbaric human hell of famine, civilian killing and devastation inflicted on Yemen via the Saudi Arabians (with Western arms and advice).
But it is certainly a deadly trap for the working class to be led into this shallow and philistine chauvinism which can only drag this already barbaric warmongering to new levels.
It is total nonsense to be told by the “Brexiters” that the working class is “getting back” a say in what happens.
What “sovereignty” have they ever had under this fraudulent and hoodwinking system of “parliamentary democracy”?
It is a total stitched up racket, manipulated and controlled a thousand ways by the billionaire controlled media, endless freemasonries (like the Jewish-Zionist conspiracies operating out of the London embassy, just caught on camera by Al Jazeera), swamping advertising, behind-the-scenes influence peddling and clubby “listen old boy” murmurings, gerrymandered boundaries, and big money “contributions” from self-interested fatcats paying for illicit campaigning, and where the choice is anyway only ever between one set of careerist, opportunist and mostly corrupt pocket-lining mountebanks, or another set, all offering only one or other version of capitalism anyway, barely distinguishable from each other and certainly maintaining this ever more unfair and unequal system.
They all lead in the same direction towards intensification of the crisis.
And if there was ever even a hint of real change for the working class, as opposed to the revived and anyway hopelessly ineffectual “left reformist” posing of the Corbynites (and the crew of entryist “lefts” opportunistically riding this latest bandwagon and thereby demonstrating their own bankruptcy) it would be put down with as much ruling class violence and openly dictatorial repression as needed.
The reality of “democracy” as bourgeois dictatorship is increasingly exposed.
This is already intensifying with ever more intrusive surveillance and draconian “anti-extremism” brainwashing and censorship such as the Prevent programme, sold as an “anti-terrorist” measure but in fact part of the endless anti-communism and anti-socialism bullying of the ruling class (which avoids saying outright what the real, communist, target is, for fear of giving the game away).
Alongside go new measures to further arm the police (and outright militarise them in the States), with incidents of sudden shooting like Mark Duggan in Tottenham, and the recent police killing on the M62, now on the rise.
Open warnings of military coup were made recently on TV by Britain’s most senior military generals.
The lessons are all there from the stream of coups and overturns made around the world by imperialist skulduggery throughout the post war period, from the openly-admitted CIA (and British) deposition of “left”-nationalist Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran, and its assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo (where new imperialist skulduggery is being provoked currently), to the infamously brutal torture and massacre coup by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973 against the “legally elected” majority socialist government of revisionist influenced Salvador Allende.
Dozens of other interventions, secret wars and brutal torturing suppressions went before and after as detailed in such useful accounts as historian William Blum’s book America’s Deadly Export - democracy and Ian Cobain’s The History Thieves (which should both be compulsory school reading rather than the anti-communist Animal Farm lies by police and MI5 fink George Orwell) and culminating recently in the 2009 Honduras coup and its death-squad suppressions (tacitly approved, if not instigated by Hillary Clinton and the “progressive” Obama administration) and the 2013 military overturn of the Egyptian Arab Spring spontaneous revolt and its democratically elected president, using CIA-style “colour revolution” methods, whipping up petty bourgeois populism to install the General Sisi regime on a tide of blood and cold-blooded civilian massacres, and the grotesque pro-Western US-funded prison torture and judicial execution repression now in place.
There is no “sovereignty” for as long as capitalism rules.
And equally it is completely wrong and opportunist to tell the working class that their problems are caused by “dumping” of surplus products by the Chinese or indeed anyone else.
This on multiple counts but most all in suggesting that “other people” are producing too much. It is capitalism, all of it, and its anarchic and endless attempts to expand in the hunt for profit which has produced “too much”.
It is only “surplus” anyway (“too much”) because it cannot be sold at a price sufficient to keep the fatcat owners raking in their profits; there is endless human need for steel and everything else, from billions still in poverty.
Their want could easily be satisfied were production to be planned and costed in balance with real needs and without the gratuitous skimming off of a huge slice of the value for the wasteful pampering and indolence of the ultra-rich “owners” and the elaborate and expensive arms industry, capitalist state and security etc that they require to “protect” their gross class privilege.
