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Engraving of Lenin busy studying

Economic & Philosophic Science Review

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.--- V. I. Lenin


Back issues

No 1534 2nd May 2018

Tory Windrush turmoil reflects ruling class fear as the monopoly capitalist crisis plunges, facing the greatest ever collapse despite “upturn” pretence. Jumpiness over setting off internal upheaval overrides crude racist callousness but hypocritical pretence to “see justice done” only underlines the overall poisonous scapegoating being whipped up. Brexit Little Englander chauvinism remains the plan to divert attention from Catastrophe and stir hatred for oncoming hostilities as unstoppable international trade war slide towards World War Three, already destroying country after country with horrifying blitzing like Yemen. Similar fearfulness revealed in “limited” missile strike on Syria despite belligerent bluster and “chemical attack” lies. But capitalism must still whip up war because it has no other way out. Zionism increasingly a spearhead for imperialist aggression. Fake-“left” capitulates to Jewish freemasonry “left anti-semitism“ Goebbels inversion of reality - too scared of lying “racism” claims to call out this Nazi-campaign. Leninism needed

The desperate backpedalling of the Tories over the callous and racist Windrush immigration issue; the bizarre tokenism of the “allied” missile “strike” on Syria (carefully avoiding a fight with “evil” Russians); the upside down Goebbels nonsense of “anti-semitic racism” accusations by ultra-racist Zionists; fearful hesitation by the Bank of England to impose urgently needed anti-inflation interest rises on a badly faltering economy; and the ever deepening splits, antagonisms and intractabilities of Brexit – all indicate a capitalist ruling order, more fearful and paralysed than ever.

The near-senile British ruling class in particular, but those in every other major power too, are terrified by the imminent return of the great Catastrophic collapse of their monopoly capitalist economic system, surfacing in full in the global bank meltdown of 2008 after decades of partial failures (Japan, SE Asia, Mexico, Argentina, etc) and put “on hold” only by massive Quantitative Easing Mickey Mouse money creation, intensified world trade and currency war and relentlessly escalating austerity impositions.

They know the world has seen nothing yet of the full disaster to come once the credit system and the international dollar trading system implodes completely, as it must if the only means to sustain it is by pumping in yet more valueless and ever-mounting inflationary $trillions of additional “paper” (electronic) currency.

Even the IMF, desperately trying to talk up “confidence” around the artificial upturn which the QE fantasy credit has temporarily induced, lets it be known:

Don’t be fooled. That was the simple message from the International Monetary Fund to policymakers as it boosted its forecasts for the global economy for both 2018 and 2019.

Sooner rather than later, the IMF believes, the recovery will peter out.

Growth in the US is being boosted by tax cuts that are not really necessary and could be stoking inflationary pressure. The headwinds to growth in the eurozone – an ageing population and what the IMF sees as a lack of commitment to economic reform – have not eased, but are being countered for now by the European Central Bank’s stimulus policies and by exports to the US.

The fund is concerned that Donald Trump’s tax cuts could eventually add to protectionist pressures. That’s because the US is already running a hefty trade deficit and the cuts will lead to stronger demand and a surge in imports.

By contrast, big exporting nations, such as Germany and China, will see their already large current account surpluses expand further unless they take action to encourage imports.

In the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008-09, global imbalances between surplus and deficit countries were part of the economic landscape, but there are two key differences between then and now.

The first is that the biggest deficit nation – the US – is led by a president prepared to use protectionist policies to reduce those global imbalances. The second is that a decade of unusually weak real income growth across the west has made voters more suspicious of globalisation.

“Anxiety about technological change and globalisation is on the rise and, when combined with wider trade imbalances, could foster a shift toward inward-looking policies, disrupting trade and investment,” the IMF says in its World Economic Outlook.

Not so much euphemistic “disruption” is coming but an economic “nuclear winter” which almost froze the world economy a decade ago as then Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling described it.

It will make the current cutbacks and trade skirmishes look like a picnic.

Total collapse of the dollar is inevitable, with utterly unknown consequences.

What then will be the turmoil and revolt when tens, hundreds, of millions face disaster even in the most “advanced” countries?

The Second World War, which killed a minimum of 50 million and wiped out several major countries - whole regions - triggered gigantic waves of communist and nationalist anti-colonialist revolt.

The coming turmoil will be far more widespread and deep.

And how will the ossified British ruling class, presiding over one of the weakest and least efficient of the major imperialist powers, be able to cope with the massive intensification of cutthroat international competition for markets which will be needed (and is already in train), let alone survive the inevitable degeneration into all out war conflict - World War Three – between all these competing powers, desperate to avoid total bankruptcy and breakdown????

Savage devastation of country after country, as rehearsed already by dominant US imperialism and its sidekicks for nearly three decades, is a mere taste of the horrifying destruction that is the ruling class’s only “way out” of the unsolvable contradictions of its production for private profit system, destroying the “surplus” capital that its insane greed-ridden accumulation produces, and which can find nowhere to invest as the rate of profit falls (see economic box and Marx’s Capital etc).

It is obviously a “solution” only in as much as it obliterates great masses of the production capacity and infrastructure in the world, leaving a space - after great swathes of the world are devastated and the capitalist rivals with them - for the few left standing to start allover, just as in 1945 after Germany and Japan (and the British Empire) were knocked out and the US finally became the “top dog” imperialist power.

For a short few decades “boom” conditions were restored.

But even before the full collapse comes now, nascent revolutionary consequences are apparent across the Third World and in the most desperate communities and poor working class sections in even the “rich countries”, despite appalling confusion and ideological backwardness everywhere due to the vacuum left in world revolutionary leadership by the long decades of revisionist retreat (tragically liquidating the still viable Soviet Union) and still mis-leading tens of millions everywhere, in Europe, and notably in Latin America for example, hampering full conscious revolutionary struggle for the moment.

The Middle East has been in continuous upheaval and revolt for at least three decades, as the crisis has deepened its intractable contradictions, exploding with “terrorist” and “jihadist” rebellion and turmoil, which for all its sectarian confusions, sometimes arbitrary brutality, and attempted manipulation and interference by Western intelligence provocations and finance, is mostly directed at shaking off centuries of imperialist capitalist colonial dominance and exploitation.

It climbed to a new level of mass popular revolt and hatred in the Arab Spring with millions on Cairo’s streets, and continues to seethe beneath the barbaric suppression imposed ever since.

For the moment it has been held down with even more brutality through reestablished fascist dictatorship in Egypt, the deliberately fomented civil war destruction of Libya and Syria, and the horrifying slaughter imposed on Yemen by the backward feudalism and capitalist stoogery in Saudi Arabia, and endlessly on the Palestinians by the Jewish-fascist colonialist occupation of their country since 1948 (as further discussed below).

Elsewhere there is Catholic backed reactionary disruption killing many in the Congo, trying to topple the left-orientated government of Joseph Kabila (with new capitalist disinformation campaigns starting up again just now).

Turmoil in the Philippines and Indonesia is constantly on the point of breaking through, held down by crude repression like that of demagogic fascist “strongman” Rodrigo Duterte and his egging on of informal and state police death squad vigilantism, killing thousands of alleged “drug dealers” and just users (but in reality suppressing and intimidating the poor), alongside outright anti-communist and anti-Islamist civil wars.

Political lynching VenezuelaAnd the crudest CIA subversion, electoral and populist manipulation, street provocations and “legal coups” have been underway in Latin America to disrupt, sabotage and devastate the slew of left orientated governments and their reforms which made up the Bolivarian “revolution” (a misnomer in Marxist science as it has never seen the complete taking of power by the working class, being mostly militant left nationalist reformism at best).

From Paraguay and Argentina to Nicaragua and Brazil, the bourgeoisie and its US helpers have also whipped-up rightwing violence where it can be instigated, as in Venezuela and currently against the pale reformist version of the 1980s Sandinista revolution which came back into power in Nicaragua alongside the other “left” movements at the turn of the century, inspired by the successes of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela particularly.

But the pressure is growing towards explosion point in “metropolitan” (rich) Europe too, particularly on the poorer fringes such as Greece, already tasting the disaster of bank failures when the cash machines were virtually shut down or strictly limited, and riven by endless strikes against desperate poverty, and now spreading into France for example currently thrown into anti-austerity general strike and industrial turmoil.

The British ruling class, hovering half inside and half out of the European monopoly trading bloc and split down the middle in desperation over where it can find some kind of economic shelter from the oncoming trade war hurricanes, is increasingly looking like one of the weakest links too, as the despairing former Blairite economic pundit Will Hutton bemoans:

In any other world there would be national soul searching. Britain’s economic growth rate over the past 12 months is half its average over the previous 25 years – and set to deteriorate further. Investment is stagnating. Mortgage approvals in March slumped by almost 21%. Car output for the domestic market has dropped in the same month by 13%, for export by 12%. These are dramatic numbers.

