Back issues

No 1543 5th October 2018

Tory Brexit recriminations and vicious infighting show a ruling class paralysed by panic at the oncoming world crisis and far from the risible “golden uplands” of Theresa May. Britain, almost the weakest link among the major powers will be ground between the imperialist blocs as trade war deepens – and further austerity and slump is the only outcome. It needs sweeping away and a new socialist society building. But vital revolutionary understanding for the class war needed to end this degenerate Slump and war system will not come from “revived left” Labour under Corbynism; just the opposite the momentum is already flagging as capitulation and retreat pile one on the other. The Liverpool conference told the ruling class that it can trust the class-collaborators to run their system just as they have always done, with “left principles” like support for Palestine stabbed in the back and “patriotic loyalty” reasserted around ludicrous MI6 anti-Russian stunt hysteria and hypocrisy. Leninism ever more needed

Vicious infighting and backbiting at the Tory conference reflect the paralysis and turmoil gripping the British ruling class as the world capitalist crisis relentlessly deepens.

So too indirectly does the fudged over Brexit issue at the Labour conference, equally propping up this disastrous greed, slump and war system and heading workers away from the need for its revolutionary end.

The once smooth and slickly choreographed ovations at such events have long gone, along with the old time behind-the-scenes manipulation of politics generally, both by capitalism’s direct Tory representatives and their Blairite reactionary shadows.

Now open warfare waged by insult and character assassination demonstrates just how weak and desperate this ruling class has become as the hopeless position of British imperialism becomes clearer in the cutthroat trade war tearing all world imperialism apart.

Weak and vulnerable, the British bourgeoisie is trapped between the great rival economic blocs (Japan, Europe, the US and to some extent the special case of China) like grain between millstones.

Even before the 2008 Catastrophic credit and financial failure inevitably returns in some form or other, this frenzy reflects the complete fearfulness, not to say panic, of the Tory bosses' representatives.

Far from the seeing the completely fanciful “bright future” of a newly independent “Brexit Britain” Theresa May tried feebly to rally the ageing “troops” with, they are staring transfixed into an abyss of economic and political collapse.

Some of the bourgeois press commentary was despairing, describing the Birmingham atmosphere as “like the tired remnants of a burnt out government that just wants to spend some time in opposition to recover”.

But don’t they all, the Labourites too, constantly evading making any real challenge to take over, even within the bourgeois parliamentary racket.

They all know that the QE credit creation, pumped in to “salvage” the world monopoly capitalist system from almost total meltdown ten years ago, is about to give out, its completely valueless extra $-trillions having saturated the international trading dollar to such inflationary effect that potential worldwide currency collapse is on the way - (see constant nervous bourgeois warnings cited in recent EPSRs or the latest IMF alarms) – causing an economic breakdown of unknown extent and impact.

Whatever form it takes (bank collapse again, raging inflation, international trade collapse, Stock Exchange meltdown) the impact will be far beyond even the “economic nuclear winter” which former Chancellor Alistair Darling long ago said the world almost tipped into after Lehman Brothers imploded exactly ten years ago.

Hence the Brexit writhing and agonising of the Tories who - literally - do not know which way to turn in order to survive in the increasingly cutthroat trade war conditions of the crisis.

Staying with the European monopoly bloc makes more economic sense, giving some group protection against the sharp toothed ruthlessness of the world corporations, banks, hedge funds and other finance denizens, most from the US, whose market stampeding can pull hundreds of billions of dollars from any particular victim virtually overnight, bankrupting whole economies and stripping them to barebones if they are seen as the “wounded shark” in the water.

But for the most reactionary patrician sections of the stiff-necked British ruling class, still laden with once-all-powerful but long gone Empire illusions, swallowing the necessary second string role to long rivalled European powers, particularly Germany, has proved totally impossible.

It is all the more so since their ruling class cunning senses that any such EU shelter is transient anyway.

The oncoming financial tsunami will sweep away everything, EU bloc-ed or not, so maybe it is better to stay hitched to the biggest power of all is their thinking, notionally as a “independent” power under the laughable illusion/pretence of “getting back our sovereignty”.

But that is potentially just as disastrous, particularly in the light of US imperialism’s escalated political and economic trade war belligerence, sanctions aggression and constant international warmongering (wiping out half a dozen countries in two decades so far under the inane pretence of a “war on terror”) and new Trumpite fascist war threats targeting assorted “rogue states” such as Iran.