The demand for “import controls” just lines the working class up with the ruling class, extending the fatal class collaboration which has held the working class back for two centuries, and helped drag it into past war conflicts and the death and destruction of tens of millions, as Marxism has constantly explained, here for example in a polemic against the Socialist Labour Party, (still clinging to this chauvinism nearly two decades on) (EPSR 989 09-0-3-99):
And import controls is the only possible ‘explanation’ for the insoluble conundrum posed by this SLP demand to restore basic industries NOW before even the slightest hint of class war against the present capitalist ruling class for the ownership of the economy and the industries has been mentioned. There is currently world over-production of all these basic commodities. That is why Britain’s industries have been knocked out by cheaper or better trading competition from supposedly cheap-labour international monopoly rivals. So where would revived British production of coal, steel, shipping, and engineering go if there is already a worldwide glut in all these things which is what is causing the slump and the growing mass unemployment in the first place? And the answer is: Import controls. The British economy gets out of its own unemployment crisis by forcing some rival producers somewhere abroad to close down instead.
As any fool knows, of course, this only raises further questions of an even more insuperable or terrifying kind.
If Britain stabs other countries’ coal, steel, and engineering exports in the back, what is then to stop them stabbing other British exports in the back such as textiles, or cars, or computers?
And once these capitalist trade-war cards have been played in full, which in all capitalist history have never led to anything else other than dramatic economic collapse for ALL parties involved in this beggar-thy-neighbour stupidity, - what then stops the still ‘surplus’ labour forces (the unemployed) being driven into uniform to take this trade-war conflict onto the political war-conflict stage, -i.e. an inter-imperialist shooting war, such as alone ended imperialism’s two previous great trade-war crises this century?
Scargillism is preparing the working class to be led into the most appalling and idiotic tyranny imagineable, - putting it into the ideological pocket of its own rotten ruling class on the eve of the most disgraceful devastating crisis and crash that capitalist private ownership has ever inflicted on mankind.
This is the price of Scargillism’s philistine fear of theory and its bureaucratic stifling of discussion and debate. It is a nightmare of demagogic conceit, and its crude populism is shamefully closer to the politics of the National Front than anything else.
Crude and disgusting racist attitudes are being deliberately fostered even more now, against China for example blaming “those people” with all the undertones of past “yellow peril” hatred and contempt derived from the violent imperialist days of the Opium Wars and Western colonialism, now mingled with the anti-communism which is bludgeoned into brains morning, noon and night throughout capitalist society, via every possible cultural avenue from school education to books, TV and cinema “entertainment” and the sophisticated propaganda lies of the media “news” and documentaries.
But we are “against racism” say the “lefts”. The Lalkar/Proletarian which was then part of the SLP, now declares “against such deplorable attitudes” and “does not wish to be associated” with the racism and chauvinism of others who campaigned for Brexit.
But it was still for “leaving Europe”, advancing the soft-headed notion that somehow Britain’s breaking away from the Europe will “weaken imperialism” and therefore constitutes “a step towards socialism”.
Pulling out of one particular bloc of capitalist economies as a separate capitalist economy does not “reduce the capacity of imperialism to exploit the Third World” – it merely weakens that particular bloc. If German capital and its allies are set back, the Japanese, the Americans and others will fill the space.
And what supposed weakening can be achieved which is not anyway part of the deadly rivalries and to-the-death struggle for monopoly dominance built into all of capitalism and rapidly escalating as the Slump bites deeper?
Such la-la fantasies would be – and are – overridden by the deadly effect of the working class inevitably identifying its interests with the local ruling class once it is told another ruling class (the EU in this case) is the problem.
It is the entirety of monopoly capitalism and its vicious competition which has hit a paralysing contradiction, which cannot be escaped from or modified or shifted towards the interests of the working class, but confronts everyone with a social, economic and political conundrum only solvable by a total turning over all class relations.
Such “weakening” is nothing but a total sophistry, a continuation of the revisionist perspective of steady advances and steps towards socialism, capitalism slowly declining ever further.
It is the same old Stalinist notion of “gradually limiting” capitalism which was crystallised in the 1952 Economics Problems analysis by Stalin suggesting that monopoly capitalism was now fatally hamstrung and unable to expand any more, and would steadily be contained (with sufficient “peace struggle”).
It was pure sophistry then and impure opportunism now, nothing but a kind of “revolutionary” reformism (without the revolution needed), the same disarming rubbish which underlies the outright support from the revisionists for such flaky and unreliable bourgeois nationalist dictatorships as Saddam Hussein, Assad and Gaddafi (rather than wanting only the defeat of capitalist skulduggery against them - the revolutionary defeatism line made clear by Lenin in 1917 during the reactionary General Kornilov attack on the new bourgeois regime, when the Bolsheviks stood alongside the treacherous “parliamentary democrat” Kerensky to prevent Tsarist/fascist restoration, while making very clear to the working class that he and his forces should not be trusted further than they could spit).
