Back issues

No 1567 7th December 2019

General election “choices” for the working class are a complete fraud on all sides. World economic catastrophe and the NATO split hints of coming inter-imperialist war are the real questions - totally ignored by the bourgeois parties and only answered by revolutionary politics to end this system. Voting for the Tories to “get Brexit done” is like turkeys voting for Christmas giving the ruling class another “democratic” stick to beat workers with more slump austerity. But Labour’s “hope” message is even worse, a hopeLESS floundering nonsense trying to fool workers that there is a future within capitalism. The relentless crisis demands class war to overturn this system – Labour’s spending fantasies disarm workers and invite Allende style Pinochet coups, as just seen once more in Bolivia. Leninist understanding needed

The bizarre and unreal atmosphere in the general election, full of lies, dirty dealing, media bias, internet scams, and laughable promises from all sides, underscores what a gigantic fraud capitalist “democratic” politics are.

No election in two centuries of gradually extended “suffrage” has ever got the working class out from under arrogant bourgeois rule, the degeneracy of its mindless “culture”, the constant rip-offs by corrupt and grasping private ownership, endless demoralising hire and fire labour exploitation, escalating drug and murder crime, terrifying armsrace international aggression and the general viciousness, alienation, stress, heartbreak and antagonism of life in its ratrace society.

Its hoodwinking racket is now a bigger joke than ever.

The one certainty for the working class is that whatever “result” is twistedly manipulated next week by deluges of advertising, fatcat media bias, outright lies and false statistics, it will leave them facing even worse deprivation, austerity, inequality, injustice and political domination than ever.

And that will never change until capitalism itself is ended.

Even the minor amelioration to the quality of life made in past boomtime “reformist gains” through post-war Labourism etc, have been stripped away (council cuts, welfare cuts, NHS sneak privatisation, housing cuts, safety standard cuts, legal aid cuts, education cuts etc etc etc) and there is no prospect of them being restored.

Just the opposite.

Things are about to get far, far worse as the great crisis Catastrophe of the world capitalist system heads for the rocks, the temporary rescue from disaster in 2008 (for the rich) by endless dollar and Euro QE money printing, about to implode.

The whole system was already just 12 hours away from a worldwide “financial nuclear winter” as then Labour chancellor Alistair Darling described it, saved by credit injection and it only just lurches on now, despite all the lying pretences of “recovery” and “full employment”.

When the props finally give way the unsustainable capitalist trading system will be even more polluted with valueless and ultra-inflationary dollars and open trade war hostilities, multiplying the problems tenfold.

But this giant elephant in the room of unsolvable capitalist crisis contradiction is the crucial fact that none of the politicians will even mention let alone confront and explain, and which makes a mockery of all their “promises” and plans, “costed” or not.

Or, to be more accurate, which exposes their manifestos and completely unfulfillable plans to be so much hot air and cynical posturing.

They all know it, Labourism, (“left” and “moderate”), the LibDems, the Greens and above all the ruling class Tories.

So cynical are the Boris-ites that they have hardly even bothered to make any serious promises, launching a cursory, thin Manifesto of glossy photos and little else on a slow-news Sunday and laughing outright when their various specific “commitments”, costings and weasel explanations are revealed as misrepresentation, not to say outright lies (tax cuts, housebuilding, new hospitals, no NHS selloff or insanitary chicken imports, etc), in the few serious interviews they deign to do.

Their plan is solely to tap (and whip up further) the backward chauvinism and Little Englander-ism of the population, inculcated by centuries of strutting racist Empire dominance and colonialist plundering and still running deep through the petty bourgeoisie and layers of the working class, particularly in the corrupted mentalities of official trade union class collaboration and its political wing of the Labour Party.

Despite many bitter battles and often outright heroism and huge sacrifice by workers to make progress historically, most of the reforms achieved in the past have been provided for from the super-profits of imperialist plunder, with the attitude then rooted in the TUC bureaucracy and Labour movement leaders of doing “deals” with the ruling class to “get a fair share”, while disregarding or even going along with the ruthless colonialist exploitation providing it (and still providing the “standard of living we enjoy” to this day).

A dozen Labour governments have not only accepted such overseas tyranny but have run the imperialist system for it (even founding the NATO western anti-communist warmongering alliance as the 70th anniversary “celebrations” reminded everyone this week).

By sticking to the “Brexit” mantra, the Tories hope to stampede enough of a vote from this deluded British nationalism and its “sovereignty” pretensions to give a small further lease of life to the preposterous notion of a “popular mandate” for the savagery and further Slump speedups that have to be made, particularly when one-sided deals have to be done with the trade-war aggressiveness of Trumpites.

Selling off remaining parts of the economy to America First rapacity is the price this “Empire” wing of the ruling class is willing to pay for being able to side with the US, once the full force of the international trade war/Slump disaster hurricane blows – as opposed to the Remainer wing which believes its best prospects are with the European monopoly bloc (see past EPSRs on Brexit).

Either way on Europe the working class loses out, with giant monopoly combines exploiting them even harder, inside or out of Europe.

It is total misleading treachery for the Left Brexiters like Arthur Scargill’s SLP, the SWP and the Lalkar/Proletarian to continue this philistine chauvinism, so bent it is now effectively, or even outright, counselling workers to vote Tory or the Brexit Party, outright ruling class parties.

“Getting Brexit done” is a meaningless fraud which changes nothing and leaves capitalism in control under a brutal Tory ruling class.