The increasing war horrors internationally like the devastation in Yemen (facing not just starvation but imminent total famine for 8 million people) are a hint at what is in store.

Washington is unlikely to spare a generous gesture for the “limeys” if it conflicts with ultra-reactionary “America First”, the just-as-desperate policy for the US topdog to try and ride out the storm itself by violently forcing the crisis onto everyone else (while blaming them for it) – and Britain’s stance lining up with Europe against America on continued trade with Iran for example (out of its own economic desperation for any trade at all) is already a sign of the conflicts to come.

All of which reflection of the relentless breakdown of the “globalised” monopoly capitalist world raises urgently the question of revolutionary overturn of this system as the only possible way out.

Even in the richest countries, before the next catastrophic lurch, the crisis is now so rapidly decaying into austerity desperation, savaged services and shredded local provision, with ever rising food banks, low wage partial employment, shop door sleeping homelessness and drug and crime despair, that it becomes increasingly obvious that all this old politics has failed.

It comes so close to the surface in despair, anger, discontent and potential street revolt, that the Tories are afraid even of the tepid “leftism” of the Corbynites.

They needn’t be.

The conference in Liverpool was bending over backwards to show precisely the opposite.

Far from newly “revitalised left” Labourism threatening any ruling class interests, its deliberate wool pulling fraud and hollowness was ready to prop up capitalism all over again just as it hits the greatest crisis failure in all history.

This Corbyinism is now more clearly exposed than ever as exactly the same racket as slickly reactionary “New Labour”, as Marxism understood and warned from the beginning.

It has simply stripped off a little of the discredited Blairite unctuousness, and stirred in a bit more of the “Old” Labour admixture for credibility.

It is a sick joke, and the craven servitude to capitalism utterly repellent.

And it is an even sicker joke that much of the Trot and revisionists fake-“left” continues to support this philistine and grovelling opportunism, or rather, ride it for their own careerist ends.

In fact the more glaring the crisis collapse becomes and the more threadbare the reformist fantasies of doing deals and making steady gains, to eventually achieve a “fairer society” through parliament, the more tightly the “comrades” cling to these class collaborating traditions of the past, pretending it is a path to eventual socialism, even revolution, when it is exactly the opposite.

Their petty bourgeois souls can sense the “spectre of communism” arising again to quote a famous book (i.e the Communist Manifesto), and they recoil at the implications reflexively, trained by long decades of anti-Soviet brainwashing, clinging to the worn out reformist fabric for fear of the revolutionary turmoil to come.

The popular “left” surge which elevated Corbyn was a real enough symptom of a deep response to the crisis in the working class (and some of the petty bourgeoisie) and is still carried along to some extent by its enthusiasm but it can never have its demands and uncertainties resolved by this opportunism and philistinism.

It will need to break free to develop.

No revolutionary message is ever going to come from thoroughly bourgeois Labourism and the rotten class collaborating TUC tradition, even under some supposed “left” revival or popular front notions about “alliances of a special kind” with fake-“leftism” etc.

Pretending capitalism can by improved for workers by corporate taxation and regulation is a cynical fraud to rescue this burnt out system, served up by a bunch of reactionary pseudo “left mavericks” in Labour who have always been kept in reserve for the day when the ruling class can no longer work the old tricks holding the working class back.

Labourism has only ever served one purpose in more than a century and that is a loyal duty to the bourgeoisie to fool the working class with reformist promises about a jam-tomorrow future that was never going to be achieved even in the best of times.

It was codswallop even when a few sops were finally thrown the working class postwar with council houses, the NHS and some “nationalisation”.

Those were handed over only because of ruling class panic at the victorious Soviet Red Army tide destroying Nazi aggression and then sweeping in a revitalised revolutionary wave across Europe in 1945 to the cheers of the entire international working class, and panic at the equivalent revolutionary mood at home where the working class was up to its neck in disgust at the 1930s Depression and a decade of unspeakable world war horrors from Nanjing onwards.

The supposed triumph of the post-war Attlee government, shoved into a huge majority by this mass desire for socialism, was completely bogus, putting through “takeovers” of services, mining and transport not for the working class but to rescue a bankrupt and totally incompetent capitalist economy so that “private enterprise” could be kept going.

