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No 1556 25th May 2019

Brexit frenzy (on both sides) is a deadly trap for the working class, helping only whip up chauvinism and scapegoating for the slide into international trade war and ultimate all-out shooting conflict. The point is made by Donald Trump’s vicious bullying of Iran, being set up as the next target for siege strangulation or nuclear obliteration, after half the Middle East has already been destroyed by the nonsensical “war on terror” excuse for imperialist blitzkrieg. This fascist bluster and bullying shows the relentless slide towards devastation and brutal destruction is unstoppable, because it is the only “answer” capitalism has to its paralysingly unsolvable and incurable Slump collapse, caused by “overproduction” exactly as Marx analysed. All “left “ failure to explain all this reflects hopeless opportunism verging on treachery, most of all from groups advocating “support” for the fascist demagogue Nigel Farage in an echo of past “national socialism”, but also from pie-in-sky remainers. Only revolution can change anything. Build Leninism

Continuing fake-“left” disputes on the Brexit issue paralysing the British ruling class, underline their rotten confusion-mongering.

Born of opportunist class-collaboration and philistine shallowness their squabbles disastrously mislead the working class by taking sides, either with narrow Little Englander chauvinism or with fatuous, moralising Euro-complacency which offers no explanation to workers for growing collapse and austerity.

The worst aspect (whichever side, for or against) is the complete absence in their “analyses” of any wider or deeper perspective on the capitalist crisis and its breakdown into incurable conflict and war.

It is worldwide “overproduction” – the core of the contradictions which always bring capitalism to slump disaster – which has just driven the Scunthorpe steelworks liquidation for example, not “restrictive European state aid rules” without which the plant “could have been rescued”.

Blaming Brussels as such is a complete joke. An anyway bankrupt British government, serving a rapacious British capitalist ruling class, would neither want nor be capable of mounting any such rescue, whatever “sovereignty” it had.

It would be even less willing to pour in money in already deadly trade war conditions of worldwide gluts of steel, and particularly when it would inevitably be in hock to an aggressive US imperialism (as the only potential “ally” outside the EU) which is busy trying to revive its own decimated steel industry using ruthless America First protectionism.

Of course staying in Europe cannot save Scunthorpe either, but that is the point.

The whole of capitalism is in Catastrophic meltdown and relentlessly plunging towards Third World War led by ever-more undermined US imperialist domination lashing out with ever more nazi-like belligerence and blitzkrieg threats as its desperation deepens.

The latest hair-raising US warfleet provocations and starvation siege sanctions against Iran in the Middle East; continued invasion threats and terror sabotage against Venezuela’s left-reformist “socialism”; bloodcurdling threats against North Korea; the desperate savagery of the trade war tariffs imposed on China’s workers state; and the attempts to bully the rest of the world’s capitalist powers to go along with this demented Nazism, all confirm the Marxist understanding that capitalism is a system of crisis which can only end in war and devastation.

It is getting closer to total barbaric breakdown by the minute and all-out inter-imperialist war.

That is the only context in which to assess “Brexit”.

As the EPSR has constantly argued, grasping the inexorable plunge of the entire antagonistic capitalist system into its greatest ever economic crash, world wide trade war and ultimately all-out inter-imperialist conflict, alone can give any orientation at all to workers on any and all questions – with its necessary conclusion that only class-war revolution to overturn capitalism for good, can change things.

That means building a party to develop a revolutionary philosophical, social and economic explanation of the world’s Catastrophic breakdown that not only climbs far above limited arguments about Europe but exposes the deadly trap of nationalism and jingoism which such arguments embody.

Brexit is a solely a ruling class problem.

Total paralysis and bitter infighting splitting the establishment down the middle (and its bourgeois Labour Party B-team) and now taking Theresa May’s scalp too, reflect how British ruling class “prestige” and confidence has been shattered.

It has fallen ever further behind in the sharpening cutthroat competition between all the big monopoly capitalist powers with almost everything sold off to foreign hedge funds (like the one which stripped all the remaining value from the Scunthorpe steel plant while embedding it in usurious debts over the last three years).

The vicious recriminations in UK bourgeois politics are at near civil war levels because the ruling class is in a blind panic over how this moribund has-been economy can survive coming inter-imperialist conflicts, and with which other imperialists it can “ally” to try and ride out the storm.

But choosing whether to go with rapacious American capital (as signalled for example by Trump-stooge Nigel Farage’s call for the NHS to be rescued by “more private practice” i.e opened up to US medical combines) or to play second fiddle to European monopolies (meaning mainly the Germans) in order to remain in the European market cartel as a defence against the world’s other monopoly blocs, (particularly the US, Japan and perhaps China’s capitalist sector of the workers state economy) can have nothing to do with working class interests; workers will be ruthlessly exploited either way (see past EPSRs eg) by ever more intensified monopoly carve-up, imposing speedups, unemployment and cutbacks.

All the fake-“left” disputes over Brexit are a giant reformist diversion, leaving the working class tied to collaboration with one wing or other of the riven ruling class (which is one additional reason why the ruling class is making such a meal of it all beyond its own paralysed inability to come to a decision anyway about its own difficulties – which are unsolvable)) just when the world crisis is unravelling faster than ever.

They keep workers’ consciousness pegged to capitalism itself, when the sick degeneracy of this vile, unequal and repressive system is making the need clearer than ever for a conscious revolutionary lead for the fight against it, a class war to take over everything (industries, banks, farms and fisheries) to allow the building of a planned socialist world under firm workers control.

Some of the further specifics of various “left” railings against supposed “betrayals of the referendum” on the one side or high-handed accusations of “racism” against workers naturally fearful of capitalist wage-and-conditions cutting through migrant labour on the other, give away how the “left” all remain trapped by illusions in the “democracy” fraud or subjective-idealist “moral principles on immigration”, and how they are all a million miles away from the need to overthrow capitalism when it comes down to real developments, however much they posture about their “Marxism” or tack on paragraphs at the end of articles about “revolution” (but never explaining what that means).

Before looking further at Brexit however, the deadly war buildup around Iran needs to be examined, warning as it does of the devastation which is going to hit everyone as the entire capitalist system becomes ever more entangled in the contradictions of “overproduction” and terminal slump far deeper than anything seen before in history.

The latest bloodcurdling threats are an escalation which potentially goes far beyond the already staggering savagery and barbaric destruction imposed on the Middle East, where half a dozen countries have already been torn to shreds by invasion or proxy wars, cities have been reduced to pulverised backwardness, and everything else left in deprivation and gangster warlordism.