And it will not take long for the cold truth to hit, that there is no held-back “British potential” to be “unleashed” and certainly none that will come the way of the working class.

The British Empire is long defunct, save as a sidekick servant to the US, and its ruling class is one of the most ossified and sclerotic in the whole world, incapable of running a railway, or building one, leaving tens of thousands in terror every night in cheapskate fire-risk tower blocks and millions in poverty even when they have jobs.

It has long ago mortgaged or sold its industries and “service” institutions (banks, insurance, lawyers, Stock brokers etc) to the rest of the world bourgeoisie.

It lives by vile arms dealing and trading on its past glory and the luck of its position (the City, the English language, past connections) to filter feed on the world flows of capital, soliciting investment and finance from any disreputable source it can to siphon off “fees”.

It is like some shabby-suited “aristocratic” beggar, ready to service the primitive mafia-thug feudal sheikhdoms of the Middle East, and the carpet bagging Russian oligarch gangsters and to turn a blind eye to plenty of even worse; its “City” is a major money laundering centre passing through cocaine takings, stolen funds from tinpot dictatorships, tax avoidance cheques and more, all with a “discreet” murmur while slipping it quietly into a range of “offshore” tax havens, out of sight and the reach of the world’s “plebs”.

It dutifully runs one of the world’s biggest surveillance centres at GCHQ to spy and monitor the world’s population on behalf of American imperialism primarily (another reason for the Brexiters to be “embedded” in Washington’s fundament).

The moth-eaten reality of this “potential” is no better summed up than by the scandal-ridden, plump and oafish Prince Andrew, now “discreetly” retired because of his connections with the monstrous serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein in America (a kinder fate than would meet any of the working class tangled up with such degeneracy).

He is not only a member of the utterly pointless parasitical “royal family” “celeb” racket, paid for by tens of millions of the public’s money each year, to keep a susceptible part of the population distracted with stupid mindless soap opera, while being touted as “an example to us all” of moral values (!!!!!) but until recently was the leading “trade delegate” for grovelling to the monarchical pretensions of the ultra-rich (and equally arrogantly degenerate) Gulf and Saudi “princes”.

He makes an appropriate figurehead for the ludicrous plummy-voiced British ruling class and its patrician fantasies of “cutting it” on the world stage, by constantly begging favours and handouts.

The more fascist-minded of the bourgeoisie like the Murdoch press and Mail, who have always hated the chinless wonder uselessness of the aristocracy, have quickly moved to denounce not only his ludicrous excuses for “hanging-out” with the repulsive Epstein, but also to query exactly how come he has accumulated vast personal wealth given that his royal allowance is a “mere” £250 000 per year.

But they are only shooting themselves in the foot; the entire Brexit pretence hinges on the historically bankrupt fantasy of some special quality to “Britishness” and particularly the virtues of the “great and good” entitled to rule over us.

This empty bluster might well “win” a result yet however, if the ever-more rightfully disillusioned working class is not yet so disgusted by the whole degenerate opportunist parliamentary game that its ever declining turnout drops to such a low level that the pretence of a “democratic” decision becomes impossible to sustain (the reality of virtually every election in fact for decades with less than 20% voting for any particular party for the last half dozen elections and then mostly in a negative way, to stop the others).

But the alternative “left” on offer will have trouble overcoming their scepticism too.

The Labourite plans are pie-in-the-sky is a common feeling.

Obviously this is in part the propaganda of a reactionary press speaking for a greed-ridden ruling class which wants nothing to be given away, but it also comes from multiple past experiences of Labourite reformism being derailed or “blown off course” by economic problems and the demands of the markets or infamously the “Gnomes of Zurich”.

The plans are unrealistic, and complete fantasy for as long as the capitalist system continues.

The problem lies not in the obvious need and justice for the savagery and blight of the austerity impositions on the working class to be lifted, and not even in the notion that big changes could be made by taxing and tolling the rich as individuals and as capitalist corporations.

It is in the pretence firstly that it is remotely possible to do so within capitalism, and that the capitalist ruling class would calmly stand aside and let it happen.

Initially of course they will take their money and run, as threatened, fencing it around with international law:

Two of the UK’s largest power companies have quietly transferred the ownership of their British operations to offshore companies to protect themselves against Labour’s plan for renationalisation.

National Grid and SSE, which together own Britain’s gas and electricity transmission networks, confirmed on Sunday they had created overseas holding companies following Labour’s pledge to restore them to state ownership.

SSE has put its UK business into a new Swiss holding company while National Grid has shifted its gas and electricity businesses into subsidiaries in Luxembourg and Hong Kong.

The decisions, which follows a similar move by two water companies, are designed to protect their shareholders against any move to buy back the firms without paying what they would consider to be the full market value.

Last week, Jeremy Corbyn unveiled Labour’s most radical manifesto in decades, including the pledge to reverse several of the privatisations of the 1980s and 90s.

Then there is the inevitable reaction of the international markets, with potential sell-offs and a run on the pound if their profiteering is threatened – in modern times such is the scale of the funds they move, that virtually any economy could be turned over and bankrupted in hours.

The only way such nationalisations might be tolerated is if they suit the interests of the ruling class; that might be in slump conditions where it is no longer possible to make further profits, or where the privatisations have already stripped out as much value as possible by sweating the assets.

State takeover of the remnants for suitable “compensation” might be considered the best option by the private investors, just as after the Second World War when the bankrupt railway companies were nationalised in order to keep the remainder of British private industry going (dressed up by the Attlee Labour frauds as being for the working class and a million miles from the takeover without compensation which real socialism requires).