World imperialist exploitation and colonialist oppression were as vigorously pursued for the ruling class as if it was in power itself, both under the “left” Attlee-ism (so falsely mythologised by idiot anti-Soviet Trots like Ken Loach) in the partitioning of India, formation of NATO to encircle the communist Soviet Union with nuclear intimidation, brutal wars to suppress Malayan and Greek communist partisans with butchery and newly developed torture methods, and the creation of the “Israel” Zionist occupation in Palestine in the first place, as well as ever since, supporting the brutal wars to stop “domino” communist advance in Korea and Vietnam (despite Harold Wilson’s notional holding back from actually sending troops to the latter for fear of working class revolt at home), running vicious wars in 1960s Yemen around Aden and secretly in Oman, the intelligence arming of the Indonesian counter-revolutionary slaughter of at least 1.5 million communists and sympathisers in 1965, and then physical arming of the genocide of half of East Timor’s population later on, endless butchering shenanigans in the Africa colonies like Kenya and failure to deal with breakaway fascism like Ian Smith in “Rhodesia” (Zimbabwe) or to end apartheid in South Africa; and later such interventions as the Sierra Leone mercenary invasion to prop up western diamond exploitation and even secret collusion with outright coup attempts like that involving (Sir) Mark Thatcher trying to topple Equitorial Guinea.

And all that before blitzing Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Domestically Attlee’s nationalisation was all capitalist corporatism masquerading as a “people’s takeover” and with a ruling class always ready to take things back again once they had managed to stabilise their shot-to-pieces economic system after the Second World War, courtesy of this “left” TUC-Labour treachery, heading working class ferment into safe class-collaborating bourgeois “democracy” channels once more and the illusions of parliamentary peaceful progress (given greater credence by the imbecile notions of Moscow’s still influential revisionist guidance, telling the world working class effectively that imperialism was now so hamstrung and hemmed in by workers state triumph and expansion that actual class war revolution was no longer necessary or even desirable (see EPSR books Unanswered Polemics for deeper analysis of these long developing Stalinist permanent peaceful coexistence mistakes and other failures and their eventual consequence in liquidating the still viable Soviet workers state)).

The capitalist ruling class could never sustain such welfare “generosity” forever and had no intention of doing so, privatising and plundering the “great gains”, particularly once the moribund British economy started to lose badly to other capitalist rivals and was forced to start clawing things back to be dismantled and sold-off, this flogging the family silver desperation dressed up as “Thatcherite resolve and enterprise”.

It was followed by the empty spin trickery of the Blairite period and its cosying up to the fatcats while imposing exactly the same “tough love” bullshit disciplining of the working class that the Tories did (with Blair even admiring Thatcher) and degenerating eventually into its all-out support for the imperialist warmongering on Afghanistan and Iraq (even providing the lying made-up ‘intelligence’ excuses to Washington to get it underway) that has since wiped out a half dozen countries in the Middle East, Africa and Ukraine.

This latest Labour version is even more codswallop, and deliberately ineffectual, barely even pretending to offer a reformist way out of the crisis.

Far from giving the working class due warning of the overwhelming catastrophic disintegration to come - with Slump conditions far worse than the appalling austerity already imposed post-2008 and world war potentially worse than any ever seen - the entire Corbynite Labour racket is a great pretence to keep alive the notion that capitalism can be revived.

But the warmed over “socialism” on offer is the most timid tinkering with the fringes of the capitalist economy, hardly providing a “better life” and mainly suggesting the best that can be done is to round off the worst of the crisis’ sharp edges.

And even that is nothing but flying pig impossibilities, mostly at the expense of other workers in the world.

“You can take over some industries but only if they are British (when most have long since been sold to foreign sheikhs, US hedge funds and European utilities) and only slowly and only up to 10% (!) and without having any actual ownership rights to sell or control those shares.”

Some deal!

Even if such measures could be got past a hostile City, they hardly constitute a bold restructuring of the economy let alone the seizure of its commanding heights which even the early reformists would once have postured about.

The same with the promise for green environmental jobs “at trade union rates”.