These are all the warm up for the inescapable world war that capitalism is heading for.

Now they are being stepped up. Trump’s crude bully threats, essentially to incinerate the Tehran regime or starve it by a sanctions siege worse than that which killed millions in Saddam’s Iraq in the 1990s, are at a level of strident belligerence and fascist self-righteousness the equal of any of Hitler’s near hysterics which whipped up frenzied belligerence at the great mass rallies of the Nazi party – stirring up national aggression for the last great crisis sort out when the world collapsed into Depression, “solved” by the insane WW2 destruction of most of Europe, Japan and sections of the Far East.

Only the mass media methods have changed.

But even as this demented Trumpite nazism becomes ever louder and more threatening it reveals the hollowness and weakness of the entire capitalist system hurtling into the greatest Catastrophic slump in history and terrified of where it is being driven.

Pre-emptive gunslinger thuggery was already started by the “New American Century” Bushites under the meaningless notion of a “war on terror” 20 years ago, triggered by the Big Lie excuse of Iraq’s non-existent WMD and aiming to intimidate the entire world by “shock and awe” so that it would keep on paying up for the fat and greedy US “way of life”, built on plundering and tyrannically exploiting the entire Third World and, increasingly, on squeezing even the other imperialist powers as well, demanding more of the booty share they get to cream off (according to their place in the post-WW2 pecking order).

Fear of domestic revolt even in the “rich” US, as well as growing anti-imperialist turmoil everywhere else, was a key element driving Washington into this ever more demented nazi-bluster and threats against the whole world using the relatively insignificant but shocking 9/11 attacks as the excuse.

War could stave off disaster the American ruling class believed and keep enough of an economy going to pacify its population with yet more of the consumerism and celeb shallowness and glitz of the long post-war boom, even as the world system collapsed.

The attempt to bully the world into continued subservience to its greed and tyrannical exploitation, already saw the 1998 blitzing of first the tiny Serbian revisionist core of the former Yugoslavian workers state and then the non-stop blitzkrieg and torture barbarities inflicted on the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan, then Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen.

But it has not worked.

Nor could it.

Exactly as Marx’s scientific dialectical analysis said in Capital 150 years ago the contradictions of production for private profit are intractable and unsolvable (see EPSR box)).

The escalating regional credit slumps and partial collapses which have been shaking capitalist world finance for decades (Mexico defaults, Argentina bankruptcy, Asian currency meltdown(s), Japanese 30 year stagnation, Russian restored capitalist implosion, Enron meltdown, etc etc etc etc) simply continued erupting, culminating in the worldwide bank failures of 2008.

George W Bush’s brute force had only made the problems a thousand times worse, accelerating massively the disparate rebellions of left nationalism and “terrorist” and “jihadist” revolts growing across the world, (and turning later into mass revolt in the Arab Spring) and further bankrupting the US economy while shattering domestic morale as war weariness grew.

The temporary retreat and pretence of a pullback under “liberal Obama-ism”, using demented money printing to prop things up, could never last (and was a hypocritical fraud anyway as Libya, Syria and the Yemen destructions were imposed behind the fraud of “stopping terrorism”).

Problems have multiplied and will deepen further as the QE credit effect also fails (ask Scunthorpe).

Trump’s belligerent bluster and nervousness simultaneously, demonstrate even more the staggering weakness and failure of almighty American economic and technological dominance, established as topdog power after the great World War Two sort outs, and which once could soak up all the best and brightest in the world and remained easily in international control, commanding intimidated “respect”, and wish-fulfilment “blue jeans and rock music” envy, wherever it trod.

“Making America Great Again” encapsulates the huge fall from its position of easy supremacy and the need to impose its authority by brute force, tearing up all the past alliances and international relations to do it, increasingly making clear the antagonisms which are rapidly sharpening between the great capitalist rivals (in inside the US too).

At the same time, conditions for the ordinary mass majority in the world will soon far exceed the brutal poverty and despair already imposed on the poorest and most deprived since the global crash (as just outlined by the UN report on “workhouse” poverty hitting one-third of the UK population, for example).

Gigantic upheavals are inevitable as life becomes increasingly impossible for the masses, as phenomena like the French gilets-jaunes movement already show, “black lives matter” and beyond that the giant “terrorist” hostility spreading ever further in Asia and Africa.

There is no other answer for capitalism but even more war and destruction and domestic repression, culminating in open inter-imperialist war.

But after two decades of Middle East invasion quagmire, and growing resistance, (and as well the still persisting longer-term horrifying lessons of two previous world wars) that is more difficult than ever to get underway.

Hence the bragging and bravado of the increasingly crude nastiness of the Trumpite White House now lashing out in all directions, potentially nastier and more destructive than ever, as it tries to intimidate and face down growing world discontent, egged on to a frenzy by its even more demented and fanatical Zionist stooges and their bizarre warmongering alliance with their once “enemies” in the always reactionary, and now outright mafia-thug gangster, tribal sheikhdoms of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states (summed up as the three “B”s of Benjamin Netanyahu, Prince bin Salman and John Bolton).

Disquiet at this world threatening madness is growing even in the one-time allies, as expressed by bourgeois press insiders tapping into the fears of dubious mainstream ruling class opinion in Britain (and usefully recounting developments):

For better or worse, America remains the world’s leading military superpower. In Washington last week, a familiar row erupted over how best that power should be used. Past targets have included Soviet Russia, al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Today the international bogeyman topping the White House’s to-do list is Iran.

Once again the US is in the process of deciding whether to go to war. As always, it is a tangled, messy and dishonest business. On one side, favouring punitive action, stand the Iran hawks. They include neoconservative retreads such as John Bolton, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, who championed the 2003 Iraq invasion; Mike Pompeo, a former CIA director and Christian evangelical who heads the state department; and Mike Pence, the ascetic US vice-president.

On the other side, opposing escalation, stand Democratic party leaders in Congress and a clutch of presidential hopefuls; sceptical Pentagon generals and security agency officials who trust Bolton as far as they can toss an IED; a majority of Washington’s more important allies in the EU and Nato; and China and Russia, which oppose American global power-plays on principle.

The focus of the row was secret intelligence, reportedly gathered by US satellites over recent weeks and presented to officials on 3 May. The photographs purported to show Iranian Revolutionary Guards loading missiles onto dhows in the Gulf. Their presumed purpose was to attack American and allied naval or commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil supplies pass.