To drive the point home, on Friday we learned that in the first three months of the year, Britain grew at its slowest rate for five years. One comforting explanation is that the “beast from the east” hit construction. But dig a little deeper, and the cold snap also prompted a surge in demand for electricity and gas. As the Office for National Statistics observed, the weather alone explains little of the setback.

Output from manufacturing and services was just idling in January and February before an ominous gathering slide in many areas in March. This should be sounding alarm bells everywhere – it is plainly why Bank of England governor Mark Carney signalled that an interest rate rise slated for next month may be deferred, and why the pound was sold so aggressively after the news. If there had not been a world boom over the last two years, it is clear that the UK would be hovering on the brink of a recession; indeed, as the world economy falters in the months ahead, there is now a real prospect of just that.

If you are a passionate Brexiter, this is just some frictional difficulty before the British economy moves to the sunlit uplands, riding the boom in the fast-growing economies of Asia as it does trade deals aplenty. After all, Remoaners don’t draw attention to unemployment falling to a 40-year low, the companies who threatened to leave instead of committing to the UK, and the ongoing strength of our high-technology sectors.

It’s true that unemployment is hearteningly low. But unemployment is what economists call a lagging indicator – the last statistic to turn sour in any recession. It reflects what economic conditions were twelve months ago. More importantly, it is no longer the sole proxy for labour market health. Since the financial crisis, real wages have fallen by a stunning 10%. Over the last generation, the UK has become the global leader in creating low-paid, low-skill, casualised work. In any three-year period, such is the churn in the labour market that a third of the workforce find themselves in poverty. Without either strong trade unions or a burgeoning knowledge economy, the condition of working life is one of profound hardship and stress.

Is there good news to indicate where new growth might originate? Very little. As for hi-tech sectors, Britain had real hopes of growing a £40bn space industry by 2030 – of which a cornerstone was more than our fair share in the great EU space projects Galileo and Copernicus. Now we are to be excluded from Galileo, and in particular the encryption technologies that drive the highly effective system for moving government data securely via the new generation of Galileo satellites. It is a tragic loss.

The hits keep coming. The EU used its collective muscle to negotiate an even-handed open skies policy with the US; outside the EU, the US is insisting on a deal that hits British airlines very hard. Who should be surprised? British scientific research was expecting to win £10bn more than the UK government contributed to the EU science budget between 2020 and 2027. That prospect is dead, too. Nor can there be any certainty about what Britain’s trade relationships will be in future.

At present, Britain is the linchpin of the world’s greatest free trade area: the 27 member states of the EU, another 31 countries with whom free trade agreements are signed and operational, and another 30 with provisional deals about to be put in place. This global EU is the citadel and heart of the world’s free trading system, setting standards, from the production of chemicals to the use of data, that the rest of the world follows. There is zero chance that Britain can reproduce this on its own. Everyone, outside the closed world of the Brexit advocates, knows that rupturing these relationships and vandalising our hi-tech sector is supreme folly.

Thus the business world is, at best, watching and waiting; at worst, actively taking measures to protect itself by moving activity to mainland Europe. Figures released by the OECD on Friday show inward investment into Britain slumped by $181bn over the last year; outward investment has boomed by $120bn. This is one of the biggest one-year turnarounds by any country ever recorded. But it is scarcely reported.

Put all this together and Britain faces the gravest economic crisis since the war.

The growth model on which we have relied – inward investment booming because Britain is the heart of the world’s greatest free-trade area, married to emergent strengths in high technology dependent on access to that market – is being shattered.

There is nothing to put in its place – but our vastly overpriced housing market depends on it continuing. If it does not, it could have the severest of consequences. Faced with this challenge, our national debate is disgracefully frivolous.

The “pigs would fly” fancy that “if we had only stayed in Europe things would be better” somewhat detracts from this analysis but the real point to draw from it is the disastrous prospects caused by international economic failure and the reality of the Slump which will hammer the British working class whether it is in Europe or outside it, the only difference being which group of rapacious bankers, hedge funds and corporations get their paws on the few remnants of the British economy still left to plunder.

It is this background of total worldwide crisis disintegration and the deliberate chauvinism and xenophobia being whipped up as the international tensions escalate unstoppably, that is vital to keep in mind in analysing the racist savagery exposed by the Windrush upheaval, and the much more widespread chauvinism and Little Englanderism being stirred up by Brexit (demonstrating that racism is not limited by skin-colour).

As the quite deliberate appointment of an Asian Tory politician Sajid Javid as Home Secretary to replace the torpedoed Amber Rudd now demonstrates, the scandal involves much more than simple crude racism which is usually blamed by the liberal, reformist Labourite and fake-“revolutionary left” and demands a much more thoughtful and deep response than simple “kick out racism” campaigns.

Just the opposite, such sloganising in isolation helps veil the class realities and exploitation of capitalist society and the vital understanding for the working class that it is only by taking up the fight against capitalism itself (the best, in fact only serious, way to bring about “unite and fight”) that an end can be made to racist divisions and the many other tribalist divisions and antagonisms constantly regenerated by the very nature of a society built on individualist competition and dog-eat-dog dominance through treading on everyone else’s faces to reach the top.

As the EPSR has many times pointed out (eg issues 1132-1133-1134-1136), seeing racism as primary cause to be dealt with in order to climb up to revolutionary politics (endlessly deferred in practice by the fake-“left”), rather than as a symptom and consequence of capitalist exploitation itself, lets capitalism off the hook and obscures the real responsibility for hatreds and conflicts at all levels in society, and therefore obscures the real and only possible solution.

That can only be overturning the entire foul and degenerate profiteering system to establish socialism under workers control.

And blaming white workers for the backward protective clannish attitudes engendered all the time by living within imperialism and reinforced by the fears of collapse and slump does nothing to help educate and develop the Marxist class war understanding required either; it just drives them away into the arms of the fascists, hard and “soft” (such as UKIP and even the Tories).

Worse still, as the archive item on p5 describes, black campaigning per se, not only does not sort out the class issues but can lead to the development of a black bourgeoisie which simply continues and perpetuates the class exploitation that suppresses the great majority whatever their colour.

The warmongering savagery of the “black” Obama presidency which was essentially continuous with the Bush blitzkriegers before (in a White House with its own share of black faces at the very top, such as Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell) makes the point; so too the corrupt nonsense around the ANC in post-apartheid South Africa, and so too the various Caribbean and Asian MP spokespeople now put forwards by both the Tories and the Labour opportunists themselves, all part of an elite which supports and continues the capitalist system responsible for oppression.

By hiding away capitalism’s sole responsibility for all such divisiveness they all demonstrate that they are part of the problem however much they declaim against racism, apologise, or advocate even the “leftest” of reforms as explained in EPSR 1071 for example (09-01-01):

In a country like Britain, it is undoubtedly the case that the vast majority of racist prejudice is inflicted by whites on non-whites. And of course it can never be challenged enough, – even precisely in those terms.

But it is ridiculously misleading to pretend that identifying the worst or the most racism as being the fault of white racism, makes any progress at all, towards solving the problem. It strikes a completely harmful tone of moral self-righteousness, that is all. This is not only utterly useless for solving the problem. It completely conceals the real problem.

Only superficially does racism have any colour, – majority whites against minority blacks or Asians; majority Asians against minority whites or blacks; majority blacks against minority Asians or whites, – – all of which can actually be found in localised bad circumstances in Britain itself, as well as in the world at large, and all of which would always inevitably erupt under any circumstances all over the world once international economic slump conditions get a good grip.

Racism is essentially an inevitable spin-off from class-war mentality which not only can never disappear but can only gain relentlessly in intensity, measured on a worldwide scale, all the time that monopoly-imperialist private ownership remains the basic international economic structure on the planet.

Racism will continue to flourish, occasionally flaring up into worse epidemics than at other times depending on economic conditions, etc, – and all the time susceptible to being turned into a significant openly political football, – for as long as capitalism lasts.

Paradoxically, only going all the way with class-war mentality provides deliverance. Only a completely communist philosophy can be objectively world-community-enthusiastic enough to grasp how ultimately damaging to everyone on earth is injury of any kind to any people on earth, negating the only true concept of freedom for everyone in a material world. If some people are not ‘free’ somewhere, (from whatever is the problem), then in a world of never-ending material repercussions, no one is eventually ‘free’ anywhere.

Genuine 100% worldwide economic cooperation is the obvious only sensible way to run the planet, just as it is the obviously only sensible way that human communities have ever found for working at all harmoniously together (taking a genuinely healthy and enlightened family unit as the obvious starting point).

The best efforts of communist philosophy so far (the socialist camp of workers states, when it existed) is the best stab at this until now, but a far more fully combative and wholesome communist philosophy needs to take the world on from those ultimately revisionist failings of the Stalin era.