How will that be done in an economy undercut by cheap imported labour, zero hours contracts and the overwhelming dominance of massive international monopoly combines relentlessly (and in a capitalist trade war world, necessarily) imposing ever worsening conditions on workers, and where trade unions, and their “rates” have long been largely neutered?

And where any significant borrowing to boost things will immediately be hammered by the “international markets”?

The answer cannot be that “all this austerity should be reversed”.

How exactly? This is all part of the inexorable monopolisation and increased exploitation of capitalist development which is more easily overthrown than turned back and “regulated”.

There is no possible way actually to salvage the British economy, which is now probably the most parasitical capitalism on the planet, dependent on “service industries” (i.e finance) taking in the dirty washing from international racketeering, Russian oligarchs, and the siphoned off wealth from Western installed tinpot dictatorial exploitation everywhere to launder and clean it up while siphoning off a large “fee”.

It has virtually no industry left with much of what remains being arms production, and agriculture is just as cut back (producing just 60% of consumption), and what little real production there is, is now almost totally owned by rival capitalisms anyway, from rapacious hedge funds in America, to Indian monopolists, Gulf Sheikhs and European utilities and corporations.

The Labourites’ economic plan is total cynicism in other words, a diversionary trick to lull the working class away from any grasp of the great rampaging Catastrophe.

It deliberately pretends that capitalism is essentially sound, with the problems caused by austerity “unnecessarily imposed” out of sheer wilfulness and excessive greed which needs only a bit of “relaxation” and corporate regulation to put the world back on course.

Capitalism can be tamed, it says, if only the greed and incompetence of the ruling class can be pushed aside.

No wonder former Blairite groupies like Will Hutton and Polly Toynbee were gushing their approval after Liverpool.

It is a giant steaming nonsense which pays no attention the objective realities of capitalist production for private profit and the contradictions that generates, which unstoppably brings it back to crisis and collapse, and always on a greater, wider and more devastating scale than seen before – this time far beyond the Depression of the 1930s (as already understood by all the senior capitalists involved in the 2008 events) and threatening World War Three greater than the utter carnage of both the twentieth century’s world wars put together, with weaponry and capabilities a hundred times more destructive.

Austerity is an objective result of crisis, and is a “policy choice” only in the sense that the ruling class must impose it (domestically or on other powers) or give up its power altogether, which is never going to happen: no ruling class in history has ever given up its position and privilege, except by being forced to leave the historical stage.

There is no ending the crash except by ending the very system which generates it.

To pretend a few tinkering tax changes will do the trick is philistine shallowness which disarms the working class and leaves it open to the kind of counter-revolutionary barbarity that took down the Allende government in Chile in 1973 in a river of blood and torture, and many others, including the Arab Spring government in Cairo, slaughtered by the thousand, and now tragically in a potential Allende repeat across half a dozen countries where fascist threats and CIA stirred skulduggery are undermining the entire Latin American reformist left-nationalism misleadingly called the “Bolivarian Revolution” (see last issue).

Corbynism is either totally stupid in setting itself up for a British General Pinochet or utterly cynically opportunist.

Either way it objectively serves only the interest of the bourgeoisie.

The great divisions on Brexit in Liverpool illustrate the same thing, reflecting the same illusions about continuing capitalism.

It is because the Labourites deliberately keep all thinking within the framework of a capitalist world that the argument remains unsolvable.

For the working class the question “inside the EU or out” needs the same response as the in old joke about asking directions from a hayseed when lost in the countryside: “If I were you I would not start from here”.

Start instead from a complete perspective of the entire capitalist system and its disintegration into Slump because of “overproduction”, and the great conflicts that must generate between the ever more concentrated monopoly powers all battling for the world markets, just as Marx and then Lenin described (Capital 1-3, Imperialism - the highest stage of capitalism).

Only then can the working class be brought to understand that it will be hammered by the capitalist crisis either way; Brussels might be a corrupt bureaucratic nightmare serving the interest of the great European monopolies and banks but the working class in the world outside is just as ruthlessly exploited, if not more so, by monopolies from the US, India, Russian oligarchs, Gulf Arab statelets, and everywhere else, (including plenty with European ownership).

For example, either the NHS gets dismantled and sold off to European ownership, or it is plundered by a desperate profit-hungry American health and drug industry. Ambulance calls at $4000 a ride, as in the US, are the result in both cases.