The existence of the surveillance photos was top secret – until the information inexplicably leaked to the media last Wednesday. Oddly enough, a few days earlier Saudi Arabia – America’s close ally and sworn foe of Iran – had reported attacks on four tankers in the Strait. Oddly again, no one claimed responsibility and Tehran denied all knowledge. Marine insurers pointed the finger at Iran’s Houthi allies. But while admitting it had no proof, the pro-war camp in Washington immediately blamed Iran or its proxy forces.

The reaction from Bolton and Pompeo was swift. Citing yet more secret intelligence that Iran was rallying Shia militias in Iraq and Syria to “prepare for war”, they had already expedited military reinforcements to the Middle East – an aircraft carrier battlegroup and nuclear-armed bombers. Pompeo dramatically cancelled a visit to Germany and flew to Baghdad to warn of the threat.

In the wake of the tanker attacks, the administration upped the ante. Details of a White House national security meeting were also leaked. They revealed that Patrick Shanahan, the acting defence secretary, had presented a new plan to send 120,000 troops to the Middle East, supposedly to deter Iran. Another option under discussion was multiple sea and air-launched missile strikes on Iran’s military facilities and suspected nuclear-related targets.

Since then, White House officials have persistently talked up an “imminent” threat from Tehran, Pompeo has personally briefed EU governments (he reportedly got a cool reception), and the US embassy in Baghdad has been partly evacuated. But there’s a snag. Throughout this accelerating process of military and diplomatic escalation, the US has not produced any firm, on-the-record evidence of hostile Iranian action.

For anybody who recalls the disinformation, untruths and downright lies that preceded the Iraq invasion, the similarities with Iran are uncanny – and disturbing. Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, was among those complaining last week about a blind drift to war. “Did we learn the lessons of the last decade?” asked Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate. “There is an alarming lack of clarity here, there’s a lack of strategy, and there’s a lack of consultation.”

Smelling a familiar rat, Democrats are investigating claims that Pompeo’s state department slanted an annual global arms control report to cast Iran in a bad light.

In this respect Bolton’s current role is particularly suspect. After Iraq went disastrously wrong, he was widely accused of massaging and manipulating secret intelligence to falsely bolster the case for war. Inaccurate US claims that Saddam possessed and was ready to use weapons of mass destruction – claims infamously echoed by Britain’s the then prime minister Tony Blair – fatally discredited the strategy.

Memories of the Iraq fiasco may have influenced Major-General Chris Ghika, the British deputy commander of the coalition against Isis, when he was asked about the American claims last week. “There’s been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria,” he said. Since Ghika is based in Baghdad, he might be expected to know best.

That did not stop the Pentagon issuing an extraordinary rebuttal, saying the general’s comments “run counter to the identified credible threats”. In another echo of Iraq, the British government caved in to US pressure and disowned Ghika the following day, saying that it fully agreed with Washington’s threat-level assessment.

The crisis began to build in earnest last year when Trump reneged on the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and the US, Europe, China and Russia. When signed, the deal was hailed as a major diplomatic achievement, allaying fears Iran was secretly trying to acquire nuclear weapons by imposing strict, independently verifiable curbs. The US decision to trash it was just the start.

Trump went on to impose probably the most severe, wide-ranging economic and financial sanctions ever levied, including an embargo on oil sales. He also vowed to punish third countries, including allies such as Britain, if they continued to trade with Tehran.

Trump justified his action by claiming the 2015 treaty was a bad deal. Iran might still eventually build a bomb, he claimed, while the pact did not constrain its ballistic missile programme or its “destabilising” regional activities. He just wanted Iran to act like a “normal” country.

That was interpreted, in Iran and elsewhere, as a naked bid to enforce regime change. Indeed, Trump has encouraged opposition street protests amid suggestions the regime’s expensive foreign entanglements are unpopular with Iran’s hard-pressed, tax-paying public.

In recent weeks, the US has stepped up its so-called “maximum pressure” campaign, designating the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organisation and cancelling remaining waivers allowing some countries to buy Iranian oil. Iran’s oil exports have now fallen to 1 million barrels per day (BPD) or less from a peak of 2.8 million BPD. Exports could fall as low as 500,000 BPD this month.

Pompeo and Bolton also set a new trap over proxy forces. Official policy now states that “any attack on US interests or on those of our allies” will be met with “unrelenting force” directed at Iran. Any one of dozens of pro-Iran Shia militias in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria or Yemen, or any terrorist group or individual wishing to make trouble, potentially has the power to provoke direct US-Iran armed confrontation by attacking “US interests and allies” anywhere at all.

Relentless, seemingly implacable American hostility is producing an inevitable reaction inside Iran where, for many, the US-Iran war of 2019 has already begun. The military encirclement is tightening. The country is being strangled economically. Ordinary people face growing hardship. Emboldened regional enemies are queuing up to strike. And it seems nothing will silence Washington’s war drums.

That, at least, is how Iranian hardliners, including the powerful clerical establishment, the judiciary, conservative media outlets and Revolutionary Guard commanders, increasingly appear to view the present crisis. Their influence is growing as the inability of Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s moderate president, and his allies to fend off US pressure becomes more evident.

Defiant Iranian rhetoric is flying hard and fast. Scorning America’s “gun to the head”, the Revolutionary Guards general Saleh Jokar warned last week that Iran could “easily” strike US navy ships in the Gulf. But his assertion that the US “cannot afford the costs of a new war” smacked of dangerously delusional thinking. Saddam made a similar mistake.

Rouhani’s policy of “strategic patience” is now widely dismissed as a failure. Bending to his critics this month, he said Iran would cease to observe some of the terms of the 2015 deal. At the same time, he urged European countries that still support the agreement to do more to circumvent US sanctions. He received short shrift from France and Britain, while at home his move was dismissed as “minimal”.

Rouhani’s second term has two years to run, but he is plainly in trouble. His recent call to the public to prepare for sacrifices even greater than those during Iran’s 1980s war with Iraq did not go down well. Internal repression, arbitrary arrests and censorship of social media, which he once vowed to eliminate, are increasing. Hopes of democratic reform that blossomed in the 2009 “Persian spring” have faded.

US-Iran enmity is by no means new. It dates back to the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah, a western ally, and the subsequent, prolonged hostage siege at the US embassy in Tehran. Some Iranians believe the US has never forgiven that humiliation and has sought revenge ever since. That is given as a reason why Washington backed Saddam, and sold him weapons, during the Iran-Iraq war. Others say it is majority-Shia Iran’s emergence as a regional power that enrages the Americans and Trump’s allies, the Sunni Muslim patriarchs of Saudi Arabia.