But even such corporate state-ism could still prove too much for the ruling class to swallow despite the limited scope and scale of the Corbynite programme which is only describable as “radical” set against past Blairite collusion with fatcat capitalism.

Sloganeering about “hope” is deliberately misleading, pretending to the working class that the world can not only continue under this rotten, vicious, callous and lying system but even improve.

It is completely hopeless even as an answer to the austerity facing the working class, barely beginning to take the rough edges off the cuts of the last decade, while requiring huge borrowing which will never prove acceptable to the bourgeoisie.

It is a deadly wool pulling exercise which drags the working class back behind the bankrupt “democracy” system, disarming understanding.

The whole programme is a posturing fraud which the working class is rightly suspicious of, and which leads them up the garden path; it does not remotely challenge the existence of monopoly capitalist exploitation and even the limited measures suggested will be “blown off course” by the markets, or there will be stronger responses from a bourgeoisie which remains in control of the state, the military and the army and the courts.

The latest bloody coup in Bolivia, on top of a string of constitutional and legal coups toppling most of the other “Bolivarian Revolution” left-nationalist regimes of the last two decades, should re-teach the working class just how far the bourgeoisie can and will go to stop real moves towards socialism through parliamentary means or even simply equitable redistribution, just as the 1973 toppling of Salvador Allende in Chile should have taught the deposed Evo Morales, or the brutal 2103 sacking of the Morsi government in Egypt, or a dozen other cases.

It is deluded and philistine complacency to suggest “that could not happen here”; not only has the military already publicly warned on TV that it could move if for example the Trident nuclear deterrent was removed, but the endless demonisation of the Corbynites with the foulest of lie campaigns since he was elected Labour leader already hints at the viciousness to come.

The demented “left anti-Semitism” conspiracy by the Zionists and the Jewish lobby, with its carefully timed and publicised lying interventions, trying to label all opposition to its monstrous landtheft occupation of Palestine as “racism” is the most glaring example.

But it also demonstrates the craven and opportunist nature of this Labourite “left”, cowed by the big lie onslaught so much that it has done the dirty work itself by setting up “inquiries and expulsions”, instead of challenging this total reactionary conspiracy (as exposed by al-Jazeera’s the Lobby documentaries eg).

On top of all that, the Labourites, fail to warn the working class of the far greater problems to come as the great Catastrophe hits, the trade war it is already generating reaches boiling point, and the whole world is plunged back into international/world war which has three times seen total devastation, each time on a far greater scale than before.

The entire election has heard not a word about it. But the signs of how ever greater and unstoppable monopoly concentration is leading to disaster appear almost daily:

Downturns historically come about once every decade, and it has been more than that since the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, banks were the “too-big-to-fail” institutions responsible for our falling stock portfolios, home prices and salaries. Technology companies, by contrast, have led the market upswing over the past decade. But this time around, it is the big tech firms that could play the spoiler role.

You wouldn’t think it could be so when you look at the biggest and richest tech firms today. Take Apple....which became the first $1tn market-cap company in 2018.

But hidden within these bullish headlines are a number of disturbing economic trends, of which Apple is already an exemplar. Study this one company and you begin to understand how big tech companies – the new too-big-to-fail institutions – could indeed sow the seeds of the next crisis.

No matter what the Silicon Valley giants might argue, ultimately, size is a problem, just as it was for the banks. This is not because bigger is inherently bad, but because the complexity of these organisations makes them so difficult to police. Like the big banks, big tech uses its lobbying muscle to try to avoid regulation. And like the banks, it tries to sell us on the idea that it deserves to play by different rules.

Consider the financial engineering done by such firms. Like most of the largest and most profitable multinational companies, Apple has loads of cash – around $210bn at last count – as well as plenty of debt (close to $110bn). That is because – like nearly every other large, rich company – it has parked most of its spare cash in offshore bond portfolios over the past 10 years. This is part of a Kafkaesque financial shell game that has played out since the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, interest rates were lowered and central bankers flooded the economy with easy money to try to engineer a recovery.

But the main beneficiaries were large companies, which issued lots of cheap debt, and used it to buy back their own shares and pay out dividends, which bolstered corporate share prices and investors, but not the real economy. The Trump corporate tax cuts added fuel to this fire. Apple, for example, was responsible for about a quarter of the $407bn in buy-backs announced in the six months or so after Trump’s tax law was passed in December 2017 – the biggest corporate tax cut in US history.

Because of this, the wealth divide has been increased...

That phenomenon has been put on steroids by yet another trend epitomised by Apple: the rise of intangibles such as intellectual property and brands...software and internet services are so scalable and enjoy network effects (in essence, they allow a handful of companies to grow quickly and eat everyone else’s lunch).

But according to Haskel and Westlake, it also seems to reduce investment across the economy as a whole. This is not only because banks are reluctant to lend to businesses whose intangible assets may simply disappear if they go belly-up, but also because of the winner-takes-all effect that a handful of companies, including Apple (and Amazon and Google), enjoy.

This is likely a key reason for the dearth of startups, declining job creation, falling demand and other disturbing trends in our bifurcated economy. Concentration of power of the sort that Apple and Amazon enjoy is a key reason for record levels of mergers and acquisitions. In telecoms and media especially, many companies have taken on significant amounts of debt in order to bulk up and compete in this new environment of streaming video and digital media.