Only socialism in workers states has willingly initiated and provided free health care, in the Soviet Union and famously out of Cuba for example; even the formation of the NHS is owed to them indirectly.

Of course the detailed argument either side of the Brexit dispute needs to be considered if only to expose what the illusions are, on both sides, and to show that they have no resolution within capitalism, (and certainly not to justify tailending backward and narrow prejudice or to strut high-handed moralising).

Clearly the much of working class wanted to demonstrate its contempt and despair by the 2016 Brexit referendum vote and particularly to express its rejection of the establishment in general, and of the special conditions in London (and some other big cities) where finance capital appropriates most of what wealth still circulates.

As many times analysed by the EPSR, that gesture, far from being automatically reactionary, contains potential deep running stirrings of revolt.

And if that turns initially on narrow clannishness and parochialism there are understandable reasons why, as many sectors of the working class see capitalism deliberately fostering the use of migrant labour to undermine wages and their own capacity to organise, and with it seeing increased competition for already austerity savaged services and housing etc.

In recent years this has been on a massive scale by a British economy now so degenerated and out-competed that most of its small and medium businesses cannot survive any other way, and certainly not paying the wages they used to.

Without a better and much wider perspective being offered, and without the time to study the politics themselves in hard-pressed lives dominated just by the battle to survive day-to-day, and with all the “culture” they get being relentlessly dumbed-down celebrity-following and consumerism, it is no surprise the virtually automatic reaction is to blame “outsiders” and foreigners, along with blaming “overseas competition” for factory closures and other cutbacks.

Of course all that is very easily headed into English nationalist channels and scapegoating prejudice and racism, which is then wide-open to fascist and reactionary ideas, which all needs to be constantly fought with.

But that is not done by narrow moralising single-issue “anti-racism” or “Stop the Nazis” campaigns; it needs a full perspective that offers a view of the real and only way out, by ending capitalism.

The demand for “import controls” equally feeds such prejudice, by blaming foreign workers in other countries for the problems, instead of the general “overproduction” that capitalism generates, and which can only be solved by socialist planning of production internationally.

Tariffs and blockades then intensify the trade war hostility being built up, generating in turn responses by other capitalist powers in retaliation, dragging their own workers behind their local nationalism and chauvinism.

And so on in a spiral of slump and belligerence.

It is the recipe for dragging workers into the war hatred that imperialism used for World War I and II and needs again, to “solve” its “surplus” capital problems.

One of the main factors in the Tory ultra-Brexiteers’ strategy is precisely to tap and foster this backward chauvinism in the working class, and particularly the anti-immigrant scapegoating atmosphere.

They also make class calculations about where the best political and economic alliances can be built for the intensifying international trade war, (and their own personal investment advantage as many exposés have shown) and eventually the best security and military alliances for the coming hot war.

Keeping workers trapped in “Great British” nationalism, is a factor so important for maintaining ruling class power as the crisis degenerates that it almost overrides some of the obvious immediate economic disadvantages of an outright split with the EU.

Both hoodwinking “democracy” notions of “winning back control of our own affairs” – (when did the working class ever get to decide about anything other than the most trivial?) – and assumptions of “superiority” over other foreign workers, are aspects of disastrous class-collaboration and potential chauvinist reactionariness which keep workers tied back to and away from a grasp of revolution, internationalism and the need to confront the ruling class in class war to defeat it (which means both anti-imperialist class war internationally and civil war to bring down and defeat its own ruling class domestically).

Such imperial assumptions have been deeply inculcated in the petty bourgeoisie and down through most of the working class over especially the last three centuries of brutal British colonialism and slave-trading, not simply as racism (barbaric enough) but as a general assumption of entitlement and privilege, as for example in the long running contempt for the “Irish navvy”, which Marx and Engels understood to be one of the greatest political and psychological chains binding the British working class to its own ruling class.

Without breaking with this collaboration with imperialist domination and calling for Irish freedom, they too could never be free, they said.

Supporting or encouraging these backward and petty nationalist attitudes, as the “left” Brexiters do, leaves the working class open to the worst scapegoating and fascist notions in the end; it is criminal opportunism.

But all this is not countered by the Remainers, simply sneering at working class clannishness as “backward racism” and implying that the “Leave” vote is all some ghastly mistake which could be solved by reversing the decision.