From outright support for Damascus, there is a short step to condemning all the struggles against Assad etc, and then all “headbanging jihadism” and another to “supporting” therefore, all those suppressing such “terrorism”.
And so by wooden undialectical logic the museum Stalinists arrive at support for the American funded Sisi military dictatorship in Egypt because it attacks the Islamic State allied “jihadists” in the Sinai desert.
And when the nazi-Zionist occupation is attacked by the “headbanging jihadists” as in the latest incident in Jerusalem - what then????:
Four Israeli soldiers, three of them cadets, were killed in Jerusalem on Sunday when a Palestinian attacker driving a truck ploughed into them deliberately, injuring more than a dozen more.
The attack, the deadliest in months, comes after a lull in recent violence between Palestinians and Israelis.
It comes at a time of warnings about growing tensions, not least over Donald Trump’s highly controversial plan to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, and calls from some rightwing Israeli ministers to annex parts of the occupied Palestinian territories.
Police said the dead, three women and a man, were all in their 20s. Among the wounded, three were described as in a serious condition.
The attack took place as a large group of Israeli soldiers visited a scenic outlook overlooking modern Jerusalem and the Old City, a few blocks from the current US consulate.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said: “We in Jerusalem have just experienced an unprovoked terrorist attack, a murderous attack that claimed the lives of four young Israelis and wounded others. This is part of the same pattern inspired by Islamic State, by Isis, that we saw first in France, then in Germany and now in Jerusalem.”
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, and Palestinians with no known links to Isis have carried out ramming attacks in the past. Palestinian media identified the attacker as Fadi al-Qanbar, a married man in his 20s, who had reportedly previously served time in an Israeli prison.
The driver was shot dead by other soldiers and a tour guide with the group that was hit as the driver reversed back towards the dead and injured.
Israel’s chief of police, Roni Alsheich, described the incident as a terror attack. “You don’t need more than two to three seconds to find a terrorist target. The soldiers at the scene reacted immediately and killed the attacker,” he said.
The incident is the deadliest Palestinian attack in Jerusalem in months. It happened just after the cadets had disembarked from a coach that had brought them to the Armon Hanatziv promenade, a grass-lined stone walkway with a panoramic view of the walled Old City.
Alsheich told reporters he could not rule out the driver of the truck having been motivated by a similar attackon a Berlin Christmas market that killed 12 people last month.
A wave of Palestinian street attacks, including vehicle rammings, has largely slowed but not stopped completely since October 2015. Assaults over the past 15 months have killed at least 37 Israelis and two visiting US citizens.
At least 231 Palestinians have been killed in violence in Israel, the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the same period. Israel says at least 157 of them were assailants in lone attacks often targeting security forces and using rudimentary weapons including kitchen knives. Others died during clashes and protests.
This latest attack is another blow against the monstrous Zionist-fascist colonial occupation which stole the land of an entire indigenous people with terror and ethnic cleansing horrors (see forthcoming “anti-semitism” EPSR book) and will send its morale reeling.
Marxist leadership does not advocate these anarcho-individualist methods but it does say that the Palestinians and all other grotesquely downtrodden and exploited peoples have the right to struggle as they see fit, advising only that it is better to build a scientific Leninist revolutionary understanding for a mass revolutionary struggle.
To “condemn” such heroic self-sacrificing desperate attempts by the appallingly oppressed, endlessly terrorised and blitz-massacred Palestinians is utter betrayal by the “lefts” (across the board) reflecting the same capitulation to bourgeois pressure and ideology that they have all shown since 9/11, a craven capitulation on a par with the Second International’s support for the First World War in 1914 which exposed the opportunism of Labourism and all its variants across Europe, for all time.
The condemnations of the entire emerging Third World struggle as “reactionary Islam” are part and parcel of this same treachery by the “left”, all of it in various forms.
So muddled does all this leave the museum-Stalinists in their ponderous, narrow, straightjacket thinking that they virtually support the Donald Trump election – making their blinkered A to B to C “logical” path from outright “support for Assad” (the first error) to therefore approving the Russian intervention in Syria, which is “progressive” only is as much as it has defeated obvious imperialist funded intrigue such as Aleppo (see last issue of EPSR), but simultaneously plays a reactionary role in attacking “terrorism” in general, lined up with American imperialism and with its own capitalist “Greater Russian” expansionist agenda.