And the struggle to get to a new world communist movement is, of course, at the same time the only genuinely anti-racist movement possible as well. Only revolutionaries are genuinely active anti-racists. Only thoroughgoing revolutionary philosophy meaningfully exposes the sources of race-prejudice to the core and explains to mankind the only way for civilisation to proceed towards genuine world harmony. Supposed ‘anti-racist’ support for the free-market system is a contradiction in terms.

That being the case, it is precisely politically-correct ‘anti-racist’ reformism which is the next biggest problem here, after capitalism itself. This Blairite liberalism populates a fantasy world which consists of nothing but the sickest hypocrisy. The cruellest deceit in the whole history of capitalist-born race-prejudice is the phrase “any black person can now become a police chief, a top eye surgeon, or even prime minister”, etc, etc.

The reality is that 80% of the black and Asian population will always be working class, just like 80% of the white population. And while any individual, from any background, can in theory become anything they like, – the fact that 80% of the population will always be working class, – guaranteed nothing in life except what some hirer of labour-power is prepared to pay them, and constantly subject to being fired again at any whim or ‘economic downturn’, etc, – makes it certain that class-war resentments in all directions will never die for as long as capitalism lasts. 20 black people out of every 100 will continue to make it as police chiefs, eye surgeons, judges, and prime ministers. But 80 black people out of every 100 will continue to always suffer the humiliation of not making it in society, of being continuously subject to hire and fire, and to all the obvious resentments (class resentments spilling over into racist resentments) in both directions which such a contradictory ‘freedom’ system (privately-owned monopoly imperialism) must inevitably always lead to, latent in ‘good’ times, and explosively bad in times of economic difficulty.

The Windrush issue has caught out and further exposed the callousness and arrogant indifference of the ruling class, and certainly weakens further the desperate cobbled together Tory minority government, but if treated as an isolated issue is also open to being used by the ruling class to distract attention from the bigger questions.

The inhumane “anti-immigrant” treatment of this post-war generation – and their descendants – is obviously to be called out, as numerous case studies by the bourgeois press have brought to light.

Undoubtedly the small-minded, vicious, bureaucratic callousness of their persecution and rejection over years and the Kafka-like refusal to pay attention to the justice of their cause is saturated in racist attitudes by the capitalist state built on centuries of colonialist tyranny and contempt.

But much more is involved that the simple racism which permeates capitalist society.

Oddly enough it is likely to be as much incompetence and sheer bureaucratic insensitivity which has created the problem of the “Windrush generation”.

And the rush to redress the situation, while demonstrating the fearfulness of the ruling class, also demonstrates that this system can accommodate such single issue upheavals and reformist demands when it has to (as it has done with gay-LBGT rights and feminism etc).

If anything, despite the brutal treatment of many Windrushers, it is clear the ruling class in Britain has been trying to make at least cosmetic accommodation to some sections of the black and Caribbean population in the wake of massive social upheavals, riots and popular campaigns over past decades including the Brixton, Bristol and Liverpool riots of the 1980s, the explosiveness of the Tottenham estates and the huge and dogged campaign around the brutal murder of Stephen Lawrence, culminating the MacPherson report of 1998 (see archive piece below).

The sudden cynical ruling class Tory pretence to be “shocked, shocked I tell you” about Windrush after years of deliberately ignoring the ruination of hundreds of lives is another aspect of a ruling class trying to bend in the wind, desperate to head off a hostility that they know could go all the way to a revolutionary understanding otherwise.

Goebbels propaganda does not get more peculiar than to turn round on your very own policies and denounce them, as the bizarre statement from (now former) Home Secretary Amber Rudd and her predecessor Theresa May herself have done, announcing “measures to deal with the injustices”.

Additionally, one of the most sickening ruling class hypocrisies of the past month for example has been the announcement of a special Stephen Lawrence commemoration day and the prominent presence of Theresa May, author of the “hostile atmosphere” anti-immigrant policies in the first place, at the memorial service on the 25th anniversary of his foul murder.

As the three part BBC 2 documentary on the long and dogged struggle of Doreen Lawrence for justice brought out, even now the attitudes in the police which were supposedly shaken up, remain blind to much of the racism still there, but the official story is maintained of “new brooms” and “institutional change”.

But it is probably true that the treatment of the Windrush victims and the communities around them is an unintended error.

But that only emphasises the much greater turn to scapegoating and blame-mongering underway across the board, being deliberately fomented as part of the entire Brexit issue in particular and by the international trade war developments in general.

In their rush to stampede as much small-minded and poisonous xenophobic hatred as they can, particularly anti-Islamic anti-”jihadist” scapegoating, the ruling class managed to catch in the net a section of the population least likely to be “a problem” since it is one saturated in old-fashioned “Empire loyalty”.

As many bourgeois press accounts have said, many of this original population are “more British than the British” with Union Jacks and pictures of the Royal Family on the walls; it is no surprise that the most reactionary of all the Tories, Jacob Rees-Mogg should pop-up in the middle of a Channel Four News vox pop debate alongside Labour MP David Lammy to defend them and denounce Amber Rudd.

The strategy here is to tap back into the deep contamination of the British population with past imperialist attitudes of “superiority”, inculcated over 200 years of the “Empire” and running especially through the petty bourgeoisie but also deep into the working class including, ironically, sections with colonial “British citizenship”, turning this outwards into hostility against “others” and into blaming “foreigners”.

Playing up, and “rectifying the injustice” against those “entitled” to be here, essentially reinforces the differentiation against “those who came later” or who are “illegal” and strengthens the atmosphere of clannishness and petty nationalism which has been stirred up especially around the Brexit campaign.

As declared above, the use of racism by the ruling class, deliberately playing the race card, is ultimately colour blind, as many incidents are demonstrating at present:

A Polish man was chased by a group of 20 men and beaten with a nailed plank of wood in a “racially aggravated assault” in Hull, police have said.

The 20-year-old victim is being treated in hospital following the attack on a crime-hit housing estate north of the city.

Friends of the man, who has not been named, said they were chased by 20 men after being overheard speaking Polish.

One friend said the victim and three others, all from eastern Europe, ran off when the men began to shout and throw bottles at them at about 7.30pm on Sunday.

He told the Hull Daily Mail: “They then started to chase after us, so we did the only thing we could and ran. We got to about three doors down from where one of us lived, and then they caught one of us.

“They were hitting him with a plank of wood with nails in it. He was on the floor for 25 minutes before the ambulance came, and he was in hospital overnight. He is recovering at home now.”

The racist attack follows repeated warnings...Three people were stabbed in less than a month on the estate between February and March, including a 21-year-old woman who was killed.

The friend of the Polish victim attacked on Sunday said he was scared to leave his home and that it was not the first time the group had been racially abused. He said he had been trying to move out of Orchard Park for more than six months.

“I have been living here for five or six years. Then the gangs started to realise I was Polish, and I have had problems ever since. It is definitely getting worse.”

Hull North Labour MP Diana Johnson said...“I want our local police have the resources, powers and support they need to catch and prosecute the criminals and to deter young people from getting involved in gang culture.”

But what she did not say is that such attacks are inextricably linked to the capitalist crisis and the deliberate fostering of xenophobic hatred, part of the ruling class’s great diversion from its collapse, to stampede the working class into the warmongering to come.

The race card and the whole use of immigration has been a cynical and twisted tool of ruling class manipulation for centuries from the slave trade onwards, using it to undercut wages and conditions, and stir up communal tensions and then whipping up emotive “anti-immigration” when needed, to split and divide workers.

But Labourite opportunism has just as much played with the race card, directly declaring immigration “a problem” at times or pretending to be anti-racist while boosting the very fatcat capitalism which is responsible.

Corbynite Labourism plays the game too, particularly through supporting Brexit which is a complete disaster for the working class precisely because it panders to the very worst Little Englander nationalism, (blaming outsiders for economic disaster and demanding “import control” which will only feed Trump and other’s trade war demands) and sustains embedded illusions about “sovereignty” and “taking back control” which continue to tie workers back to the parliamentary “democracy” hoodwinking racket.

In practice so too does the slew of fake-“lefts” who support Corbynism as some kind of “advance” for the working class (a reformist nonsense) or have even embedded themselves inside Labour as “entryists”, giving it de facto support whatever the “differences” they allege they have with it, and whatever pretences of “changing it from the inside”.

Labour is a thoroughly bourgeois party as more than a century of its existence and around a dozen periods of government have taught the working class who have become increasingly cynically dismissive of it decade by decade, even if that is expressed largely as a general contempt for the parliamentary racket and even for all politics in general, for the moment.