Of course there are huge economic disadvantages to pulling out of the networks of monopoly corporate production across Europe, as many of the major corporations and their bosses and organisations like the CBI have declared; the ever greater monopolising tendencies of capitalism have created integrated multi-country supply chains which are massively disrupted by cross border holdups.

That may see disinvestment by the big car companies for example adding to British economic difficulties and losing multiple jobs.

But once again it is the crisis which needs identifying as the cause of the economic breakdown which will no more spare the EU than anywhere else, and which will drive just as much inter-imperialist conflict inside the EU as out; the German bank and finance bullying of Greece since 2008 and the fractious arguments currently with Italy are all symptoms of incurable capitalist contradictions that will be driven to new levels of antagonism by the crisis.

Fanciful ideas of holding Europe together so that there can “never again be war” are just that – fanciful.

And the turn to chauvinism and Nazi scapegoating inside Europe, particularly Germany, is at least as rampant as around UKIP, Tommy Robinson and (discreetly) the more extreme end of the Tories.

The deliberate avoidance of any decision on the Brexit issue at the conference is pure opportunism, effectively avoiding the need to speak out about the bankruptcy of all solutions in capitalism and in practice tailending the worst nationalist backwardness fostered by class collaborating import control trade unionism.

What this is really about is a message that the Labourites can be trusted by the ruling class whatever “left” noises they might make.

The momentum (literally) behind Corbynism will continue for a while but it is being fooled, either through naïveté or because of the deliberate political ostrich “blindness” of the petty bourgeois class position, not wanting to confront the full enormity of the crisis.

But there are plenty of other signals, not least over the Palestinian issue.

Delegates and visitors waved a sea of Palestine flags to show their support for the relentlessly persecuted and endlessly blitzed and tortured people, forced off their own land 70 years ago by horrific ethnic cleansing violence and mostly festering in refugee camp exile ever since.

But while it was a pointed gesture it is effectively of no avail since the Corbynites have declared their support and “apologies” to the Zionists, and the Jewish freemasonry, and its colonialist occupation of this benighted people’s land.

And the one precludes the other; either the Jews get to keep their stolen land, farms, cities and houses and continue the genocidal butchery and suppression of these effectively indigenous people (living there for at least the last 1500 years) in order to prevent the non-stop revolt against them that cannot ever cease, or the land and every single well, field, olive grove and city street is returned to the Palestinians, and the Jewish occupation has either to find somewhere else to live (mostly returning to the US, Russia and Europe from whence it came) or petition a new Palestinian state for permission to stay on, in whatever spare space can be found.

The “left” rarely starts with this perspective, seeing “support” purely in the impossible reformist way that colours all its politics, merely as do-gooding “help” for the Palestinians, which ends up as a form of political charity like most other support groups (Venezuela, Cuba, etc) - its limited aid counter-balanced by the dire brain-rot perspectives it fosters.

Hence the flagging (!) enthusiasm was undermined, because the dirty stab in the back for the Palestinian cause (and the entire Third World) has already been done by Corbyism with the two years of official Labour pretend agonising about the nonsensical notion that the “left is riddled with anti-Jewish racism”, and subsequent “official party inquiries” etc etc. which, by their very creation, capitulate to this out-and-out fascist lie campaign by accepting that there is such a thing on the left.

The coup de grace was the “heartfelt apologies” conference capitulation to this monstrous “left anti-semitism” CIA/Zionist propaganda and censorship campaign, which now vilifies anyone who tries to speak out against the Nazi-Zionist landtheft occupation and its Jewish freemasonry support (via a slew of outrageous reactionary and censorial “definitions” which have been officially adopted as “policy” by Labour).

Its culmination in outright “recognition and support” for the murdering fascist “Israeli state” declared in the conference speeches was just a further kick in the teeth for this “left” posturing, making clear that all such soft political “support” work, however sincere or worthy in itself, becomes just a cover for reaction if it does not address the only possible way such issues can be solved, through the total defeat of imperialist barbarity and the subsequent revolutionary overturn of this degenerate capitalist order, including its Zionist rottweillers helping suppress Middle East anti-imperialist revolt.

Worse still it effectively lines the Corbynites up with oncoming imperialist blitzkrieg and warmaking in the Middle East, for which the Zionist are a key collaborator with Washington.