From there it declares Putinism to be “progressive”, a total nonsense which required a 5-page (!!) article of twisted reasoning recently to somehow “prove” that Moscow is no longer a monopoly capitalist counter-revolutionary restoration but a “bourgeois nationalist regime” – the multi-billionaire oligarchs still plundering the giant Russian economy somehow having evaporated and such “nationalism” suddenly acquiring “progressive” status (via more step-by-step-ism).
Putin is a balancing act between the new oligarchism and the still lingering social remnants of the old workers state, a form of Bonapartism that needs constant analysis but these new definitions by the Brarites have about as much meaning as the old Trotskyist anti-Soviet categories of castes and “deformed workers states” which is to say, none.
This brain curdling nonsense then leaves them soft on Trump because for the moment it served his interests to oppose the anti-Russian provocations which the US establishment has been using as its main warmongering propaganda, stung by its setbacks and failures in the Middle East.
But Trumpism most certainly is a lurch deeper into obvious fascism, exactly as warned by the EPSR two decades ago (1015 06-120-99) against all the “left” derision and sneering about “catastrophism”:
The course of unchangeable cut-throat free-market competition is relentlessly back to fascist-slump and war, just as in the 1930s.
What is ‘fascist-slump’ pedantic anti-Marxists will provocatively ask on the fake-’left’? It is the unmistakable pattern of all capitalist crisis where the viciously degenerate and terrified ruling class will ALWAYS get first go at deliberately breaking the mould of ‘normal’ parliamentary politics when they see the likelihood of bourgeois-dictatorship control slipping out of their hands if merely kept genteely in place by the usual ‘democratic’ frauds, - and ALWAYS turning to racist-divisive and xenophobic provocations (and fascist encouragement) to give such mould-breaking some really powerful material to go to work with. The mass unemployment and the angry despair of the inevitable economic slump accompanying capitalist crisis does the rest. As its decadence and demoralised fear grows, the imperialist bourgeoisie will CONSCIOUSLY lay plans for fascist-slump ‘solutions’ to its problems, which inevitably can only end in warmongering chauvinism and inter-imperialist war. Insanity obviously, but that is exactly where bourgeois-capitalist control of civilisation can only end up putrefying towards.
Part of the Trotskyist “left” - like “Left Unity” reformist project set up by the hard-bitten anti-communist Ken Loach (part of a slew of “celebrity” posturing fake-“lefts”) and others, – are now hysterically campaigning against the “turn to fascism” but causing at least as much confusion in doing so as the Stalinists above.
Of course Trumpism’s overt aggression and bellicosity is fascist with many of the “mould breaking” characteristics described - witness the bizarre press conference condemnations, the overt support for extending the Zionist occupation, the trade war aggression.
But declaring this to be a special phenomenon separate to and different from the rest of imperialism and its degeneration is totally to mislead the working class.
All of imperialism has been on a path into warmongering degeneration and all of it has to be overturned.
Suggesting that Trump (or Le Pen, or Alt-Deutschland, or the Finnish nationalists, or the Netherlands' Wilder) are essentially different leaves most of these reformists and the Trots (who have mostly liquidated themselves into the “left” posturing hopelessness of the Corbynite Labour Party) declaring their support for “anything to stop fascism”.
They even advocate votes for the “conventional” rightwing in France to stop the Front Nationale.
But this is a disaster for the working class; Hillary Clinton and Obama have pursued a relentlessly bellicose course anyway for the last eight years for example, destroying at least three countries in the Middle East – advocating support for this monstrousness is to utterly mislead.
It drags the working class back behind the illusions of parliament and “democracy” and “left pressure” just when the “parliamentary democracy” fraud has never been more threadbare, and the failure of reformist change (now seeing the dismantling and deliberate running down of the last blocks of the “welfare state” - pensions, the NHS, social care, public services etc etc) was never more obvious.
This petty bourgeois Trot activism reflects their contempt for revolutionary theory on the one hand and their hostility and hatred of the workers states and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Their anti-communism means their “anti-fascism” is worse than useless.
Worse still their moralising posturing about single-issue causes, further alienates and confuses the struggle.
Declaring Trump to be a monster because he is a “sexist” or “racist” is completely to head the working class away from the real issue of capitalism’s collapse.