Labour is not going to be “won over” to revolution, and the great uplifting of Corbynism is simply playing the same treacherous role that “left” Labourism has always played - Corbyn included – of giving some supposed “socialist” credibility to the increasingly played out racket.

And even if Corbynism were genuinely “aiming for socialism” instead of being the utterly opportunist “left cover” it is, it would still be a total disaster for the working class, just as was the hombre sincero Salvador Allende in Chile who led the working class up the garden path of “democratically achieved” socialism and straight onto the guns of Augosto Pinochet’s CIA backed military coup in 1973.

No better is the notion of winning an “anti-Brexit” position which would change nothing either, since the problem of the world crisis is not solved that way and the argument simply adds to the noise of the entire Brexit dispute, which for the working class is nothing but a gigantic distraction, capitalism’s great diversion to stop workers seeing the need to overturn it.

Additionally, as the EPSR has often discussed, the counter to the anti-immigrant feeling being inflamed is not to demand a “welcome for all immigrants” (No 1057 12-09-00):

Without an understanding of world imperialist crisis and the inevitability of communist revolutions everywhere, trying to mobilise the current working-class mentality to eschew blind-alley race-prejudice with the slogan: “Unconditionally oppose all immigration controls” is worse than useless. This barminess, widely supported in the Trot press, is the fruit of posturing that ‘moral principles’ should, and can, rule politics.

This is subjective-idealist nonsense at its worst. The fascist victimisation of asylum-seekers is odious and dangerous filth that working-class communities must be fought-with over, as hard as possible. But it is just as big and loony a diversion to try to persuade workers to go round saying “Asylum-seekers welcome here” instead. Economic migrants are not all necessarily petty-bourgeois-minded opportunists, eager to embrace all the West’s crap values, but the chances of them being outstanding communists and determined revolutionaries are even less likely.

What people fed up with life in Turkey/Albania/Bangladesh/Nigeria/etc, really need to be doing is taking up the fight for revolution there, not helping swell the illusion of the ‘good life’ under Western imperialism, and distracting local anti-capitalist struggles with welfare demands, which are more pure reformism.

Not for ages after world socialist revolution will a planned new planetary order be sufficiently well-established to start creating a genuine ‘freedom for all to move and live where they want’. And it can only create more confusion than clarity to adopt it now as a slogan supposedly disruptive of capitalism. What the world proletariat needs the ruling class off its back for is not “for everyone to be free to do what they like” but for the working class to be free to build a strong, affluent, secure, educated society where voluntary mutual discipline can eventually resolve all difficulties with the best reasoned argument available.

The idea that this will be automatic upon the overthrow of the world imperialist system is insane. As all past revolutions have proved, there would initially ‘automatically’ be much total anarchy. A new party-led proletarian dictatorship order is the only possibility for preventing world imperialist counter-revolution and for getting planned socialist reconstruction under way.

But the posturing “moral outrage” responses of the Labourites, and the fake-“left” entryists bolstering them up are totally dishonest anyway, firstly because virtually the whole of Labourism has “played the immigration card” too, which lies behind this gross injustice and failure, and more importantly because they do nothing to explain and challenge the great onrushing capitalist crisis.

The Corbynites, through their spokeswoman Diane Abbott, a prime example of petty bourgeois opportunism, has been declaring that “of course illegal immigration has to be controlled”. And what about this “loyal” exchange in the House of Commons:

Theresa May and Corbyn start by congratulating the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the arrival of their third child.

May says MPs will want to mark the anniversary of Stephen Lawrence’s death. Corbyn says Lawrence’s parents, Doreen and Neville, fought for years to get justice. Institutional racism must be driven out wherever it occurs, he says.

Turning to the Windrush generation, he says there is a lack of trust. Can May confirm those denied work and benefits will be fully compensated?

May agrees with Corbyn about stamping out racism “in every form”. On Windrush, she repeats the offer made by Amber Rudd. There will be a compensation scheme, she says; everyone knows the Windrush generation are British.

Corbyn hits back that it is not an act of generosity to give people rights that are theirs already. He says an internal Home Office memo from May’s time as home secretary talked about creating a hostile environment and the possible dangers. Why did May ignore it?

May says Liam Byrne talked about creating a hostile environment for illegal immigrants when he was a shadow immigration minister. He is now on the Labour frontbench, she says.

Corbyn says May ignored warnings from Labour MPs about the impact her policies would have on the Windrush generation.

She says Corbyn is talking about policies aimed at people here illegally. The Windrush case relates to people here legally. She quotes various measures taken by Labour to crack down on illegal immigration....

He says there would be no compensation if it were not for campaigning by Labour MPs. He says the withdrawal of legal aid made it harder for migrants to challenge government policy. Can May tell us the hostile environment is over and the immigration targets will be scrapped?

May says dealing with people who are here illegally is different from the Windrush cases. She says in 2013 the then shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, said much stronger action was needed by government to bring illegal immigration down. She repeats the Windrush generation being here legally.

...It may well be the case that there is more public support for May than Labour MPs (or Guardian readers) would care to admit when she says the public do want to see the government crack down on illegal immigration.

But, over all, May was on the defensive and her effort to defend herself against Corbyn by quoting Byrne and Cooper against him was a strategy doomed to failure. You won’t find “controls on immigration” mugs on sale at Labour HQ any more.

But you will find Byrne is “on the front bench” and the grovelling to “royalty” underlining yet another capitulation to join the many others making clear the “left” Labourites’ complete subservience to capitalism.

None of these is more craven (and more clearly reveals the complete bowing to imperialism that characterises all Labourism) than the disgusting “apologising” to the increasingly strident “anti-semitism” demonisation campaign being run by the “Jewish community” in Britain (and elsewhere in Europe); a campaign which by its very topsy-turvy inverted demonisation proves many of the points made against it.

Goebbels would have been proud of this demented propaganda onslaught borrowing the best fascist trick of accusing your enemy of the crimes that you are perpetrating yourself, in this case throwing the allegation of “racism” against those who oppose the Zionist monstrosity of “Israel” grotesquely squatting over the land of the Palestinian people and genocidally oppressing and slaughtering them for decade after decade.

Nothing is the world is more racist that the “state” of “Israel” and its revived imperialist colonialism.

To give any credence to it at all is to capitulate to the most concentrated expression of vile racism and oppression in the modern world, namely this land-theft occupation of another people’s territory.

The very nature of a “state” founded on the principle that its people are “chosen by God” and therefore superior to all others and entitled to dismiss them as lesser peoples cannot be but racist in ideology.

And the practical reality is even more so in both domestic repression inside its colonialist occupation (lyingly recognised as a valid “state” by the imperialist “international community” and its stooge instrument of the United Nations) and in the external aggression against the Palestinians, the wider Arab world and the Middle East in general.

Every aspect of the legal and political superstructure of land grab imposition in the heart of the Middle East confirms it, with privileges for the Jews in every aspect of life (property ownership, civic rights, education, health etc etc) compared to second class status for non-Jews living inside “Israel”, and brutal apartheid oppression of the Palestinians themselves around its borders and their endless steady dispossession of even the tiny scraps of land remaining to them (with constant harassment, tree cutting, well-poisoning, and outright violence).

Endless slaughter of the PalestiniansWorst of all is the hellhole incarceration of more than two million in the tiny enclave of the Gaza strip, under permanent siege conditions for over a decade, and repeatedly blitzkrieged every few years on top of the constant bombings, shellings, and general intimidation all the time.

And now of course the turkey-shoot organised sniper killing and maiming of thousands of unarmed protestors demonstrating against their inhuman concentration camp besiegement and against the dispossession of the land on the anniversary of the Naqba ethnic cleansing which pushed them out of their own homes, farms, and cities 70 years ago.

And this Jewish freemasonry wants to accuse others of racism!!!!

What is needed is for these twisted fascist nonsenses to be thrown right back in the faces of this reactionary Jewish freemasonry and its conspiracy to demonise and rubbish the “left” (deliberately organised and part coordinated by undercover manipulation out of the Zionist “Israeli” Embassy, as covert filming showed last year) to be vigorously and continuously denounced.

The entire CIA/Zionist campaign needs exposing.

But instead of making the obvious point that there is a sound reason for the worldwide hatred of “Israel” because of its fascist massacres, brutal oppression and smiting, for its own ends, on behalf of imperialist domination of the Middle East, and increasingly as the spearhead for oncoming world war, the Labourites and the “left” capitulate to this nonsense by accepting that there is such a thing as “left anti-semitism”, from which an entire demonising edifice of supposed “secret racism” is built.

Setting up “inquiries” and “investigations” to “root out” this alleged “hidden or unconscious reaction” has simply given credence to the entire preposterous smear campaign, and ammunition to all kinds of reactionaries including the mass of Blairite and semi-Blairites still filling the Labour ranks and looking for anything to sabotage even the most tepid moves “leftward”.