Some of that debt is now looking shaky, which underscores that the next big crisis probably won’t emanate from banks, but from the corporate sector. Rapid growth in debt levels is historically the best predictor of a crisis. And for the past several years, the corporate bond market has been on a tear, with companies in advanced economies issuing a record amount of debt; the market grew 70% over the past decade, to reach $10.17tn in 2018. Even mediocre companies have benefited from easy money.

But as the interest rate environment changes, perhaps more quickly than was anticipated, many could be vulnerable. The Bank for International Settlements – the international body that monitors the global financial system – has warned that the long period of low rates has cooked up a larger than usual number of “zombie” companies, which will not have enough profits to make their debt payments if interest rates rise. When rates eventually do rise, warns the BIS, losses and ripple effects may be more severe than usual.

...the deflationary power of technology (meaning the way in which it drives down prices), exemplified by companies like Apple, could make it more difficult to manage.

Technology firms drive down the prices of lots of things, and tech-related deflation is a big part of what has kept interest rates so low for so long; it has not only constrained prices, but wages, too. The fact that interest rates are so low, in part thanks to that tech-driven deflation, means that central bankers will have much less room to navigate through any upcoming crisis.

[Then]...look at the debt offerings and corporate bond purchases being made by the largest, richest corporations in the world, such as Apple or Google, whose market value now dwarfed that of the biggest banks and investment firms.

In a low interest rate environment, with billions of dollars in yearly earnings, these high-grade firms were issuing their own cheap debt and using it to buy up the higher-yielding corporate debt of other firms. In the search for both higher returns and for something to do with all their money, they were, in a way, acting like banks, taking large anchor positions in new corporate debt offerings and essentially underwriting them the way that JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs might. But, it is worth noting, since such companies are not regulated like banks, it is difficult to track exactly what they are buying, how much they are buying and what the market implications might be.

..stunning Credit Suisse report that both confirmed and quantified the idea. The economist who wrote it, Zoltan Pozsar, forensically analysed the $1tn in corporate savings parked in offshore accounts, mostly by big tech firms. The largest and most intellectual-property-rich 10% of companies – Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) among them – controlled 80% of this hoard.

According to Pozsar’s calculations, most of that money was held not in cash but in bonds – half of it in corporate bonds. The much-lauded overseas “cash” pile held by the richest American companies, a treasure that Republicans under Trump had cited as the key reason they passed their ill-advised tax “reform” plan, was actually a giant bond portfolio. And it was owned not by banks or mutual funds, which typically have such large financial holdings, but by the world’s biggest technology firms. In addition to being the most profitable and least regulated industry on the planet, the Silicon Valley giants had also become systemically crucial within the marketplace, holding assets that – if sold or downgraded – could topple the markets themselves. Hiding in plain sight was an amazing new discovery: big tech, not big banks, was the new too-big-to-fail industry.

There are plenty of other warnings and signals of world collapse.

And the splits and tensions at the NATO “celebrations” this week, revealed how near the surface are the international conflicts, with the old “international community” order of the major imperialist powers breaking down into every man for himself chauvinism, the giant US in the lead.

Trumpism is not a sign of the US withdrawing from war as the deluded revisionists suggest, still mind-numbed by “peace struggle” Stalin worship, but a sign of its preparations for much greater war to come.

Build revolutionary Leninism.

Tony Lee

West steps up its lie campaign against China with Goebbels garbage about Uighur “concentration camps” as its counter-revolutionary provocations in Hong Kong falter and genuine revolt and upheaval grows everywhere else against imperialist tyranny. The real barbarities imposed on the world are those by the West destroying country after country and butchering tens of thousands with its lying and meaningless “war on terror”. China’s re-education is humane and rational but revisionist lack of revolutionary perspective falls down by accepting the notion all “terrorism” to be condemned. Lalkar/Proletarian takes this to its logical end point supporting Egypt’s Sisi tyranny

Western despair that its six month long counter-revolutionary provocation in Hong Kong has failed to shake Beijing’s control of its city, let alone produce any similar upheavals on the mainland (a hoped for revival of the reactionary “democracy” Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989) now sees an escalation of its vicious big lie propaganda campaign about supposed “totalitarian repression” of the Muslim Uighurs.

However, instead of aiding the Western-coordinated “colour revolution” in Hong Kong, these wild and ludicrous allegations about “forced prison camps” and “brutal suppression” only serve to further expose the mendacity and grotesque hypocrisy of this anti-China campaign, driven by US (and sidekick British) imperialism’s growing trade-war belligerence, hatred of workers states and most of all the need to “justify” its own non-stop monstrous warmongering and brutality, escalating rapidly as the great Catastrophe of its crisis collapse draws ever nearer and it seeks to blame and scapegoat the rest of the world for it.

The nonsense and lies of this Goebbels campaign are apparent as soon as any rational examination is made of the supposed “tyranny” being imposed on the Xinjiang province where the roughly 10 million strong traditionally Muslim Uighur population lives and the reasons for it; and a comparison is made with Western responses to jihadist and “terrorist” upheaval across the planet.

Washington, and its “allies” like Britain, have suppressed and terrorised populations in countries across the Middle East and Africa for two decades (on top of three centuries of colonialism before that too), with horrific torture, brutal massacres, indiscriminate bombing, total razing of cities and barbaric vengeance killing.

They have butchered tens of thousands of resistance fighters and far more civilians, women and children under the completely meaningless pretence of a “war on terror” (in fact an excuse for imperialism’s own warmongering agenda, the prelude to WW3).