Political Correctness posturing is a major part of the problem holding the working class back from understanding the real crisis issues at stake; these “moral” postures and individualistic obsessions distracting and diverting from the critical questions of revolutionary breakdown at best, (which is why bourgeois ideology is so willing to take them up, including Obama and Cameron pushing through “gay marriage”) or even becoming outright tools for reaction, as in the “gay” rights lobbying and disruption of the Palestinian cause and against the world Islamic revolt in general, or in helping escalate the West’s anti-Russian war demonising around the nazi-takeover fostered as a CIA “colour revolution” in the Ukraine for example.
Not only does this deluge of every kind flood minds with nonsense as previously described (EPSR 990 16-03-99):---
Never have so many billions been so brainwashed by such mountains of anti-communist philosophical claptrap, political stunt and distortion, and historical garbage, in such a short space of time. Great waves of new-age reformist nonsense about feminism; ecologism; single-issue ‘human rights’ of all kinds; alternative lifestyles by the hippy busload; new religious gurus every five minutes; health freakery unlimited; popstar and filmstar worship-cultures of obscene fanaticism; drug cultures; sexual liberation of every conceivable variety; etc, etc, etc, have relentlessly flooded human consciousness to distraction just so as to guarantee that the one necessary understanding of society for the modern era, - the Marxist-Leninist science of the class-war basis of all contemporary development and problems, - should remain completely ignored.
-- but these po-faced PCisms are increasingly used to censor the great debate and polemic that must unfold if the working class is to build a revolutionary movement, with reactionary grandstanding about “safe spaces” and “no platforming” blocking off precisely the open discussion that is urgently needed to hammer out issues and develop a clear understanding.
The Trump contempt for such limitations finds some response in the working class (though many hold back) because they sense that this moralising PC posturing is a million miles from any kind answer for the giant crisis being pushed down onto them.
Of course “iconoclasm” by all these neo-fascist reactionary rights is nothing but a giant pretence, (just as Hitler’s “National Socialism” was) fostering the worst demoralised backward attitudes, and challenging nothing about the real source of the crisis, but it also reflects the anger and contempt of masses of people for the failure and collapse which is dragging the world down, which the hopeless “left” pressure prescriptions do not.
Turning to such pretences of “anti-establishment” militancy also reflects a ruling class assessment that the bourgeois democracy racket is now so near to collapse, as an effective way to keep the working class in line, that the old pretences can be torn up, and the direct bourgeois dictatorship aggressiveness of slump ridden capitalism be escalated.
But it is a dangerous game for the ruling class because it abandons all pretence of reform and rationality.
Nazism has only ever been a last ditch mechanism, and one contradictorily expressing the desperation, failure and weakness of the ruling class.
While scapegoating and demonisation has reached new depths of crude and offensive rabble rousing, tapping the vilest of bellicose hostility, and hoping to whip up the crudest anti-communism, it is also clear that the ruling class is fearful about this latest turn.
Its nervousness shows in the astonishing outbreaks of vicious infighting both around the Trump ascendancy and the unprecedented personal attacks in the British ruling class over its Brexit path, including stunning Daily Mail headlines denouncing judges as “enemies of the people” and the public vilification of senior British civil servants by Brexit Tories.
The attacks on Trump by capitalism’s own senior intelligence agency, the CIA, using all the methods of mud-slinging and leaked disinformation for a media stampede, perfected in hundreds of manipulations and intrigues everywhere else in the world to topple uncompliant and disfavoured regimes, but now turned inwards, is incredible.
The EPSR has long speculated that a major element of the crisis would see elements of the ruling class turning on themselves, and even US state components at each others’ throats and so it is now.
Such public infighting is virtually unprecedented for a ruling class which long ago learned to present a united class face to the world, to fool and bamboozle the working class, whatever its own differences.
It also undermines the very foundation of the United States where the authority of the “president” acquires almost mythical quasi-monarchical status once he is elected.
These divisions show the profound differences in the ruling class over how to proceed as the crisis deepens.
Much further analysis is needed but speculatively the differences include those already emerging in the Syrian skulduggery where part of the establishment wanted to continue trying to overturn the Damascus regime, using manipulated and bought “rebels” and another part thought this a disastrous strategy which was unnecessarily causing jihadist anti-imperialist “blowback” such as ISIS.
Again speculatively, there are differences over escalating the tensions with Russian oligarchism - instead seeing China and its huge economic power and competition to be the main “enemy” and hostility with Russia at the same time to be biting off too much at one time.
The heavy handed trade war aggression from Trumpism is also causing major tensions with major allies for example, albeit hidden behind traditional politeness:
Japanese officials have defended Toyota’s contribution to the US economy after Donald Trump threatened to impose a “big border tax” on the carmaker if it went ahead with plans to open a new plant in Mexico.