By giving in on this (and secretly relieved to be able to do so) the Corbynites made glaringly clear their own collusion with the entire capitalist racket, using the cover of righteous “anti-racism”.

It is another black mark against “single issue” politics.

But the rest of the fake-“left” is just as exposed through its huffing and puffing about “anti-Zionism” being “different” to anti-semitism.

Much analysis has been put out, including now infamous (but correct) “Hitler supported Zionism” comments from “left” Labour opportunist Ken Livingstone, to show that Zionism was different to Jewish sensibilities in the early twentieth century, was deliberately created by imperialism itself, had a thoroughly reactionary mentality which colluded with imperialism at multiple levels, including German Nazism, and was effectively anti-semitic itself in its hostility to all those unwilling to support its colonialist agenda.

Some of this has excellently researched historical detail - a new booklet from the Lalkar/Proletarian Stalinists for example (save for ignoring Stalin’s role in recognising “Israel”!!).

But it all equally ends up conceding the same point, that supposedly there still is unjustified “anti-semitism” around which has to be eschewed, denounced and expelled.

It says there is a “bad side” to Jewish Israel which is Zionist, to be opposed, or even “overthrown” as the CPGB’s Weekly Worker says via the many articles of Tony Greenstein, but that hostility to Jews in general is “racist”.

But all this is simply covering up a fundamental question; that of the existence of “Israel” at all and its nature as an artificial colonialist implant established by military oppression and ethnic cleansing by terror gang massacres and intimidation.

By suggesting that “Zionism” is the enemy it is implied that any more generalised anti-Jewish hostility is “racism”.

The notion is smuggled in of there being possible a “reasonable and peaceful” Israel; look it says, there are even many anti-Zionist Jews.

Two falsehoods are put forwards therefore; that an “Israel” can exist in Palestine, and that most of the Jewish diaspora is different to and separate from the “reactionary Zionists”.

But it is the very existence of “Israel” through dispossession of the Palestinians which is the never-ending cause of the anti-Jewish feeling in the world, and no “nice” version is possible. Material conditions make the struggle for the return of their lands never ending for the Palestinians (and the more so in a modern epoch of anti-colonialism) and stopping any further expansion by the fanatical settlers and “greater Israel” Zionists, will not change that.

So the necessity for endless smiting will not change either.

The “anti-Zionists” are simply fearful that fanatics will jeopardise the future of “Israel” if things are pushed “too far” - “let us be content with what we have already taken” is the message.

But this is only a soft version of the colonialist supremacy.

Embedded in this is the notion that Jewishness outside “Israel” is essentially different to Zionism; but the differentiation is in essence only one of policy.

The essential issue is that of supporting the existence of “Israel” either actively or passively and the overwhelming majority of the Jewish freemasonry in the world (95% at least) does exactly that - the number who actively oppose it and call for its defeat and the return of all Palestinian land and possessions is negligible. Thus as the EPSR has long said (eg No 1209 18-11-03) [and see Zionism and "anti-Semitism" book Vol 20 due shortly - ed]:

The pressure now is going to be put on the anti-imperialist struggle everywhere to come to a decision at long last about whether there is any worthwhile meaning any more in distinguishing the international Jewish freemasonry from the international Zionist freemasonry, or whether continuing to do so just plays into the deliberate political-confusion hands of reactionaries like Sachs to try to double slander the worldwide anti-Israel movement as both “terrorist” and as “racist”.

Since the armed Jewish colonisation of Palestine began, what further use is the old distinction between “Jew” and “Zionist” since the number of Jews who do not believe in their right to a homeland in “Israel” are no longer worth counting as a significant international or domestic factor in politics.

All that the vast majority of “anti-Zionist” Jews want to do is separate themselves from the vicious Nazi-aggression tactics of the non-stop warmongering which has created their “Israeli national home” from the very beginning.

But an utterly negligible number come out to agitate for an end to the foul nonsense of an “Israel” altogether.

In which case “Jew” and “Zionist” are now completely interchangeable.

And the point is reinforced by the way the “Jewish community” has rallied around the demonisation campaign, standing in the Zionist anti-”left” demonstrations alongside the most reactionary elements of British capitalist society from Ian Paisley Jnr and leading rightwing Tories, to the vilest of the Blairite opportunists.

Clearly some of the anti-Jewish hostility which Zionist aggression has created does find expression in crude anti-semitic attacks superficially resembling those stirred by feudal and capitalist scapegoating in the past.

But sanctimonious condemnations again reflect the cravenness of the fake-“left”, in just the way that they have gone along with imperialism’s denunciation of “terrorism” in general.

Anti-Westerner, anti-American or anti-Jewish, these are all expressions of the rising hatred of imperialism and if they are not the answer to its oppression, then let revolutionary leadership be built and fought for which can provide the answers.

Ending this Jewish occupation and ending the imperialism which uses and supports its endless smiting oppression to keep its boot on the neck of the Middle East and the Third World and which is now using it to escalate the world war aggression to a new level against Iran and Syria.

The Palestinians, the Arabs around them and others like the Iranians are entitled to fight back in every way they can, including every kind of “terrorism” and let there be defeat after defeat for this monstrous occupation, and for the imperialism it stooges for.

Every blow will not only be cheered on by the masses of the planet but will shift entrenched attitudes and perspectives, opening up the door for a return to revolutionary communist understanding and the fight to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat everywhere, under which the planet can build a rational cooperative socialist world.

Build Leninism.

Jacob Tremain

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Letter

Denaturing the Communist Manifesto

There was a front page lead story in the Financial Times - Life section recently, headlined: ‘What would Marx write today?’. It detailed what Marx (apparently!) would have said in The Communist Manifesto if he were writing it today.

The writers acknowledge how relevant the Communist Manifesto is today. In fact they say they would leave 75% of it untouched -

‘However much communism has been rightly [of course!] discredited, a great deal of the argument remains startlingly relevant today. Historians have said it is most important document of the 19 century.’

The article then goes on, predictably, to strip the Manifesto of revolutionary meaning.Communist Manifesto - original

The piece is telling in two respects. First that the writers actually feel the need to address the issue of Marxism in the FT in the first place - after all haven’t we previously been told, for the past 60 years, that Marx is both an irrelevant relic, a sort of philosophical Nostradamus, and more importantly, has been proved wrong on fundamental socio-economic issues.

Secondly, and following on from that, Marxism is still apparently important enough for the article to need to neutralise Marx - in this instance by rewriting the Communist Manifesto (!), telling us what Marx would really say today, given that he was a pragmatist who adjusted his theories to the historic situation.

First the pieces’ ‘concerns’.......…

‘As we write in our manifesto: 'the complete power of the Haves is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating wealth and influence , deriving from ruthless and cynical exploitation by the Haves of the Have-nots. The Haves have never in history held so much advantage over the Have-nots. We are faced with the extraordinary fact that the top 1% of the population hold same resources as the remaining 99%. no social mobility, ...............difficulty of entry to monopoly capitalism......................’

‘As with the manias, panics and crashes of history, the dislocations arising from the financial crisis created new opportunities for the Haves to benefit from the political response. The use and abuse of complex financial innovations - derivatives, credit default swaps etc have extended the financial system beyond its primary purpose of facilitating economic growth, matching borrowers and savers. It has now being used for secondary and more dubious purposes.’

[Of course, the piece could have explained why all the capital washing around the financial system was forced to be diverted into bizarre and risky financial products, rather than productive capacity, in the first place.

The answer, that there is not enough productive capacity in which to invest to generate maximised profit, is never given in any ‘capitalist’ analysis - the world is awash with surplus capital and already has too much production capacity. So, clearly it’s one thing for a bourgeois article to spell out the economic/historical situation, but quite another to accept the cause [capitalism] or solution [revolution].

And now for the disembowelling............…

‘Marx and Engels were revolutionaries but they were also pragmatic - they wanted their ideals to be discussed as real alternatives. Look at their own reflections in 1872, 25 years after the original Communist Manifesto when they wrote. “The practical applications of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and for that reason, no special measure is laid on revolutionary measures”. ’

[So let us tell you what they would have said now!!]

’Left and right alike reject the Communist Manifesto’s arguments on labour and property. Even leaders of so-called communist states embrace markets and decentralisation. Take North Korea, the country that has most resisted capitalism...it has started to encourage entrepreneurship and a formal, if reluctant, acceptance of brand-led marketplaces. ’

’We also think that Marx and Engels would update their views about private property. While the abolition of private property was their most prominent demand, we think they would recognise that Have-Nots have benefited from property rights. Moreover, we argue that stale-held property is problematic, leading to waste and inefficiency and the likelihood of being co-opted by the Haves in our society. As the role of the state has grown, inequality has also grown. And the Have-nots have been the ones who paid for it. Banks have been bailed out, being too big to fail, and public services have suffered when public- private partnerships have failed.....’