The increasing revolt stirred up, for the moment mostly borrowing militant Islamism as its guiding ideology, has also spilled into China, causing a massive wave of terrorist attacks and bombings there killing hundreds.

In addition significant numbers of Uighurs have left to join ISIS and other jihadist movements in Syria and Iraq.

The Chinese state has responded with a programme of re-education and social control, not blitzkrieg destruction of the entire Province, or huge “collateral damage” and illegal assassination raids like those on Osama bin Laden by Obama-ism and al-Baghdadi by Trump.

As analysed further below, there are questions to ask on just what the re-education comprises and especially about revisionist notions on “condemning terrorism” in general (rather than solely when directed at a workers state).

But even so, this is a relatively humane and rational response which is in complete contrast to the imperialist barbarity from Afghanistan and Iraq, to the devastation imposed on Libya, Syria, Somalian and Yemen, and the fascist suppression in Egypt.

The Western lie campaign will ultimately backfire just as it is in Hong Kong where the “demonstrations” have become ever more openly reactionary and pro-Washington (and pro-Trump).

Riots and reactionary-anarchic violence have been whipped up there for six months not just to stir up local hatred and anti-communist feelings in the city but demonise China in general and beyond that, workers states and socialism in the broadest of terms.

The turmoil – even if triggered initially with some genuine underlying discontent against growing austerity caused by the endless capitalist crisis, unrolling since 2008 – was rapidly infiltrated by bourgeois provocateurs to turn it against China, pivoting around the fraudulent ideology of capitalism as a “free and open” system guided by “the will of the people” expressed in “free and fair” elections; this giant lie then set against the endless brainwashing by the bourgeoisie, since 1917, that communism and the workers states are nothing but “monstrous tyrannies” bent on making life as miserable as possible for their people (for unexplained, and obviously inexplicable – because nonsense – reasons), if not killing and torturing them outright (again for no conceivable reason).

This is total garbage turning reality on its head.

It is bourgeois “parliamentary democracy” which is the gigantic hoodwinking fraud and the worldwide colonialist tyranny it is part of.

All supposed “free vote” options are constrained by a highly limited choice of not-fundamentally-different parties, (who all run capitalism for the fatcats if elected), while the entire process is completely dominated by the propaganda and power of big money through lavish funding of political parties and “think tank” influencers, control of mass meeting places, and deluges of twisted advertising, and biased press, TV and increasingly social media (see main story too).

Even then the decisions that matter and affect ruling class interests will anyway be taken by the banks, multinationals, property magnates and oligarchs, and the finance markets pressure they bow to, all enforced by total brute violence and tyranny if necessary, – (when necessary), – as much of the Third World knows daily to its cost, and as the relatively privileged working class in even the richest countries has experienced in part, in many crisis or depression periods.

Advances by “reform” are only achieved for workers when the ruling class is facing revolutionary threat, and those only if the ruling class can “afford” it while holding onto to its dominance and power, ready to reverse the gains later (as with Thatcherism onwards and especially as workers everywhere are finding out as austerity bites and welfare, proper housing, the NHS etc, are dismantled and sold off).

Only all-out classwar revolution can really change things, permanently and completely, by fully taking all bourgeois property and control of production into working class hands, and breaking up the state forces (army, police, judges, courts etc) which protect the tiny ruling class minority and its specious privileged “ownership” of society’s resources by which it extracts the wealth produced by workers’ labour for itself (getting even richer).

The working class needs to replace the state with its own army and police force drawn from the armed masses, the huge majority in society, to protect their interests, as well as its own intelligence services to track down and root out inevitable counter-revolution by the now dispossessed bourgeoisie.

In other words it needs a workers state.

China is yet such a workers state, for all its flaws and major political and philosophical shortcomings of it leadership, saturated in the revisionism which the EPSR has continuously challenged in its fight for a return to Leninist revolutionary perspectives in the world struggle.

As far as can be seen, it is still ready to defend itself as such, despite illusions in “peaceful coexistence”, “not rocking the boat” and a failure to assert Leninist principles of revolutionary struggle as the starting point for all understanding.

And, again for all its flaws, it becomes steadily more powerful, and capable, while the capitalist system heads towards the greatest breakdown in history, raddled with incompetence, degeneracy and crude warmongering aggression.

Hence the constant skulduggery to undermine Beijing (and other workers states like Cuba and North Korea and “left” nationalism like Venezuela), and bolster the threadbare “democracy” fraud, the bourgeoisie’s best ever trick for keeping on top, disguising the fascist chauvinist reality beneath its hidden class dictatorship.

Illusions (delusions) in “democracy” are still a hugely powerful weapon fooling public opinion – constantly bolstered by non-stop propaganda from billionaire funded foundations and institutions, (and by the idiocies of the fake-“left” of all kinds, revisionist and Trot, still calling for votes and “left pressure”).

Hong Kong’s upheavals have seen full scale interference by these NGOs, most of them indirect, or not so indirect, fronts for the CIA and Western intelligence, like the “Foundation for the Defence of Democracy” or the “National Endowment for Democracy” and even USAID, as a recent useful Russia Today documentary has detailed.

The same programme showed how the supposedly “leaderless” street demonstrations were given their anti-Beijing direction by political reactionaries and local magnates in close contact with, and often funded by, the US (which has been taking them on trips to Washington, meeting senior Trumpites and lauding them in the demented rightwing media).