In one sense, modern Iran is following a well worn path as its strength grows, extending its reach and influence in much the same way as 19th-century America. The chaotic aftermath of the Iraq invasion helped expand its grip. But many in the Sunni Arab world decry Iran’s advance as malign, while Washington has never taken kindly to those who challenge its global prerogatives.

Iran’s role, with Russia and Hezbollah in Lebanon, in rescuing Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite regime in Syria is nothing to be proud of. Many atrocities and much suffering can be laid at its door. Iran’s hand is also seen in the fight between Houthi rebels, the Saudis and the UAE in Yemen. Bahrain, among others, accuses Tehran of stirring up trouble with its Shia majority. In all these cases, in fact, the Shia-Sunni divide is an important factor.

Most of all, Iran’s growing regional power is seen by the US as a direct threat to Israel. Leading Iranian political and military figures, notably the former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have repeatedly threatened to wipe the country off the map. Iran is building military bases in Syria, within close missile range. And Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister and Trump buddy, remains convinced the mullahs, despite denials, are hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.

In short, America does not lack for reasons to fear Iran. But does that justify the use of military force? Like Iraq in 2003, all the ingredients for war are again present in 2019: old grudges, new weapons, dodgy intelligence, personal animus, opposing ideologies, regional, territorial and religious rivalries, and competition for resources, particularly oil.

Optimists say both sides are posturing, that it is a war of nerves, not missiles, and that all-out conflict is unlikely. Pessimists say battle has already been joined on multiple fronts and will surely escalate.

Strangely, given his record, Trump could be the person to stop the dread descent to war. Though he does not give a fig about democratic self-determination or human rights, he would like to see a pro-western government in Tehran. His Israeli and Saudi allies desperately want to de-fang Iran and he insists he will defend US interests. He has surrounded himself with hawks and headbangers. On both sides the potential for miscalculation – of war by accident – is massive.

Yet Trump says he does not want a fight and has offered to talk to Iran’s leaders, possibly using Swiss intermediaries. He has consistently criticised unpopular and expensive armed interventions in the Middle East. His gut instinct is to fight America’s battles by all means other than military. He would be loath to launch another war as US election year approaches.

The ruling class has never been “loathe” to make war.

Just the opposite, as Margaret Thatcher re-discovered with the 1982 colonialist war over the Argentines’ Malvinas Islands (thievingly called the “Falklands”), it is one of the best tricks in the ruling class armoury to distract the masses and stampede “popular patriotic opinion” behind the scapegoating and fingerpointing blame game, to cover-up the failures and incompetence of the entire class system as crisis deepens.

But what it is loathe to do is lose wars and suffer defeats; it is through such setbacks and blows to imperialism that mass consciousness will be (and to some extent already has been) unlocked and transformed, and the door opened for rebuilt revolutionary Marxist struggle.

And the dangers have already been underlined by the setbacks and chaos with Afghanistan and Iraq. If they could not be pacified, one among the most backward territories on the planet and the other a country just one quarter the size of the 85 million strong Iran, how is this vast territory to be brought under control????

How many body bags and flag-draped coffins of US casualties can be tolerated before the gung-ho populism behind Trump (always overstated anyway) collapses or worse, swings round in a qualitative change???

The 2016 election was already built on “bringing the troops back home”, on “not wasting money for the Washington elite” and “leaving the rest of the world to get on with it”.

Trump’s Mussolini-strut buffoonish bragging is hesitating nervously:

The acting US defence secretary has claimed that the alleged threat from Iran has receded as the result of an American show of force in the Middle East.

“We’ve put on hold the potential for attacks on Americans,” Patrick Shanahan told reporters before briefing Congress on the situation in the Persian Gulf and the military deployments that the US said were a response to a danger of imminent attack.

The arrival of an aircraft carrier and its accompanying ships was recently accelerated, and B-52 bombers were sent to Qatar.

Nerves in the region were put even more on edge on Sunday by Donald Trump’s tweeted threat that any conflict with the US would mean “the official end of Iran”.

Asked what he meant by saying that the threat was “on hold”, the acting defence secretary said: “There haven’t been any attacks on Americans. I would consider that a hold.

“That doesn’t mean that the threats that we’ve previously identified have gone away,” Shanahan added. “Our prudent response, I think, has given the Iranians time to recalculate. I think our response was a measure of our will and our resolve that we will protect our people and our interests in the region.”

The Trump administration did not make public the intelligence it claimed showed an imminent Iranian threat to the US in the Middle East, but officials briefing the media claimed that overhead photography showed missiles being loaded on to dhows on the Iranian coast, and chatter about potential attacks on US facilities and personnel in Iraq. The state department withdrew non-essential staff from its embassy in Baghdad and consulate in Erbil.

It was unclear what Iran’s aim was supposed to be in loading missiles on to dhows. Experts said that it would be very difficult to fire a missile from a small boat and if the intelligence reports were true, it was more likely they were being shipped to the Houthi movement in Yemen, or moved for safekeeping.

...“My take is that the Iranians saw an attack coming and they prepared to strike back and that caused alarm in the White House and particularly with the president,” said Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council, who now teaches at Georgetown University.

“The line sold to Trump by Bolton and Bibi Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Salman is he could strike Iran, show US dominance, and not risk anything. Iran showed it was preparing to strike back. Trump is smart enough to know that a war would be devastating, and not just for his political interests.”

None of which means any kind of “reason will prevail”.

Propaganda and diplomatic humiliation and retreat only add to the gigantic crisis facing the ruling class – and ratchet up the pressure to lash out if it is not to go under (and no ruling class in history has ever walked away from its sweet power and privilege).

Eventually war has to come.

If the Europeans are concerned (as they were in the war against Saddam), it is not out of “liberal principles” and some airy-fairy Euro-notions of post-war harmony but because they are as much the target of the vicious strangulation of Iran as Tehran itself.

Iran’s blockade sees them bullied out of their own vital trading deals, just as they are being arm-twisted by Washington to shut down economic dealings with China (particularly with the telecom firm Huawei at present as it increasing out-competes America’s monopolies despite their huge advantages) and with Russia over the huge Nord Stream Two energy pipeline.

All this escalated US trade aggression against a Europe which Trump has already called “the enemy” will ultimately turn on them in outright war belligerence, as they are declared a “problem” to be blamed for “causing” America’s decline (along with “Chinese cheating” and “untrustworthyness”, Latin American “socialism”, Russian “interference” etc etc).

Meanwhile, even if it hangs back for the moment, the White House sabre-rattling goes on, trying to drive Iran into the ground or to provoke an attempt to break out so that it can be declared the “aggressor”, just as Japan was pushed by US blockade into the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, and just as it does with Venezuela, Cuba and others, and against the North Korean workers state for having the temerity to stand up to US intimidation.