The interesting point, however, is not their reinterpretation of Marx, but that they feel compelled to attack it in a more oblique, considered way. Rather than indulge in crude Marx-bashing, there is a need for them to acknowledge the relevance Marxist philosophy and then rewrite it.

In some ways the fear inherent in the piece was similar to that in a much more crudely reactionary Guardian Rafael Behr article. Behr noted how significant it was that ‘worries’ about capitalism were on the agenda at Davos. There was also concern that

‘Millennials are complacent about the benefits of the market, easily seduced by the sirens of anti-capitalism.’

Then there was the Frances Ryan article in the Guardian:

‘If you’ve not been hit by Tory cuts yet, your time may soon be up’.

In other words, the most clear-cut failings of capitalism are no longer felt only by vulnerable sections of the working class.

There is a real fear among the ruling class that many elements of the bourgeoisie too are increasingly affected.

And that could be dangerous....

‘While universal credit will see unprecedented numbers of people experience social security cuts, the ongoing gutting of public services will touch millions more. Last year, the Institute for Government and the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy identified five public services as being at “breaking point’’: hospitals, adult social care, police, prisons and schools. The Local Government Association, meanwhile, points out that council budget cuts will impact everything from road repairs to parks, children’s centres, leisure centres and libraries. Even that stereo typically middle-class concern - bin collections -won‘t be exempt. In short, families who were previously protected from austerity will increasingly see it in the fabric of their lives. ’

Contained within most of these articles is the recognition that it is increasingly difficult to counter growing, popular anti-capitalism with the fall-back scare stories about ‘Soviet, Stalin-was-as bad as Hitler, brutality’. Clearly, despite more than a century of vilification and disparagement, Marxism just won’t go away. And there is now a historical and economic situation where it is becoming increasingly dangerous for the ruling class to ignore capitalism’s most glaring failings, or attempt to gloss over them with threadbare jam-tomorrow promises. More to the point it is becoming more difficult to rubbish Marxism and it’s philosophical relevance today.

There is, for the time being anyway, a majority wing of the ruling class which recognises the need to maintain the notion of a liberal democracy on which to pin its justification for capitalism. But it is faced with a serious problem. At some point it will have to meet any Communist movement head-on, with increasingly blatant facism. But that of course, undermines the whole illusion of democracy. The alternative, if possible, is to undermine it obliquely, and keep the show on the road for as long as possible.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t hurt for much of the bourgeois media to strike a chord of fear into the ruling class - to curb its most obvious excess and keep the balls in the air for that bit longer.

Frank McDuff

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Leaflet - London issue - 4th April 2018

“Left anti-semitism” hype by the Jewish lobby is a sick topsy-turvy Goebbels campaign to divert attention from the worldwide hatred for “Israel”, caused by its endless fascist suppression and genocidal butchery of the Palestinian people. Hostility to Jewish land grab occupation of their land is part of rising anti-imperialism accelerated by capitalism’s deepening unsolvable crisis and nothing to do with vile “racism” allegations. Jewish freemasonry implicated because it supports the false colonialist “state” and participation in this foul stunt confirms its reactionariness. Revolution is the solution

The sickest part of the coordinated “anti-semitism” bourgeois media and political deluge against the “left” is the almost total silence on the latest butchery inflicted by the Zionists on hundreds of Gaza strip residents.

In a week of demented Mccarthyite witchhunting and reactionary hysteria, led by the Tories and a BBC obviously tied to a Zionist lobby agenda, the latest monstrous atrocity has been barely mentioned; as a typical, (and by no means worst) example the hour long Broadcasting House news review on Sunday ran a huge item on the ludicrous made-up notion of “left-wing anti-semitism” without once saying anything about the horrific Palestinian slaughter two days previously.

Yet this cold-blooded killing by heavily armed Zionist “border” soldiery deliberately shooting down a score of unarmed Palestinian protesters, and inflicting injuries on nearly 2000 (!!) more would, all on its own, justify every description of the stinking “Israeli” Jewish occupation as fascist – let alone the 70 years of non-stop, virtually daily violence and intimidation inflicted on this 7 million strong dispossessed people and the regular all-out military onslaughts, killing hundreds or thousands of men, women and children every two or three years (including by the most depraved and illegal methods such as bone-burning white-phosphorus, modern high explosive 1t megabombs, deadly cluster bombs and deliberate anti-personnel weaponry like flechêtte bombs, filled with deadly steel arrows spraying out in all directions).

Blitzkrieg savagery on GazaSo too would the conditions in which nearly two million of these people are forced to live, under constant brutal Zionist enforced siege in their tiny concrete enclave, restricted, humiliated, exploited and starved of even such basics as electricity and clean water, leaving even the sewage system unable to cope – (the sea off Gaza, their only recreation, is like a cess pool), – the hospitals desperate (when they can get any equipment or medicine at all), supplies limited and education and other opportunity suppressed and restricted.

It is a de facto concentration camp and especially for the last ten years of total Zionist blockade (reinforced by the reactionary Egyptian Sisi dictatorship next door).

Conditions for the remainder are little better; for the constantly harassed, intimidated and persecuted West Bank residents, their wells poisoned, trees destroyed, and land (which has never been the best anyway) still being stolen square kilometre by square kilometre by outright fascist settler seizure, killings and violence; for the residents of Jerusalem Zionist land grab used for settlementssteadily forced out of their houses by intimidation, draconian and deliberately oppressive restrictions, demolition orders, planning refusals and wilfully obstructive bureaucracy; for the traditional Bedouin of desert areas, their villages repeatedly destroyed and pastures ethnically cleansed; for the second-class Arab and Palestinian residents of “Israel” itself, suffering an apartheid existence worse than South Africa’s within this living embodiment of a racist “state”; and even for parts of Syria, invaded and still occupied for decades since the 1970s war.

And all that not to mention the permanent, degrading, refugee camp existence for many more in Jordan and the forced diaspora existence of many others abroad.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking. This latest barbaric slaughter would be all over the front pages for days on end, with non-stop denunciations from the “international community”, Western politicians etc, were it to have been an alleged Russian incident near the Crimea, or on the Myanmar border, or within Syria.

But the masses of the world understand very well.

The Palestinians, the whole 406 million strong humiliated Arab world of which they are part, the even wider Middle East and much of the tyrannised Third World, are in uproar against this gross oppression by the artificially imposed landtheft “state” of “Israel” which can never stop smiting and repressing them if its false existence is to continue.

And they equally hate the entire Jewish freemasonry around the world which supports this barbaric and endless seizure and colonial dispossession of an entire people, driven out by British diktat, Stern gang terror, horrifying massacres and ethnic cleansing, continuing to the present day.

Calling this modern anti-Jewish feeling “anti-semitism” as if it is some new wave of arbitrary “racism” bent on a repetition of the capitalist World War Holocaust (which was not exclusively anti-Jewish anyway but was imposed on Roma, homosexuals, mentality restricted people, trade unionists and communists) is to turn truth on its head.

Palestine gradually taken overIt is anti-imperialism and expresses resistance to one of the sharpest expressions of international imperialist brute force domination and exploitation anywhere, which uses the throwback mysticism of the Jewish religion and its specious antique claims to “own the land” as the completely nonsensical basis for keeping this belligerent cuckoo squatting in the Middle East, to smite and destroy any hints of resistance or rebellion against its interests or imperialism’s.

This hatred and resistance is only added to by this grotesque pretence and self-righteous posturing lie of “anti-semitic persecution”, dreamed up by a ruling order which has tyrannised them for centuries and has now blitzkrieged the Middle East for three decades, killing millions and destroying entire countries.

It is an even more twisted propaganda campaign than anything the German Nazis ever did, using actual past victimhood to impose modern tyranny (Goebbels would have been lost in admiration).

Small wonder the much hyped, exaggerated and stunted-up demonstration by the Jewish lobby in London this week was attended by just about every vile reactionary going from Tory rottweiler Norman Tebbit and the bigoted Ulster unionist Ian Paisley Junior, to an assortment of Blairite reactionaries, leading Tories and other scum.

Of course the world hates the “Israeli”/imperialist monstrosity imposing this inhumanity and degradation and with good cause.

It has nothing to do with “2000 years of anti-semitism” as the stinking opportunist Labourite Owen Jones was declaring yet again in the Guardian this week.

Nor does it have anything to do with early 20th century racist scapegoating by the German Nazis.

Both are phenomenon of their time, and different historic conditions, the first a primitive medieval response to the rapacity of usury, which for multiple reasons was dominated by the then Jewish network (often denied access to other living), and the second a part of the international scapegoating and demonisation generated solely by capitalist imperialism itself as part of its crisis repression and the drive into World War Two.