Trump’s tweet was followed by Toyota shares dropping more than 3% in morning trade in Tokyo on Friday. Shares in Nissan and Honda also fell as unease in Japan grows over the effects Trump’s “America first” economic policy could have on cross-Pacific trade.
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, defended the role Japanese manufacturers and other firms play in the US economy. “Toyota has been aiming to be a good corporate citizen for the United States” he said.
The automaker did not directly address Trump’s reference to the Mexico plant, but pointed to its contribution to the health of the US economy. “With more than $21.9bn direct investment in the US, 10 manufacturing facilities, 1,500 dealerships and 136,000 employees, Toyota looks forward to collaborating with the Trump administration to serve in the best interests of consumers and the automotive industry,” Toyota said in a statement.
The economy, trade and industry minister, Hiroshige Seko, said the carmaker had contributed to the creation of American jobs.
“Japanese automakers are making significant contributions in terms of jobs in the United States,” he told reporters. “It is important that their efforts and results are widely accepted. This is an issue involving a private company but the government is ready to support it.”
Japanese firms employ more than 800,000 people in the US and contributed $78bn to US exports in 2014, according to the US embassy in Tokyo.
Weeks after Trump dismayed Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, with a vow to rip up the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement as soon as he is inaugurated on 20 January, Trump tweeted that Toyota would face high tariffs if it builds its Corolla cars at a new $1bn plant in the Mexican state of Guanajuato.
“Toyota Motor said will build a new plant in Baja, Mexico, to build Corolla cars for US. NO WAY! Build plant in US or pay big border tax.”
The president-elect appeared to confuse Toyota’s existing plant in Baja California with the new factory in Guanajuato, construction on which began in late 2016. The Guanajuato plant will build Corollas and have an annual capacity of 200,000 when it begins production in 2019.
Trump’s outburst came hours after Toyota’s president, Akio Toyoda, said the firm was not planning to reconsider its investment in Mexico.
Speaking just before Trump’s tweet appeared, Toyoda said of the incoming US administration: “I would like to make it an opportunity for us.
“I don’t know yet exactly how, but, regardless of who becomes president, our business is about being good corporate citizens,” he told a gathering of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association in Tokyo.
“And by becoming good corporate citizens we are facing the same goal of making America strong. And so we will continue to do our best.”
Toyota is one of several Japanese carmakers that have been tempted by Mexico’s low labour costs and proximity to the North American market.
Nissan chose Mexico decades ago as the site for its first assembly plant outside Asia, and last year produced 830,000 cars at its two factories there. Honda has two assembly and engine plants in Mexico that together produce 263,000 vehicles a year.
Nissan’s chief executive, Carlos Ghosn, said he was comfortable with Trump’s “America first” credo. “I’m hearing ‘We in the US have a very large market, and we want our fair share of the benefits both in terms of trade and jobs,”’ Bloomberg quoted Ghosn as saying Thursday at the CES 2017 trade show in Las Vegas. “I’m not hearing ‘close the border.’”
Other carmakers appear to have been affected by Trump’s attempts to browbeat them into building vehicles in the US.
Just where this goes is speculative yet, but slightly more certain is that the populist bludgeoning of Mexican jobs stirs up all kinds of difficulties south of the border where potential revolutionary developments have emerged many times in recent decades:
Demonstrators have blockaded highways, looted shops and forced service stations across Mexico to close in a wave of angry protest triggered by a hike of more than 20% in the government-set price of gasoline.
The announcement of the price increase came on 1 January – when long queues of cars were already forming at pumps because national oil giant Pemex was unable to supply all gas stations due to problems with oil refining and fuel shortages caused by theft.
The so-called gasolinazo – as the price hike is known – added insult to injury, and since then, protests have spiraled. Truckers, taxi drivers and irate individuals have blocked the main highways into Mexico City and major thoroughfares in the capital, prompting bus lines to cancel service.
Pemex warned on Tuesday that blockades had created a “critical situation” in at least three Mexican states, while demonstrations in suburban Mexico City turned violent as protesters looted at least two department stores.
Outside one gas station in the centre of the captial, Manuel López, a mechanic, stood defiantly in front of the pumps. Ironically, López does not own a car – he sold it because of Mexico’s ongoing economic downturn – but he said the size and shock of the gasolinazo had sent him into the streets.