Such treachery goes hand in hand with the Corbynites’ renunciation of all their one-time support and “guest appearances” for assorted campaigns around the “left” circuit, from backing the Irish republican cause, Latin American anti-imperialism and the Cuban revolution to the Palestine issue itself, the most concentrated expression of imperialist oppression and post-war tyranny.

And the apostasy over the critical front line world anti-imperialist struggle in Gaza and the West Bank, is just part of a stream of grovelling capitulations and “loyalty” declarations by the Corbynites making clear that they will pick up every bit of fascist provocation and chauvinist poison being pumped out by the ruling class to divert attention from its crisis.

Labourite support for the overall “Prevent” programme of increasingly draconian censorship and brainwashing about “British values” (i.e reactionary capitalist chauvinism) is a given, helping the ruling class clamp down on vaguely defined “extremism” (which in fact means communism despite using the grotesque pretences of a “war on terrorism for our very survival”).

And that is joined now by grovelling declarations of “patriotic” loyalty and backing for the ludicrous anti-Russian bogeyman lie hysteria being used to whip up international war tension.

As the EPSR has often warned, the bourgeoisie has a tried and tested formula to escape its humiliation, failure and incompetence and that is coming up with an excuse for war, often via the thinnest of provocations and stunts, from the Gleiwitz “radio station attack” (done by Nazi troops in Polish uniforms in 1939) to the Gulf of Tonkin lies about a “Vietnamese torpedo boat” used to get into the war on Hanoi.

There is now a constant stream of risible allegations against Russia which are nothing but outright fascist lies with more holes in them than a James Bond girl’s fishnet stockings.

Instead of deriding these obvious intelligence agency Goebbels stunts and their evidence-free accusations and denunciations the Labourites grovel to the ruling class’s browbeating that even to raise doubts about these accusations is “unpatriotic”.

No longer do the principles of “not guilty until proven” apply; if it is declared that “probably” the Russian government “must have” known something “most likely” “in the opinion of the intelligence assessment” then that is declared absolute truth.

The outrageous upside down distortions of world responsibility for warmongering and destruction implied by these fabricated stunts, suggesting the capitalist world was one of peace and harmony only disrupted by the disruptive behaviour of a few “thuggish states” has been analysed previously (EPSR 1520).

Nothing is changed around the Skripal poisoning by the “identification” by assertion of supposed “Russian agents”, again essentially evidence free nor does it provide “proof” for “knowledge of the incident going all the way to the top and Mr.(love that!!) Putin.”

All the obvious flaws and weaknesses remain such as why on earth would the Russian state do this, and for what purpose, going to such lengths to take out a relatively insignificant spy, years after the event and by such clumsy and amateurish means?

Even Skripal did not believe it!

The poisoned former spy Sergei Skripal was initially reluctant to believe the Russian government had tried to kill him, according to a new book, and despite selling secrets to MI6 was an “unashamed Russian nationalist”.

Skripal struggled to come to terms with his situation following the novichok attack on him and his daughter, Yulia, the author and BBC journalist Mark Urban writes.

The pair were targeted in March and nearly died. When Skripal woke five weeks later from a coma, he faced some “difficult psychological adjustments” – not least the fact that he was at first reluctant to recognise he had been the target of a Kremlin “murder plot”.

Skripal, a former paratrooper, supported Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and referred disparagingly to Ukrainians as “simply sheep who needed a good shepherd”. Skripal also refused to believe Russian troops had entered eastern Ukraine covertly, saying that if they had, they would have quickly reached the capital, Kiev.

The book does not answer the key question as to why Skripal’s former organisation – the GRU – tried to kill him shortly before Russia’s presidential vote.

Urban corroborates reports that Skripal briefed western intelligence agencies after his move to the UK in 2010, following a spy swap. He travelled to the US in 2011, the Czech Republic in 2012, and Estonia. Last summer, he spent a week in Switzerland briefing its intelligence service, Urban writes.

Still, these visits fail to explain why Moscow would try to kill him with novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent.

...In summer 1996, an unnamed MI6 intelligence officer recruited him.

...In exchange for $3,000 (£2,300), Skripal handed over details of the GRU’s organisation and command structure. This arrangement continued after he was recalled to Moscow. There were no face-to-face meetings with British spies, but Skripal wrote sensitive information in a book in invisible ink

The best explanation the Tory story tellers can come up with is that “Putin is now so corrupt that the state forces have lost their grip”.