Instead of blaming the grotesque inequalities of the still prevailing “free market” in Hong Kong for the discontent – the result of forced continuation of a capitalist economy under the “One Country, Two Systems” arrangement, imposed by the Western handover treaty in 1997, when China was obliged to compromise for 50 years on the return of its own land, stolen by British colonialism a century before – this propaganda has whipped up anti-China feeling to head attention away from the real capitalist crisis cause of their troubles.

Hong Kong is simply suffering the “austerity” and increased exploitation which has been imposed everywhere through capitalism post-2008.

The anti-communist finger-pointing resonates particularly among the confused petty bourgeois students and marginally better off elements, whose class position leaves them vulnerable to the crisis but fearful of working class rule and discipline.

The same class psychology underlies much of the fake-“left” internationally, including easily swayed anarchist elements with no sound theoretical grasp and particularly the Trotskyists, who spend their lives pouring poison out onto the workers states and their gigantic achievements, both historical (the USSR first of all) and current.

It is no surprise they go along with the anti-Chinese sentiment and “democracy” bullshit – often by declaring China to have “reverted to capitalism” though obviously without being able to point at any counter-revolution since the 1949 communist triumph (because there has been none).

But the sharpening contradictions of the crisis, heading for a far worse world collapse shortly than that which threatened international finance in 2008, make this latest provocation more obviously reactionary than ever.

Under the general influence of Western philistinism and consumerist fantasies, and the specific subversion increasingly coming to light, the protests have rapidly degenerated into outright pro-imperialist counter-revolution.

The gross and murderous violence of the “street protestor” attacks on innocent bystanders and perceived opposition, murderous violence against the state authority, trashing of buildings and government facilities, and the cheering on of the most reactionary wing of imperialism, waving British colonial-era flags, Union Jacks and the Stars & Stripes, – (and with the core “pro-democracy” petty bourgeois sections now even staging a “Thanksgiving” march for Donald Trump!!!) – was already been making that clearer and clearer.

With it the twisted Cold War hate-campaign nature of the deluge of Western media backing has been exposed more and more, in its uncritical support for the most outrageous destructiveness and lynch-mob violence, despite the obvious lie that this turmoil was the “peaceful democratic protest” it purported to be.

The sharp contrast between the relative restraint and calmness of the justified and reasonable police control, and the appalling destructiveness of the “protestors”, has already been noted in past EPSR’s. Not one demonstrator has been killed, even after severe lynch mob provocation has forced the use of firearms (and that only twice in six months of escalating hate-filled attacks).

The two fatalities have been; one, caused by the demonstrators attacking a pro-Chinese bystander, and the other an accident when one demonstrator fell from a high building, (where he should not have been in the first place). Another near fatality of a man being burned, was a deliberate lynch-mob attack, by the “demonstrators”.

The Western media’s gross hypocrisy and fraudulent pretences about “international standards” and “speaking out against repression” are even more obviously reactionary when set against their virtual silence on atrocities and killings across the planet as the crisis drives more and more popular revolt against the growing contradictions and slump impositions of the crumbling world capitalist economy, massively escalating gross inequalities, poverty, slump and despair (even as the potential for better lives becomes more obvious with every great technological advance).

Not only is life increasingly intolerable for the masses and becoming so in the “rich” West too, but the whole world senses the rumblings of far greater disaster to come, as the imminent return of the greatest Catastrophic collapse ever, the temporarily put-off meltdown of 2008.

It will be far deeper and widespread than the 1930s Depression and the unprecedented horrors of World War Two that it led to.

The contradictions are already tearing life apart and preventing the masses from being able to survive at all or “get by” with all the usual (and mostly desperate) daily stratagems that keep them going in “boom times” despite their deprivations.

Hence the world is erupting from end to end in a gigantic uproar against the foul tyrannical exploitation of a system that is increasingly useless, pointless, indolent, corrupt and degenerate and becoming more visibly so.

Just on the weekend at end of November the police and army in Iraq were using live ammunition to shoot down dozens of demonstrators in the south of the country.

Hundreds more desperate demonstrators from the ravaged Shia areas, where even the tapwater is undrinkable, have been shot down by the US approved Baghdad stooge government over recent weeks; dozens have been killed in demonstrations in Chile against price rises and austerity; more in Haiti and Puerto Rico; even more in Indonesia shot down and killed.

But no Western cries of “police and state violence” are heard for these.

A few voices among the more thoughtful bourgeois press commentators have at last spotted some of the contradictions as the Iraq events grow more appalling, such as Patrick Coburn from the Independent:

The announcement that the prime minister was stepping down came after 36 hours in which the security forces had switched from killing individual demonstrators to massacres on a larger scale – with as many as 50 people shot dead on a bridge in the southern city of Nasiriya – bringing the number killed to 408, as well as thousands more wounded, since 1 October.

Compare this horrific casualty list over eight weeks with that in Hong Kong, where just one protester has been killed and one has died accidentally since protests started six months ago. Compare also the vast and sympathetic publicity given to the Hong Kong protests with the limited interest in the savage and unprecedented government clampdown in Iraq.

But the very rarity of such comments only underlines the gross bias and lies everywhere else.

Even that perspective, concentrating on the Middle East, still does not go far.