“It’s an economic issue,” said López, 24. “Salaries are not very good. If gasoline goes up, it provokes an inflation in the cost of the items we consume daily,” he added, reciting a list of common complaints among Mexicans. “The first thing that gets hit are people’s pocketbooks.”
The timing of the protests could prove particularly troublesome as Mexico prepares for the impact of US president-elect Donald Trump and his promises to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) and build a wall on the northern border – moves economists warn will throw the country into recession.
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The looming Trump administration has already sent the Mexican peso plunging to record lows and threatens to unravel commercial ties so close that more than $1m of merchandise crosses the Mexico-US border every minute.
Throughout the election campaign, Trump trashed Mexico mercilessly, and on Friday, the president-elect repeated his pledge to wall off the border, saying Mexico would repay the construction costs “later”.
His threats could not have come at a worse time for Mexico as the country confronts stalling economic growth and a spate of violent protests over an increase in the government-set gasoline price.
“To @realDonaldTrump : The more jobs you destroy in México, the more immigrants the American people will have. Think a little!” ex-president Felipe Calderón wrote in Twitter.
President Enrique Peña Nieto has appealed for national unity, but his government has struggled for a coherent response to the many challenges it faces. On Wednesday, he named a former finance minister who arranged Trump’s humiliating pre-election visit to Mexico as the country’s new foreign minister – prompting speculation that the president is pinning his hopes on forging a close relationship with Trump’s inner circle.
Meanwhile, economists and Mexican politicians have warned that Trump’s tantrums portend further economic problems as companies shy away from the public shaming that could come with investment in the country.
Federico Estévez, a political science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, said that danger for Mexico was not a potential trade war, but the chilling effect Trump’s words would have on foreign investment.
Much of the foreign direct investment in Mexico has gone to the car industry, which took hold in states such as San Luis Potosí and sent GDP growth in the region soaring above 5% per year.
The industry’s roots in Mexico date back over decades – for years Volkswagen produced the Beetle in the state of Puebla – but the sector has grown steadily since the 1980s, to the point that most of the world’s major automakers have opened plants in the country.
“One of the main advantages automakers have in Mexico is high productivity and low wages in these plants. That’s attractive,” said Harley Shaiken, a geography professor at the University of California at Berkley, who studies the Mexican auto industry. An average car factory worker in Mexico earns around $8 an hour, compared to the $60 an hour that Ford spends on a US employee, including pay and benefits.
“You have mega transnational companies that are able to earn a lot of their investment in Mexico, in part because productivity is high and wages are depressed.”
Officials in San Luis Potosí recite a litany of other advantages which fall to companies that relocate to their region: Mexico has free trade deals with more than 40 countries, major highways and railway lines crisscrossing the region and a location in the geographic heart of Mexico, roughly halfway between Mexico City and the Texas border.
BMW collected incentives worth more than 3.5 billion pesos ($160m) to build in San Luis Potosí, the newsweekly Proceso reported.
Critics say that such deals also include arrangements to curb the influence of unions. One arrangement allows companies to strike an agreement with a union – often aligned with the political party in power – prior to hiring any employees, rather than the employees forming a union selecting their representation.
“All workers that enter the firm have to belong to that union,” said Guillermo Luévano Bustamante, a professor at the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí.
“It’s been a total transformation,” said Arturo Bermúdez, town treasurer in Villa de Reyes, a municipality where people once survived on subsistence agriculture coaxing corn and beans out of the harsh desert landscape.
Before the car plants opened, “maybe 5% of people had a car”, he said. “Now, only 5% don’t have a car.”
But not everyone expresses such enthusiasm – especially as the plunging peso has reduced purchasing power.
“They’re paying the bare minimum, which, for me, is misery,” said Salvador Martínez, a long-haul trucker in Villa de Reyes – where most jobs depend on the auto industry either directly or indirectly. “Gasoline, tortillas, everything increasingly costs more. Everything goes up except salaries.”
And in Villa de Reyes, anger with Trump often appears to be tempered by discontent with Mexico’s politicians. Much of that anger is focused on Peña Nieto himself, who has the lowest approval ratings of any Mexican president in over two decades and has been been at the centre of string of conflict of interest scandals and pushed through economic reforms popular with foreign investors but unpopular at home.
Meanwhile the public vilification of senior British civil servants by the Tories, is equally astonishing, especially on top of the Daily Mail’s populist savaging of senior judges as “enemies of the people”.
Such vicious squabbling in the British ruling class establishment between “loyal” civil servants and Tory ministers, is not some trivial spat over the detail of Brexit negotiations but a symptom of deepening panic in the British ruling class about its very survival.