If the Russian military is so amateurish then why is it constantly hyped up as a world threat???

Why all the hype about Spetznaz training, with stock film of Far Eastern high-intensity training camps and men doing assault courses pushups etc etc, implying “sinister efficiency”? Or hyperbolic phrases like “military grade” nerve agent?

But the “deadly” Novichok absorbed through the skin or by breathing did not even work, and seemingly could be spilt allover a hotel room with no observable effect on either the two “agents” allegedly carrying it in an ordinary perfume bottle, nor on the chambermaid (or man) who must have cleaned the room later. Nor did it affect them when “sprayed” on a door handle (and therefore formed an aerosol, deadly if breathed in).

Meanwhile the Observer, infamously MI6’s house journal, has had to desperately scrabble to explain away how a supposed “hobbyist” doing “administrative jobs” (?) and beginning as a one-man “investigative” website, managed, allegedly, to penetrate the heart of Russia’s intelligence system, when the rest of the world’s press and intelligence agencies seemingly could not.

Turns out his organisation is not quite so small and was not lacking in funds, and from assorted anti-communist “democracy” backers at that, once the vague “crowd funding” ran out:

The 39-year-old founder of Bellingcat, an investigative website, which in its short life has broken scoop after scoop – including last week’s blockbuster, unmasking one of the alleged perpetrators of the novichok attack in Salisbury – never intended to be at the vanguard of open-source journalism.

As a teenager, he studied media technology at Southampton Institute for Higher Education. “It was back when everything was still being done on tape and people were transitioning from analogue to digital. All the stuff I was learning seemed to be immediately out of date.”

Disillusioned, Higgins gave up on the course.

Instead he took a series of administrative jobs while developing an interest in blogging under the handle Brown Moses.

“It started as a hobby. I had no background in any of the stuff I was writing about. It was mainly because in 2011 I was watching the conflict in Libya, and the stuff that was being shared on social media was largely being ignored because it couldn’t be verified.”

For it was Bellingcat, in conjunction with a Russian website, The Insider,

(based in London!!!!)

that made global headlines last week when it claimed that Chepiga was the officer from the GRU, Russian military intelligence, behind the alias Ruslan Boshirov. This would make him one of the two men wanted in connection with the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

Identifying the real names of the two suspects was an obvious target for Bellingcat, which now employs a staff of 10 and has a cadre of volunteers, in addition to an audience well versed in exploiting social media and open sources to make connections mainstream journalists might miss.

“A couple of my team volunteered to investigate. They said, ‘The names have come out, let’s try to see what we can find out.’ We’d had success in the past in identifying GRU officers in the case of MH17.

...Although it was initially financed through crowdfunding, Higgins now describes Bellingcat as a business.

“We get a lot of our money from donors like the Open Society Foundation [the international grant-making institution funded by billionaire George Soros] and we also get about 50% of our income from workshops that we offer.”

Clients come from a broad range of backgrounds, Higgins said: “journalists, staff from NGOs and human rights organisations, lawyers, people in the business and intelligence worlds”.

Possibly because Russia runs through many of its investigations, Bellingcat has faced accusations from pro-Kremlin sources that it is a tool of enemy intelligence services.

And not just from “pro-Kremlin sources” either – anyone with two brain cells and a capacity to ask “who funds this and benefits from it” can draw the same conclusion or at the very least can raise an eyebrow or two.

Except the newly “left” Labourites it seems, grovellingly expressing their British “patriotism” to suggest there must be a “diplomatic confrontation” with Putin.

What a bunch of frauds leading the working class up the (deadly) garden path.

Build Leninism

Duncan Trubshaw

PICCAP Western bogeyman hysteria about “Russian hacking” is breathtaking in its hypocrisy; $10s billions are spent on facilities like GCHQ to impose universal surveillance in the “free” West and disrupt computers and communications around the world, especially against anti-imperialist regimes such as Cuba and such as with the Stuxnet virus sabotage developed over a decade ago by US-Zionist intelligence against Iran’s nuclear power development. Trade rivals have long been targeted for industrial espionage as diplomatic protests from the 1980s have often shown.

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