So for example there is Bolivia where the minority and nazi-minded elite descended from the original Spanish occupation (an early expression of the bloody and brutal European colonialism which has plundered and enslaved the world for five centuries) has carried through a vicious coup against the left reformist nationalism of Evo Morales and his local indigene support, the last in a decade of “judicial” and “constitutional” overturns which are coups in all but name, toppling the left reformist movement across the whole of Latin America – and barely disguised at all in Bolivia (see last issue).

But no sympathetic interviews with protestors’ representatives are broadcast by the BBC on an almost daily basis for the dozens of demonstrators being shot down here; or in Chile or Haiti; in West Papua and Indonesian capital Jakarta; in Puerto Rico; or from among the suppressed, arrested and tortured in Egypt, subjected to mass “trials” and mass executions.

Certainly there is no Channel 4 News, Guardian and BBC eulogising of the masses on the streets with encouraging on-the-spot live broadcast interviews, when it comes to the trampled indigenous people in La Paz, being shot down by the dozen as the new ultra-reactionary racist-elitist military coup has toppled the popularly elected left-reformist president Evo Morales.

Instead of the correspondents’ gush for the Hong Kongers, there is virtually uncommented British and American diplomatic approval of the Bolivian takeover and its declarations that the overwhelmingly popular Morales should be given “30 years in prison” for the “encouraging street revolt” against the minority (4% support) coup government.

So glaring is the hyper-hypocrisy and black-is-white lying that a few partial admissions have to be placed into those papers still trying to pretend a “liberal” agenda – though usually with a querying headline such as “Is this really a coup?”:

Indian massacres have returned to Bolivia. There is a history — a blood feud, to be precise — behind this tragedy. The self-declared “presidency” of Jeanine Áñez has revived the old oligarchy’s race hatred and the barbaric practice of Indian killing, the collective punishment of the nation’s Indigenous majority for daring to defy a centuries-old racial order of apartheid and oppression. Since the ousting of Bolivia’s first Indigenous president Evo Morales, security forces have carried out at least two massacres of Indigenous people protesting the military coup.

Only two weeks since seizing state power, the evidence is clear: this is a rightwing, military dictatorship. The telltale sign for a country like Bolivia is the outright Indian killing.

On November 15, the army opened fire on a peaceful demonstration in Cochabamba, killing eight and wounding dozens more. On November 16, a day after the Cochabamba massacre, Áñez issued a decree exempting the police and military from criminal responsibility in operations for “the restoration of order and public stability.” A carte blanche to kill at will, security forces have obliged the directive with increasing cruelty.

Last Tuesday, teargas and bullets rained down on a blockade at the Senkata gas plant in El Alto. Eight were killed, and dozens injured. And this was just the first week of Áñez’s presidency.

Two days later in La Paz, from behind armored vehicles, security forces showered a funeral procession with teargas and rubber bullets. The coffins of victims from the Senkata massacre fell to the ground as people scattered in panic, adding further humiliation to already grief-stricken families and communities.

The official death toll since the protests began is estimated to be more than 30, with dozens missing, more than 700 injured, and nearly a thousand arrests. Bolivia’s Indigenous majority are the primary targets of this racist, state-sanctioned violence.

The last time there was Indian killing of this magnitude by the state, Bolivia’s current opposition leader, Carlos Mesa, was vice president. In 2003, more than 60 Indigenous Aymara people were killed during the “Gas War.” President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada’s plan to sell oil and gas exports through a consortium of multinational corporations to the United States — continuing a centuries-long tradition of pillaging the nation’s resources for outside interests — led to a popular uprising demanding the nationalization Bolivia’s hydrocarbons, forcing the president’s resignation.

“I can’t accept killing as a response to popular pressure,” Mesa said in 2003 after the massacres. But he appears to have had a change of heart.

After losing to Evo Morales during the October 20 presidential elections this year, Mesa was the first to recognize Áñez’s coup presidency, while remaining silent about her authoritarian actions, her alignment with Christian far-right such as the millionaire Luis Fernando Camacho, and the massacres of Indigenous people taking part in popular protesters. Others find lessons in the rightwing-orchestrated chaos and liberal acquiescence.

“Behind every moderate liberal, you find a fascist,” Bolivia’s ousted vice president Álvaro Garcia Linera remarked about Mesa and his ilk in a recent interview.

There are also echoes from Bolivia’s past dictatorships, showing Áñez derives her authority not from popular power but at the end of a rifle barrel. In contrast to the Indigenous president she deposed, she wasn’t elected, and there was no civilian coronation for her presidency. The Plurinational Legislative Assembly, which normally appoints the president, like they did with Evo Morales thrice before, was nearly absent. Instead, a military general placed the presidential sash on Áñez.

The last time a general placed a sash on a president after a military coup was in 1980. That year, General Luis García Meza achieved a military dictatorship by assassinating the socialist leader Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz and massacring dozens of Indigenous miners.

The desire to overthrow Evo Morales and the Indigenous social movements that brought him to power has existed for years. The first coup attempt happened in 2008, when the Media Luna, which is composed of the four opposition-dominated regions in the East where most of the European-descended population is concentrated, tried to secede from the country. The racist separatist movement emerged amidst the drafting of a new constitution, which recognized Bolivia as a Plurinational state with the equal status of Indigenous peoples and control over natural resources. The region erupted into open rebellion, attempting to divide the country into two states: a wealthy one dominated by descendants of Europeans home to a large oil and gas industry and agribusiness and one with a poor Indigenous majority. The rightwing protests against resource nationalism and ending apartheid took 20 Indigenous lives.

The United States’ role in fomenting the racial divisions is without question.