Hence the astounding bitterness and poisonous character assassinations, carried out not just with the usual “off-the-record” briefings and slimy innuendos of the “everyday” cynical jostling and careeerist manoeuvring for position, but quite openly.
It is totally damaging to the ruling class’s main mechanism for survival, its hoodwinking “democracy” cover for the actual dictatorship of big capital.
The pretence of an “impartial” judiciary and civil service is one of the major props in the giant fraud of bourgeois “democracy” in Britain covering up for a bureaucracy and state drawn almost exclusively from the ruling class and which acts exclusively for those class interests, whatever party has been “elected to power”.
As with Trump this splits reveal total panic and nervousness.
On the surface the argument within the British ruling class is over Brexit and bitter divisions over which is the “winning side”, in the coming conflicts of the deepening trade war.
The ossified British ruling class is desperately trying to decide which of the big capitalist blocs it should line up with for the best prospects in the coming onslaughts; and the agony of deciding is leaving them virtually at each others throats.
The European Union was formed to give the various national bourgeoisies in Europe the economic, technical and cultural weight between them, particularly with Germany at the centre, to counter the huge size and momentum the American economy had gained at the end of the last great violent inter-imperialist sorting out of the Second World War when it emerged far out in front as “top dog”.
Choosing whether to stay with this bloc as the crisis deepens, and necessarily going along with the demands and costs imposed by dominating German capitalism (which is the main driver behind the regulations and requirements of the Brussels bureaucracy, which naturally enough favours German industry and commerce first and foremost), to come out as either a “freelance” power, or lined up with the traditional US ally in the last century, has almost paralysed the British ruling class.
And such is the vicious nature of the Slump competition that even that is not guaranteed:
Donald Trump’s trade chief has urged Britain’s rivals to exploit the “God-given opportunity” of Brexit to steal business from the UK.
Wilbur Ross, the billionaire incoming commerce secretary, has the task of striking a free trade deal with Britain.
His comments will increase fears that the US will seek to take advantage of British isolation after its departure from the European Union.
Brexiteers such as Iain Duncan Smith and Jacob Rees-Mogg have asserted that Britain is well placed to secure a free trade agreement with the US, our largest single trading partner.
However, the remarks from Mr Ross suggest that US negotiators will seek to exploit Brexit uncertainty to tempt financial companies away from London.
Days after the referendum, he urged an audience of Cypriot financiers to strike during the “period of confusion” to draw businesses away from the City.
“I recommend that Cyprus should adopt and immediately announce even more liberal financial service policies than it already has so that it can try to take advantage of the inevitable relocations that will occur during the period of confusion,” he said. Britain’s departure from the EU was a “God-given opportunity ” for the City’s financial rivals, he added, naming Frankfurt and Dublin in particular. This month a Lords committee warned that tens of thousands of City jobs could be lost from next year if banks feared that the UK would lose access to the single market.
A host of other questions are raised too, also splitting the capitalists.
For the big monopoly corporations, the development of world production has now gone so far that all border controls and restrictions are an obstacle; hence anti-Brexit feeling with the bigger fatcats.
For “small business”, the still continuing element of “traditional” capitalism, environmental, safety and employment regulations are a burden to be avoided, and they hate Brussels controls.
Siding with one part or the other is of no advantage to the working class, especially when it only reinforces the notion that “Europe is the problem”.
Inasmuch as this conflict is part of the disintegration of imperialism overall, then Marxist understanding might be that let it roll on - but only if combined with the explanation not only of the need to bring down this capitalist system but of the revolutionary paralysis that the entire system is in, locked in the greatest contradiction of all time (as Marx explains) and unable to go forwards.
These major splits demonstrate a class rule nearly paralysed by the onrushing epochal failure of this eight hundred year old capitalist system, mired in steadily escalating incompetence, gross profiteering, bankruptcy, inequality, and unfairness, but still dragging the entire planet towards a Third Great World War of total devastation rather than give up its power, its greed ridden privilege and obscene luxury and indolence.
It is a system on the way out but only once the working class consciously struggles to overturn it under the leadership of its own party of conscious, trained and coherent cadres in constant struggle to fight for and develop revolutionary understanding, establishing a clear perspective.
The fake-“left” and its refusal to see or explain the unsolvability of capitalism’s Great Catastrophe, its anti-communism and “war on terror” capitulation is the biggest weapon the ruling class has meanwhile.
Leninism is the need and the party to build it.
Don Hoskins
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