The risible “justification” of making the world safe is staggering hypocrisy from the great nuclear bully, the USA bristling with its thousands of multi-megaton missiles (and only country so far to have used atom-bombs in anger).

Pretending it is concerned about a “threat to freedom” from Pyongyang’s tiny defensive nuclear arsenal, is now echoed by its even more Goebbels black-is-white denunciations of Iran.

Firstly, on principle, Tehran has as much right as any other country to acquire or develop whatever weapons it needs and as Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein’s destruction both demonstrated, it would be stupid not to do so.

But secondly, what kind of outrageous posturing is it to declaim against what is no more yet than mere possibility of a nuclear weapon, by making terrorising threats about the “official end” of the country, which can only mean nuclear devastation and thus bring on the very horrors supposedly being policed? (and policed solely by the self-assumed world authority that “might is right” which no longer makes much effort even to pretend it is upholding “democracy” and the “rule of law”).

Like that in Saudi Arabia, or the Jewish occupation of Palestine?? In Thailand??

Which emphasises a third point, that all this comes when Iran is facing even more immediate terror-threats from the world’s most rottweiller nazi-regime in the genocidal Zionist occupation (falsely called “Israel”) which has been armed to the teeth with hundreds of secretly developed nuclear warheads for at least 30 years in total defiance of world non-proliferation principles (which are thereby once more proven to be written on so much liberal wet tissue-paper, like all such “international community” principles and treaties, only ever made a meal of, or “actioned by UN intervention or NATO invasion” etc, against communist or anti-imperialist “rogue” regimes).

If anyone is most likely to use such weaponry it is this fanatically religious beserker regime, forced by its cuckoo-colonialist landtheft presence to permanently smite all and sundry around it, in an ever widening radius, to head off the inevitable and never-ending, justified and growing, Palestinian, Arab and regional resistance it causes.

Fourthly, their new, equally unstable allies, the bloodsoaked murderous thug royals in Riyadh are to get “nukes” too, courtesy of Trump’s sinister crew:

Saudi Arabia is within months of completing its first nuclear reactor, new satellite images show, but it has yet to show any readiness to abide by safeguards that would prevent it making a bomb.

The reactor site is in the King Abdulaziz city for science and technology on the outskirts of Riyadh. The site was identified by Robert Kelley, a former director for nuclear inspections at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who said it was very small 30-kilowatt research reactor, not far from completion.

“I would guess they could have it all done, with the roof in place and the electricity turned on, within a year,” said Kelley, who worked for more than three decades in research and engineering in the US nuclear weapons complex.

The satellite photos show that a 10-metre high steel tubular vessel, which will contain the nuclear fuel, has been erected, and construction work is under way on the surrounding concrete building.

Kelley said the main practical purpose of the research reactor would be to train nuclear technicians, but it also marked the crossing of a nuclear threshold. Before inserting nuclear fuel into the reactor, Saudi Arabia would have to implement a comprehensive set of rules and procedures, including IAEA inspections, designed to ensure no fissile material was diverted for use in weapons – something it has so far avoided.

The reactor has been designed by an Argentinian state-owned company, Invap SE...

The emergence of the satellite images, comes in the midst of a struggle between the Trump White House and Congress over the sale of nuclear technology to Riyadh, after...the US department of energy had granted seven permits for the transfer of sensitive nuclear information by US businesses to the Saudi government.

The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the energy secretary, Rick Perry, have both stonewalled congressional committees demanding to know what the authorisations were for.

On Tuesday, the head of the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Kristine Svinicki, and her fellow commissioners remained silent when repeatedly asked by Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen, whether the commission had been consulted on the nuclear permits.

Tempers flared last week in a confrontation between Pompeo and the Democrat-run House foreign affairs committee, when legislators demanded to know why the administration appeared to be shielding a Saudi regime responsible for wholesale human rights abuses, mass civilian deaths in Yemen and the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi.

Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, told Pompeo: “If you cannot trust a regime with a bone saw, you should not them with nuclear weapons.”

Sherman the permits represented an effort by Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner to bypass Congress, and spare the Saudi monarchy strict limits on its nuclear programme.

Whatever particular developments unfold, this febrile powderkeg atmosphere is the reality of world capitalist collapse (see box).

It throws a glaring light on the Brexit developments, and the chauvinism and jingoism being whipped up, for the trade war conflicts to come.

The demented wish (need) in every country is to stir up as much jingoism and hatred for others as possible, along with protectionism, import controls and “patriotic” war fever (also using hyped-up, emotive demonisation of “world terrorism”).

Brexit is part of all that, dragging the working class behind the scapegoating and hostility deliberately fomented by the Boris Johnsons, Rees-Moggs, Nigel Farages and Tommy Robinsons (all amply funded by ruling class money and other hidden help) and all their neo nazi equivalents and fellow travellers across Europe and America.

These are no “new kind of politics” despite their pretences about “online democracy” and challenges to “establishment stitch-up” but merely a more extreme version of the lies, hatred and viciousness of all capitalist rule.

Not only do they not challenge capitalism, they line up with the most aggressive wing of capitalism, Trumpite fascism itself, and are in total cahoots with it (Farage so entwined that he even makes guest appearances on Trump’s rabble-rousing platforms).

So while the working class wish to use “voting for Brexit” as a two fingers gesture of contempt for the establishment is an understandable sentiment, it means it is actually being dragged down a disastrous path of backwardness and reaction as the EPSR was warning even 20 years back (No 1015 06-10-99):

But the practical catastrophe of one national group of workers being misled into blaming a rival national group of workers for their economic plight which is solely down to the CAPITALIST SYSTEM, can never be fudged, no matter what pain such explanations might need to cause. Equally, no misunderstanding must be left unchallenged that an excess of ‘foreign’ capitalists is the cause of working-class problems, or could ever remotely be so, organised in a customs union or an imperialist trade-war bloc (EU style) or whatever.

The notion of too many ‘foreign’ capitalists is just as national-reactionary as the notion of too many ‘foreign’ rival workers, - both equally playing into the trap of making workers seek chauvinist solutions (rather than class-war solutions against ALL capitalists, whatever their nationality and however grouped). The ONLY socialism is Leninist socialism, which refused to go along with the nationalist clamour in 1914, corrupting 99.99% of all workers in all countries of Europe which said: “No foreign capitalists invading ‘our’ country to exploit ‘our labour’ and abuse ‘our’ women”, etc.