But this (inverted) campaign is driven by the same underlying cause; supporting the Zionists as an aggressive spearhead useful to a capitalist system facing total Catastrophe, as its economic and political order descends relentlessly into the greatest and most intractable crisis failure in all history, and as it looks for a world war escape.

Just as sickening as reactionary Zionist propaganda is its echo by the equally reactionary pretence of Jewish Labourite and Momentum sections, plus grovelling “apologies” by the Corbynites, around a completely false picture some new “left anti-semitism”, either with outright accusations or dressed up as a humble pretence of “recognising that we have a problem”. Zionist “leftism” and the complete opportunism and falsity of Corbynism as well as its “left entryist” supporters are all implicated.

What monstrous dissembling and craven capitulation all of this is to a filthy witch-hunt already destroying people’s lives and livelihoods!

Political hostility to “Israel” spills over onto the entire Western Jewish freemasonry because in the modern world (i.e since the 1948 stooge UN imposition of the land-grabbing Israeli colony on Palestine) virtually the entire “Jewish community” is bound up with this false “country”, politically, physically and financially, identifies with it and benefits from it, and accepts the universal land-theft “right of return” for all Jews.

Pre-WW2 days of a huge, and often poorer, small petty bourgeois and working class Jewish diaspora are long gone; virtually all the modern Jewish freemasonry is part of the world bourgeoisie, bound into it and with disproportionate influence upon it.

If some of these modern hatreds and feelings occasionally have unfortunate echoes of the past then blame the ignorance in which the masses have been kept by decades of anti-communism, philistine consumerism and fake-“left”theoretical retreats.

But even turning to such old “tropes” is only a superficial borrowing of old clothes, to express a modern and sound anti-imperialist sentiment, not a revival of “racist Nazism” (and is different to imperialism’s attempts to muddy the water by actually reviving backward Nazism).

It is not solved by joining the bourgeois demonisation; it is solved by Marxist explanation of the objective world and the need for revolution.

Protests that some Jews “are anti-Zionist” and “criticise” the Netanyahu government does not change anything either; all those who do not confront the basic truth that “Israel” is a modern colonialist implant, created by imperialist violence and thieving occupation (of a people living there for 1500 years - longer than the “British” in Britain) are themselves inseparable from Zionism in its most basic content - the declaration that this is a real country with a “right to exist”.

Not at the expense of the Palestinians and not until every one can come home with every single house, field, well and square metre of land, fully restored.

It is not going to happen by fatuous demands for a “one state solution”, just another reformist posture, a fake-“left” unachievable meaningless “demand”.

Only revolution, bound in with the world revolution, will do it.

Build Leninism.

Steven Tudy

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EPSR archives - items from past issues

The class-exploitation foundations of race discrimination and prejudice begin to be revealed, making ‘educated’ society squirm, as Black and Asian anger and campaigning become more and more difficult to ignore or fob off. A mass party of bold communist philosophy about the crisis of capitalist society needs building urgently (EPSR 988 02-03-99).

Scandalous incompetence and hypocrisy has surrounded the Macpherson inquiry report into how badly racist is the British capitalist state and society, because even now the whole real problem of policing in a ‘democracy’ is being covered up.

Straw squirms, the Met continues to bungle laughably, and ‘politically correct’ reformists of every variety become tongue-tied with confusion and embarrassment because CLASS domination is the root of the trouble, not race discrimination, and because some of the Black and Asian victims of outrageous police prejudice are beginning to see through and speak out about this corruption.

Race-hatred is automatic and incurable under the imperialist freemarket system worldwide because cut-throat competitive exploitation and its resulting envy and freemasonry attitudes are automatic and incurable too.

Encourage private enterprise winners (black or white) to believe that their talent alone has deservedly raised them above the common herd and has given them a God-given right to rule, — — and they will invariably develop feelings of racial superiority as well as of personal vainglory. It happens in every capitalist society on earth, between every mixture of races on earth, the freemasonry clannishness mushrooming naturally around whoever starts to gain a dominant position in the crooked anarchic lottery of the ‘free market’.

In this society, that has meant hundreds of years of corrupt imperialist pride infecting everyone in society who has ever shared any nationalist feeling of ‘belonging’ to that imperialist success, even if it is totally remote from their real lives.

The vast majority of the white working class have always been outrageously maltreated and exploited by the capitalist-state establishment, — yet for countless generations, their loyalty to the ruling-class authorities has often been unthinking and unquestioning. Some colonial super-profits benefits have trickled down just slightly. At the same time, some of the reflected glory of British imperialist triumphs in the world has also been felt, and has helped to thoroughly corrupt and miseducate the white working class.

The century-and-a-half of trade union and Labour Party ‘reformism’ (in reality pure class collaboration) has obviously disastrously cemented backward colonial-minded attitudes throughout the organised labour movement, and throughout society in general. Britain is surely one of the most imperialism corrupted societies on earth.

The heroic Lawrence campaign challenge to the police and parliament has sensationally established that the police itself (and much else besides in British society) can no longer deny its automatic racist bias.

But it is for being but a tool of capitalist-exploitation-society that the police are so incurably racist that needs to be brought home to workers...

Racism as such needs humiliating and putting down wherever its backwardness flourishes. But it is through the far deeper interest that ALL workers have in challenging the entire capitalist exploitation state-power that the best community of interests of the ENTIRE working class (all colours and creeds), and much of the middle-class too, should best be seen as coinciding, and thus automatically beginning to make race-prejudice and cultural snobbery and arrogance between different ethnic traditions appear obviously as the most vicious, reactionary, self-damaging, and self-limiting outlook that only stupid or dominated people could ever inflict themselves with.

Political correctness of every variety has squirmed around the Macpherson report because of a universal sense that this obscene racism is endemic and incurable the way society is run now under capitalism, but none...wanted or dared to say so.

But Black consciousness is forever teetering on the brink of this realisation in a mass way, — and this makes the politically-correct petty bourgeois hordes even more nervous.

What is desperately needed in Britain is a mass party for socialist revolution which will deliberately harness that Black consciousness for a Marxist-Leninist understanding of the need for a CLASS-war solution to degenerate capitalist society’s despicable failure to achieve anything but race-prejudice despite 500 years of successful rule, and despite currently being on the crest of the greatest boomtime...in all history.

What is desperately NOT needed is the single-issue opportunist politics of preaching Black consciousness as a worthwhile end in itself, encouraging ideas of separate Black identity and development. Within capitalist society, that can only end up with encouragement for a Black wing of the ruling bourgeoisie to be formed, lumbered with many of the same class and political prejudices of the white bourgeoisie, — something already widespread in Britain and absolutely rampant in US imperialist society, (a pro-imperialist Black bourgeois elite helping the imperialist state to rule over a mass Black working class which still easily suffers the very worst conditions of exploitation that American capitalism can impose, relative to the rest of society and absolutely bad approaching Third World conditions) in a few of the more deprived and demoralised areas.)

‘Reforming’ capitalism out of its racist backwardness, is ultimately a lost cause and a giant diversion, — as is all ‘reformism’ at the end of the day. It detracts from the stark reality of world imperialist CRISIS as the great driving force of human history and one which finally makes possible a completely REVOLUTIONARY transformation of society wherein racism and all other manifestations of class exploitation can truly begin to become a thing of the past because the whole working of planned socialist society will create a completely different motivation for how people look upon each other and how they...relat(e)...to each other.

The ‘reform’ of capitalism ALWAYS merely means a slight shake-up in the pecking order and new faces on the gravy train but essentially the same opportunist and elitist system continuing with all its inbuilt unfairness and injustice, and periodic outbreaks of catastrophic and irrational barbarism which endlessly require “inquiring into” (to no purpose), — both in personal lives (Stephen Lawrence, etc, multiplied by THOUSANDS of outrages every year which do not make the headlines), and in national life (World War I, World War II, etc, etc).

It means that the essential CORRUPTION and injustice, of the system, from top to bottom, also goes on endlessly, because it is a system actually BUILT ON opportunist exploitation and hoodwinking, exploiting other people’s wants and needs for profit.

It was this dirty frayed thread of corruption that some who played a part in the Lawrence tragedy have been determinedly pulling at. The police service is essentially a service for big business crooks, or a system called capitalism. It is a system now completely out-of-touch-with and unsuitable for modern needs. It is crooked in every joint, and cannot be sanitised. Bring it down, build Leninism. RB

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World Socialist Review

(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles)

 

The American dream has become a nightmare in reality

In 1630, during a speech given aboard the Arabella, anchored in Massachusetts Bay, before disembarking John Winthrop stated that the colonists would found “a city on the hill,” that the entire world would consider an example to follow.

These arguments have been used and manipulated throughout U.S. history, from the displacement of native peoples and the independence of the thirteen colonies, to the present. In a document known as the Declaration of Independence, sighed July 4, 1776, some fundamental principles for the country were established, including “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Nonetheless, the new nation could not achieve the proclaimed equality of its citizens, delaying the abolition of slavery almost a century. A rich elite composed of 1% of the population has always ruled, making an attempt to keep the middle and working classes satisfied, while the poor population grew.

In 2018, the bad news began for the U.S. people with the approval of a tax reform, the most extensive in three decades and Donald Trump’s first political victory as President, having been in office more than a year. The cut will amount to $1.5 trillion over the next decade, affording corporations and the richest individuals generous rate reductions.

To justify such large tax cuts benefiting a favored few, the government argues that the changes will generate more jobs and bring back U.S. capital invested abroad. These measures will, however, mean cutting social programs that help the most needy, leaving some 13 million citizens without health insurance, for example. The financial package will increase inequality and widen the gap between the rich and the poor.

Nobel Prize winner, U.S. economist Paul Krugman, analyzed the impact the reform will have on the United States, and paraphrased Abraham Lincoln’s famous speech about a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” to describe the essence of Trump’s plan as “but rather by rich donors and for rich donors.”

This is the reality that the majority of the U.S. population must face, and that persons who immigrate - in search of “the land of opportunity” and the “American dream” (now) a veritable nightmare - will find.

According to the U.S. Census office, more than 40 million people (more than one in eight of U.S. citizens) live in poverty, and of these, 18.5 million in extreme poverty.

The number of people sleeping on the streets has also grown. According to the last report issued by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, in December of 2017, there are 553,742 homeless in the country. One of every five of whom live in New York City or Los Angeles.

It is evident that the United States is experiencing a difficult social situation, caused, in the first place, by the structural crisis of the capitalist system, with its neo-liberal model reaching a dead end. Thus the establishment is attempting to readjust the system, well aware that all U.S. citizens are not “created equal,” nor do they enjoy certain “inalienable rights.” They continue to be concerned that fewer people every day see their “city on the “hill” as an example to follow in 2018, much less in coming years. •

 

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World Socialist Review

(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles)

The Americas have no master

Once again, following the Monroe Doctrine, the US wants to make the region its backyard

“AMERICA for Americans” is a phrase that since the 19th century has incensed those who fight for regional integration and unity within diversity.

The phrase stems from the so-called Monroe Doctrine, attributed to President James Monroe, which may have appeared to have been shelved by various United States administrations. The doctrine, however, never died.

Today, the concept is more present than ever in the U.S. government led by President Donald Trump, whose presidential campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” foretold as much.

US monroe doctrineIt has shaped U.S. policy since last year, when Trump came to occupy the White House. He attacked migrants, defends economic protectionism, and with respect to Cuba, has undone many of the advances seen during the previous Barack Obama administration.

Now, the intention is to unleash this force against the peoples of Latin America. One of the senior officials of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, recently toured several countries of the region. The motive? As he already announced, “2018 marks the year of the Americas,” and as such, the U.S. is seeking to encourage division and submission among the governments of the continent.

Shortly before leaving for his tour of Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Jamaica, which attracted extensive media coverage, Tillerson continued to emphasize that idea, stating: “Sometimes I think we have forgotten about the importance of the Monroe Doctrine and what it meant to this hemisphere and maintaining those shared values. So I think it’s as relevant today as it was the day it was written.”

The United States government intends for Latin America to become its backyard once again, and all this comes at a time of much expectation in the lead up to the Summit of the Americas, which will take place in Peru this April.

The gathering will require regional unity, broken by factors such as the return of the right in some countries, including Brazil, Argentina, and more recently Chile, with President-elect Sebastián Piñera; as well as the persecution of political leaders and influential figures (Dilma Rousseff, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Cristina Fernandez).

It is therefore necessary to promote regional mechanisms such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America - Peoples’ Trade Treaty (alba-tcp), and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (celac).

One of the purposes of Tillerson’s tour of Latin American countries was focused on Venezuela, which represents a thorn in the side of the current U.S. administration.

Expectations were high for the Agreement of Democratic Coexistence, due to be signed by the government of President Nicolas Maduro and sectors of the Venezuelan opposition.

After months of talks in the Dominican Republic, the issues under discussion had been resolved, however, only the government signed the final Agreement on February 7, as the opposition party backed out.

According to statements by the head of the government delegation, Jorge Rodriguez, this was due to pressure exerted by Tillerson.

The Secretary of State, who was in Colombia at the time, communicated with opposition leader Julio Borges, and that was the reason why the opposition refused to sign the agreement, Rodriguez said.

Several calls have already been made on the opposition delegation to complete its mission and agree to sign the Agreement, for the sake of peace in Venezuela.

Meanwhile, during the U.S. official’s stay in Bogota, it was revealed that he called for “restoring democracy” in Venezuela, and said that the U.S. would not recognize the results of the upcoming presidential elections in the South American nation.

On referring to Tillerson’s tour, Maduro stressed: “Venezuela is not threatened by anyone, if he wants to declare a U.S. oil embargo against Venezuela, Venezuela will overcome any threat.”

The current context again reinforces the insight of “The Liberator” Simon Bolivar, who centuries ago warned of the imperialist pretensions of the North: “The United States seems destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” •

The Monroe Doctrine:

- The basis that “justifies” the various interventions of the United States in the region and its expansionist aspirations.

- Summarized in the phrase “America for Americans.”

- Promoted as part of the foreign policy strategy of President James Monroe (1817-1825). Considers the entire American continent as under the control of the United States.

- Over time it has served as a platform to defend U.S. interventions, considering that its interests were at risk or under the pretext of championing the emancipation of new republics.

- It has a special relationship with the idea of Manifest Destiny - the belief that the United States is destined to expands between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Cuba

THE Ministry of Foreign Affairs, warns of the seriousness of the message of arrogance and contempt with which the Secretary of State of the US began his tour of several countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

On the eve of his trip, on Thursday, February 1, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, in an appearance at the University of Texas at Austin, made alarming interventionist statements that openly instigate the overthrow, by any means, of the legitimate government of Venezuela, and are also aimed at undermining the unanimous repudiation of the region of retrogressive measures and tightening of the economic, commercial and financial blockade against Cuba, whose purpose is to harm the Cuban economy and people to attempt to subdue the country.

His statements are clearly in line with the regime change schemes that have claimed the lives of millions of innocent victims in various parts of the world and promoted violence, war, humanitarian crises and instability, demonstrating their failure. The government of the United States ignored that this is a region committed to the defense of peace, as enshrined in the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, signed by Heads of State and Government in Havana, January 29, 2014, during the 2nd celac Summit.

In the words of Secretary Tillerson, “In the history of Venezuela and in fact the history in other Latin American and South American countries, oftentimes it’s the military that handles that, that when things are so bad that the military leadership realizes they just - they can’t serve the citizens anymore, they will manage a peaceful transition. Whether that will be the case here or not, I do not know.”

Previously, he defended the postulates of the infamous doctrine that established as a policy that the Americas were the backyard of the United States, declaring that “sometimes I think we have forgotten about the importance of the Monroe Doctrine and what it meant to this hemisphere and maintaining those shared values. So I think it’s as relevant today as it was the day it was written.”

His words are clearly an incitement to “regime change.” In his instructions for the region, Tillerson went as far as to suggest that President Nicolas Maduro should abandon his post as head of state, democratically elected by an indisputable majority of votes. In his discourse, he also returns to the failed preconditions on Cuba and, without any moral authority, interferes in Cuba’s internal affairs, on demanding from our upcoming electoral process changes that are to the liking of the United States.

With his statements, this high official of the United States government adds a new act to what has been a pattern of successive outrages in the history of domination of our region, and confirms the sustained contempt with which the government of President Donald Trump has unequivocally referred to the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean, whose peoples it denigrates whenever it has the opportunity.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cuba condemns this new attack against Cuba and Venezuela, which follows the recent disrespectful statements of President Trump in his State of the Union Address.

Before departing for his imperialist tour, the Secretary of State announced that 2018 will be the year of the Americas and made clear that he will seek to encourage division and submission among Latin American governments. In doing so, he will come up against the repudiation inspired by his announcements and the dignity of the peoples of the region, who bear the memory of the hundreds of thousands of dead and disappeared by the military dictatorships sponsored by the United States, and that Secretary Tillerson today calls to repeat,

It is outrageous and unacceptable that the Secretary of State of the United States openly calls for a military coup in Venezuela, encouraging instability, the overthrow of democratically elected governments and violence.

It is obvious and regrettable that neither the President of the United States nor his Secretary of State know Latin America and the Caribbean. Ours has been a continent subjected to the humiliating dominance of the U.S., interested only in extracting its resources in an unequal relationship. But Our America has awakened and it will not be so easy to crush it. Havana, February 5, 2018 •

 

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