The sole acceptable class-war view as far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, was to see inter-imperialist war as the priceless opportunity to take advantage of any defeat for the Russian exploiting state to overthrow it, and by that way ALONE rid Russian workers of the degradation of imperialist crisis is warmongering.

If capitalist states start carving each other up in super-imperialist cartels, or open trade war, or even all-out shooting war, it is a signal for workers to concentrate harder than ever on seizing the opportunity to overthrow their OWN ruling class, and urge the working classes of the ‘foreign’ countries to overthrow their 0WN ‘foreign’ capitalists at the same time. It can only be DISASTROUSLY disruptive and mis-educative to indulge in the faintest trace of chauvinist opportunism to work up indignation against ‘foreign bosses’, in any way, shape or form.

This piece was aimed particularly at the petty nationalism of the Scargillite Socialist Labour Party and its “import controls” and protectionist calls, as well as the Harpal Brar Lalkarite revisionists grovellingly embedded within the SLP and giving it “theoretical justification”, though it applies to all “left” Brexitism, (Morning Star CPB, the Socialist Worker SWP, the Spiked Online petty bourgeois residue from the poisonously anti-Soviet Trot RCP) as well as to the Remainer complacency (CPGB Weekly Worker eg) which ignores the antagonisms and nationalist breakdown tearing everything apart, including Europe itself.

The Brarites, in their new Proletarian CPGB-ML alter ego, are still playing the same game despite their ostensibly hostile break with Scargillism in 2004 (after eight years of uncritically soaking up every ignorant and trade-union bureaucratic class-collaborating word - see EPSR No 1245).

Not only are they blaming a European “bosses club” once more for what is the general problem of all capitalism (all of which is owned and exploited by “bosses clubs”, inside and outside of Europe) but they have gone all out to justify lining up with the Farage-ites, painted in almost progressive colours using the most outrageous sophistry and pseudo-Marxist misrepresentation to justify a capitulation to this outright nationalism.

This rowing in with the petty bourgeois mood stirred up by this jingoism, tries to twist its way around the glaringly backward Little Englander chauvinism of it all, still expressed by Scargill, and the concomitant xenophobic nastiness which it is prey to (not inherently a working class position, but one they are vulnerable to without better leadership) - by turning things on their head.

“Of course we don’t think being out of Europe will rescue workers conditions as such” says the CPGB-ML, and it might even lead to further hardship “for a while” (!! - but not forever seemingly even while capitalism continues). “No, we realise it will worsen things but that is good because it weakens imperialism.”

Thus it becomes “progressive” to row in with the ultra-reactionaries and even to vote for them!

Opportunism has rarely been more slippery.

It is all pulled off with the most outrageous upside-down “logic”.

Instead of Brexit being a symptom of imperialist breakdown and one side of it only, the Proletarianites declare it to be a cause of that breakdown.

From that they then pretend that Brexit is not simply an advance for workers but one that takes a “step” on an implied revolutionary road.

As always this revisionist woodenness does not actually spell out the revolutionary implications at all, let alone how class war understanding needs to be built, but implies that the supposed “advance” will emerge spontaneously and somehow be realised even as capitalism continues, driving the masses into the floor.

This in fact is not actually revolutionary at all but the most dishonest and treacherous sophistry, or horse-dung to use a technical term.

Here’s a sample:

Choosing to ‘stand with’ the EU imperialists (imperialist ‘internationalism’) or to ‘stand with’ the British imperialists (imperialist ‘nationalism’): is that the essence of Brexit?

No. Brexit hurts European, British and US imperialism alike, as our party has emphasised since the beginning of the debate leading up to the referendum (in which 17.4 million voted to leave the EU, as opposed to 16.1 million who voted to remain).

To vote for Brexit does not make you a racist, even if there are people making racist, xenophobic or anti-immigrant arguments in favour of Brexit. Our party has always pointed out that the anti-immigration lies that are peddled to workers by all the capitalist parties, Labour included, are aimed at dividing us against one another and stopping us from putting the blame for our problems where it really lies – with the capitalist system.

Moreover, the EU imperial project itself is most definitely a racist one, with its ‘Fortress Europe’ plan (complete with detention centres for non-European immigrants), its two-tier system of privileges for those who originate in the imperialist core countries (France, Germany, UK) and those whose countries were only admitted so they could provide a cheap, mobile and non-unionised labour force (the former socialist republics in particular), and its backing for wars against any country in the world that tries to stand up against imperialist control (Yugoslavia, Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, etc).

Significance of the Brexit party

The Brexit party has been formed and launched with a single policy and a single intention: to pressure the government into carrying out the result of the 2016 EU referendum.

It is therefore only on this question that we need to ask ourselves whether we agree or disagree; whether there is anything useful to be gained from supporting the party at the ballot box.

The ongoing campaign in the Guardian and other liberal imperialist media to scare workers away from supporting the Brexit party with lurid stories of the racist views of some of its candidates and backers is a re-run of the campaign that such outlets ran during the referendum itself. They are continuing to push the narrative that voting for Brexit makes you a racist, and they are hiding the fact that there are PROGRESSIVE reasons why workers should vote to leave the European Union.

The truth is that there are racists on both sides of the Brexit debate, and those whose voices we hear in the mainstream media, whether leave or remain, are almost all racist supporters of a racist system. In which case the question is not ‘Is it ok to be on the same side as a racist?’, but ‘Is there an outcome that will damage the interests of the ruling elites?’

And the answer to that is YES. A REAL Brexit will deepen the divisions between the imperialists on a global scale and exacerbate the splits amongst our rulers at home. The harder the Brexit, the more the imperialists will be set back. Why else are our parliamentarians so desperate to find a way to overturn it? Why is it taking up all the resources and attention of our politicians to the exclusion of everything else? [British workers have demanded Brexit - Proletarian 17 February]

This gobsmacking nonsense is riddled by extraordinary contradictions and non sequiturs from which the Proletarianites can only escape by bending reality.

The core problem is that far from damaging all the “ruling elites” and setting back all sides of imperialism, Brexit benefits some and undermines others relative to their rivals in the great conflicts now ripening (or so they think).

Of course overall divisions are deepening but that is happening anyway because that is the nature of monopoly capitalism and its crisis which has driven these chauvinist tensions to the fore.

The question immediately thrown up is why any of the capitalists would advocate Brexit at all if it was so damaging – let alone spend vast amounts on advertising manipulating referendums? As a class they have 800 years of experience in staying on top, and the last 200 of those using the lying fraud of “parliamentary democracy” to fool everyone; they know what they are doing.

Far from being “desperate to overturn Brexit” many of the ruling class do not think it damages their interests at all but see it as their best prospect for survival, first by choosing to stand with American imperialism as trade war deepens and thereby out of the line of fire on the EU (albeit at a high price in letting in the US monopolies to pick over the remains of the British economy), and secondly precisely by whipping up diversionary jingoism in the working class, distracting them from real revolutionary grasp.

It is a particularly effective mechanism in a country with an imperial past, with class collaborating traditions running deeper than almost anywhere else to mislead and corrupt the working class, and which still hold it back, despite steadily growing contempt and cynicism as the British ruling class prestige has imploded and the working class has seen endless sellout and betrayal.

Others do want to stop it of course - but that argument is precisely what is paralysing the ruling class.

Proletarian’s bizarre logic wriggles around this awkward fact by pretending this wing of the ruling class comprises merely a few not very significant or essentially disinterested figures -

“generally non-imperialist who do not benefit from EU membership”.

That would be Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, Ian Duncan Smith, etc etc, who are so far embedded in the most reactionary, patrician wing of the ruling class that they can barely speak through their pseudo-aristocratic strangled vowels?

“Non-imperialist”???

And what of the string of major industrialists and commercial bosses, like Anthony Bamford of JCB, Dyson, ultra-billionaire Jim Ratcliffe (Britain’s richest man) and Weatherspoons owner, Tim Martin?? All for Brexit.

This astonishing misrepresentation is added to by declaring that the ex-stockbroker and very well off Nigel Farage is no more than

some random banker (Farage), who for his own reasons starts a single-issue campaign (against the EU).

No need to go deeper than that - this is not Marxist materialist analysis after all is it?

All this playing down is needed to sustain the main thrust of Proletarian’s account that secretly the “dominant section” of the ruling class has never had any intention of putting through Brexit, a halfway conspiracy theory which serves to prop up the assertion that it is all a “bad thing” for imperialism – and lo and behold, therefore to be supported by workers.

This sleight of hand is backed up with another sly twist suggesting the bourgeois press has been in on the whole thing too (as mentioned above) citing the Guardian and “liberal” media. But the mass circulation papers??? The Mail, the Sun, the Telegraph?

They support Brexit of course. Why??

Hanging from all this misrepresentation is the notion that the working class has had “its” Brexit “stolen” from it. And from that in turn hangs the notion that the Referendum is a) a valid expression of the “will of the people”, which is obvious crap, and b) even it were (and had not been as twisted and bent as any other part of the bourgeois democracy racket - in fact more so), that such a popular opinion would necessarily be any kind of guide for the working class in understanding the crisis and the action that needed to be taken.

What a miserable exposure of revisionist dunderheadedness and retreat from revolution this all is.

Where has the leadership role of the revolutionary party gone? Or any role at all?

Since when has Marxism declared that tailing along behind whatever the working class currently thinks is the way forwards, or has been persuaded or brainwashed to think it is, or has latched onto because its daily struggle leaves no time to study the questions in any depth and the only information is the highly biased and distorted input from the bourgeois controlled media and entertainment system anyway?

Someone needs to check out Lenin in his mausoleum to see how fast he is spinning around – or at least get round to reading the thousands of words he wrote on the falsity and lies of bourgeois democracy (see EPSR No1550 or No1065) and of the crucial need to develop a party of trained cadres, all participating though constant polemic and analysis in the endless development of scientific revolutionary theory to provide a lead for the working class.

It could start by exposing the continuing brain-dulling influence of Stalinist revisionism so trapped in its own mistakes and their cover-up all the way back to the disastrous mistakes of Stalin himself, that it can end up leading the working class in completely the wrong direction.

While monitoring Lenin’s rotation, just how much smoke was generated by the suggestion that a plebiscite (referendum) of all things would be the way to measure working class mood or opinion, and is a way to move towards socialism; so much is this is the ultimate trickery in the bourgeois “democracy” hoodwinking racket, more easily manipulated and used as “authority” than even parliamentary “representation" - he will probable catch fire.

It was a favourite mechanism of Hitler and Mussolini for just that reason, its carefully manipulated populism able to trample right across the timid petty bourgeois “opposition” and its fearful illusions in “doing things the right way” (as set up by and controlled by the ruling class) and following the “majority democratic will”; its rejection of revolutionary overturn led by a party of scientific Marxist-Leninism let the Nazis into power - “democratically” – without even the attempt to stop them by the huge German Communist Party in 1933.

Only the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia eventually did stop Hitler (despite Stalin’s misunderstandings and retreats from Leninism) in the titanic battles of the Second World War, virtually a repeat on a grander scale, of the 1917 revolution itself, led by the CPSU (ie Stalin) with enough remaining understanding to inspire tens of millions through the fighting lead it gave, without a single referendum to ask them first.

But it is that dictatorship of the proletariat understanding at the heart of Marxism which none of the “left” ever get round to, including the “hard nut” Brarites.

In fact class understanding itself has almost vanished with their articles constantly into references to what “the British people want”, that Brexit has been stolen “from the voters”, etc. That would include the millions of shire county Tories presumably???

What appalling chauvinism, no different to the Little Englander views they were propping up behind Scargill 15 years ago.

Build Leninism

Duncan Trubshaw

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London Leaflet for Palestine march - May 11 :

The revolutionary spirit of the Gaza rocket attacks, whatever the current militant ideology, is the crucial aspect of the fight against the genocidal nazi-Zionist occupation of Palestine. Shouting “No new Naqba” or “Release Palestinian prisoners” is hopeless social pacifism. Real solidarity is to build rational Leninist revolutionary understanding everywhere for the class war against the whole vicious capitalist tradewar crisis and its drive to WW3 as a “solution”. The Palestinians’ fight to end the artificial landtheft “state” of “Israel” ever more bound in to the general world struggle against US imperialist Catastrophe bullying and aggression for which the Zionists increasingly serve as a spearhead.

The latest brutal blitzkrieg “punishment” of the besieged Gaza enclave shines a floodlight on every squirming evasion and prevarication of the fake-“left”.

Specifically or generally, their “condemnations” of terrorism, universal since the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre, once more play into the hands of imperialism and its pretences to be a “victim”, the sickest of all the propaganda tricks used for warmongering and tyranny, particularly by imperialist Zionism’s nazi-occupation of Palestine.

Oppression of the Palestinians is so widely detested by the world’s masses that few “lefts” will want to comment directly, perhaps simply “describing” the events (like the CPB Morning Star).

But thereby they only underline their opportunism in not speaking out, as they usually do (not), and certainly not taking up the revolutionary issues.

Clarity is the vital need for all the world’s masses as the greatest ever crisis collapse of imperialism inexorably deepens into the greatest slump disaster and collapse chaos in history.

Implied or overt, general moralising against “terrorism” is not only on the wrong side but also misses the significance of the dogged and daring multiple rocket resistance launched by the Palestinians against the brutal nazi-Zionist occupation, as showing an ever intensifying and sophisticated fighting capacity by this section of the rising Third World revolt despite the huge disparity in strength against one of the most heavily armed and ruthlessly brutal powers on the planet.

Whether or not a Marxist movement would use this particular tactic at this moment, it is clear that the entire Arab and wider Third World have cheered on the blow that the Palestinian struggle was able to strike against the Jewish-Zionist oppression that holds it down under the most concentrated and vicious humiliation and persecution in modern history.

Their religious ideology is not Marxist Leninist science (and not necessarily on a straight line towards it) but the revolutionary spirit imposed a significant defeat on the imperialist/Zionist axis, notwithstanding the barbaric punishment raids launched in retaliation with yet more grotesque terrorising hi-tech “punishment” bombing, as always “taking out” dozens, including innocent Gazan women and children as well as alleged “militants”.

It is such defeats that will push back imperialism and open up the space for revolutionary Marxist understanding to be rebuilt in the world, not hopeless social-pacifist “release the prisoners” sloganising.

And while boycott movements can be a useful weapon, they remain at best an adjunct to revolutionary struggle and potentially even an obstacle if held solely at the level of reformism and counterposed to the need for revolution.

Worse still is the acceptance of “Israel” as a “real” state that is “here to stay” and any capitulation at all to the demented “left anti-semitism” lie campaign, conspiring to suppress all discussion on how and why this colonialist monstrosity exists at all.

This censorious bullying and scapegoating campaign becomes ever more intense with every escalation in the Jewish-Zionists’ colonisation which no longer bothers to hide its Greater Israel annexation plans, in complete defiance of all “international law”, United Nations resolutions and pretences of “freedom and democracy”.

The crude declaration of “sovereignty by conquest” over the militarily annexed Golan Heights in Syria, recognised by Donald Trump, and ever more in-your-face settlement construction in the West Bank and Jerusalem make clear the genocidal intent to completely eliminate the Palestinian nation, reinforced by the weekly “turkey-shoot” killing and maiming of the Palestinians in Gaza as they protest their stifling incarceration.

Even the remaining land – the tiny 22% of their own country “allowed” the Palestinians by the “international community” under plans for a laughable “two-state solution” is to be taken away or declared subject to formal Zionist diktat, and therefore their existence as a people denied.

That means they are on the way to permanent apartheid slavery or exile, or face increasing butchery and slaughter all the way to total elimination, at least down to the kind of rump existence imposed on the native American nations or the Aborigines in Australia, left festering in miserable unemployment, poverty and despairing alcoholism.

As one Likud MP sneered in the just completed and stitched-up “Israeli” election, the Palestinians “have a country; they can all move to Gaza”.

This sick fascist “joke” about subjecting all 8 million Palestinians to the effective concentration camp conditions of the continually bombed and persecuted Gaza Strip, where life is already intolerable for the two million jammed in to its limited space, and predicted by various humanitarian agencies to become impossible by 2020, sums up the now overt racist contempt of the Zionists and their increasingly sick and demented intentions.

And it could never be any different, however many “liberal Israelis” or members of the wider Jewish freemasonry in the imperialist countries, protest against the “excesses” of the more aggressively fanatical Zionist wing, while still supporting the artificially implanted “state of Israel”.

This is a colonial occupation by Western Jewish monopoly imperialist interests which uniquely went against the grain of the entire post-war period’s acceptance, worldwide, that the old colonial domination of the western empires had to end (under pressure of rising anti-imperialist nationalist struggles, no longer willing to suffer their oppression and inspired by the Soviet Red Army victories over Nazi Germany’s tyranny).

From the historical logic of this out-of-time US-Zionist colonialist insertion into the Middle East arises the entire “conflict” (as it is always falsely “even-handedly” presented by the bourgeois media) which pushes it down one path only – either the complete expulsion and eradication of the people who were living on the land now declared to be “Israel” or the eventual rejection and overthrow by the resistance against it.

And that can never stop because those dispossessed have no choice but to fight back against the ethnic-cleansing violent theft and takeover of their houses, shops, and cities, and olive groves, farms and fields, in which they have lived for a minimum of 1500 years.

Not one of the halfway house and compromise “solutions” – most notably the revisionist inspired “two-state” solution, offering the Palestinians some 22% of their own lands as a permanent state (and largely the driest, most infertile bits at that) can resolve matters, however much some opportunist and stooge petty bourgeois elements can be persuaded to go along with it (as much of the Palestinian Authority has).

Nor can any so called “one state solution” in which the dominance of the Jewish “state” continues and in which there is not the restoration of all the Palestinian property and the return to their own homes of all the dispersed and refugee Palestinians, or as many as wish it (the kind of restoration the Western world is usually very keen to implement when discussing aristocrats returning to former Soviet and east European communist states).

The latest fake-“left” and liberal one-state variant, for some kind of pooling of property to be redivided equably among Palestinians and a continuing “Israeli” Jewish population solves nothing either, since this is just another redistribution to the Jewish occupiers of “ownership” under a notionally “communal” label (with the proportions usually left conveniently unspecified).

Only the complete ending of this armed and tyrannical cuckoo presence, and full right of return for Palestinians can provide a just outcome as becomes clear and obvious once the 1940s origin of “Israel” in terror gang violence and military occupation is understood.

That is a revolutionary Leninist perspective.

It will not be built through the miserable “entryism” and parliamentarianism that the fake-“left” all continue to support, backing up the bourgeois Labour party in one way or another, (directly, or by pretending it needs electing “in order to expose it”) just when the Palestine issue among others unequivocally underlines its total opportunism.

Corbynism’s declaration of support for Israel, and its willing embrace of the nonsensical Jewish campaign labelling even the tamest opposition to the Zionist monstrosity as “racist anti-semitism” is a critical marker.

This has been a litmus test demonstration that supposed “left” Labour resurgence is as thoroughly part of the capitalist system as ever.

Propping it up is not a path towards socialism by “left pressure” (assorted Trots), “winning Labour to Marxism” (CPGB Weekly Worker), nor is there a need to “work through working class illusions” (CPGB-ML Proletarian) after some 12 Labour governments.

Building Leninism is the need.

Steven Tudy

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