The most recent wave of anti-Indian violence is made to look like self-defense. The interior minister Arturo Murillo, appointed by Áñez, wants to prosecute and imprison Evo Morales for terrorism and sedition for allegedly ordering the blockading of Bolivian cities. But testimony from survivors of the Senkata massacre tells a different story. During an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights hearing held on Sunday in La Paz, the sister of one of the men killed by security forces said it is Jeanine Añez, Carlos Mesa, Luis Fernando Camacho, and Arturo Murillo who belong in prison. Her brother was gunned down while walking to work, she testified.

Justice for the dead and wounded is still an open question.

Although the legislative body approved new elections, the decision comes with serious compromises and little promise of diminishing Áñez’s grip on power. In short, the outlook of “free and fair elections” is slim under the current oversight of an authoritarian government that massacres Indigenous people with impunity, imprisons social movement leaders, and charges anyone opposed to it with sedition or terrorism.

Indeed, a brutal dictatorship reigns.

For 14 years, Bolivian Indigenous movements broke the spell of invulnerability surrounding colonial oligarchy and the European-descended elite — and they still pose a significant challenge. An Indigenous president was proof that humble people of the earth could rule. This is their unforgivable sin.

Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an Assistant Professor in the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico and is the co-founder of The Red Nation, an Indigenous resistance organization

But such commentary is drowned by the Western hype and again makes no connections with turmoil elsewhere.

Even just next door are similar racist moves in Brazil by the new fascist Jair Bolsonaro government, with its talk of a return to the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s and opening up of the Amazon to big corporate mineral and agricultural plunder, not only devastating for the world environment (and crucial for global warming and species extinction) but threatening one million indigenes in that country too:

Brazilian lawyers and an influential human rights group including six former government ministers are seeking to indict the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro at the International Criminal Court for encouraging genocide against Brazil’s indigenous people.

Brazil’s Human Rights Advocacy Collective (CADHu) and the Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns Commission for Human Rights (Arns Commission) delivered an “informative note” to Fatou Bensouda, prosecutor at the international tribunal in the Hague late on Wednesday. It requested a “preliminary investigation of incitement to genocide and widespread systematic attacks against indigenous peoples” by Bolsonaro.

Bensouda will now request information from governments of Brazilian states and other countries, the United Nations and other intergovernmental organisations, NGOs and other sources to decide whether to request authorisation for an investigation, the groups said.

The non-partisan group of lawyers, former ministers and civil society activists said they had taken this drastic step against their own president because they believed Brazil faced an emergency situation.

“We believe there are elements that characterise genocide,” said José Carlos Dias, a former justice minister under the centre-right president Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

“It is very sad to see the president of Brazil face this process but it is necessary to protect the rights of our people,” Dias said. “The steps the government is taking remind me of the steps the dictatorship took.”

Since taking power in January, Bolsonaro has repeatedly denigrated Brazil’s indigenous people – comparing them to animals in zoos and “prehistoric men” – and overseen efforts to dismantle Funai, the already underfunded agency supposed to protect Brazil’s more than 300 tribes. He has also pushed to open up indigenous reserves to mining companies.

The brief argues that Bolsonaro attacks traditional indigenous life because it is “hampering the national development plans that the president intends to promote through infrastructure projects, mining enterprises, logging activities and agribusiness ventures in forested regions”.

As a result “the living conditions and lifestyles of the indigenous peoples are being destroyed by river pollution and invasion of their lands by wildcat miners, loggers and land-grabbers,” it says, noting the recent 29% increase in annual deforestation – the highest rate in a decade. Bolsonaro said after those devastating numbers emerged that Amazon fires and deforestation were cultural and would never end.

“We are facing a scenario of incitement of crimes against humanity,” said Eloísa Machado, a professor of constitutional law at São Paulo’s Getúlio Vargas Foundation and CADHu member.

The challenges to democracy and civic order in Brazil, the world’s fifth most populous country, have increased significantly in the past couple of weeks. As dangers to Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian president, and his movement grow, so, too, do the threats emanating from them.

Tensions reached a boiling point last week when the former president Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva was released from prison after Brazil’s supreme court ruled that the constitution bars imprisonment of defendants, such as Lula, before they have exhausted their appeals.

Lula is not only the obvious and most charismatic leader of the leftwing opposition to Bolsonaro but also the greatest prize of Bolsonaro’s minister of justice and public security, Sérgio Moro. It was Moro who found Lula guilty on dubious corruption charges in 2017 and ordered him imprisoned in 2018 at a time when all polls showed that Lula was the clear frontrunner to win the presidential election.

Lula’s release became a lightning rod for threats of repression. After the ex-president used his first speech to call for protests similar to those taking place in Chile, members of Bolsonaro’s party formally requested that he be “preventatively imprisoned” on the grounds that he was attempting to incite violence against the government.

But even before Lula’s release, the ways in which Brazilian democracy are imperiled were becoming more acute. In the past, each time the supreme court was set to rule on the possible release of Lula, more extremist members of the Brazilian military posted not-very-veiled threats on their social media accounts warning the court not to do so...

As the court was set to rule again this time, the same happened, and worse. Along with generals, leading members of the Bolsonaro movement – led by its US-based astrologer/“philosopher” guru Olavo de Carvalho – began openly advocating for a return of the dictatorship-era law AI-5 (Institutional Act Number 5).

...Previous reporting had already linked the Bolsonaro family to the violent militia that is believed to have been behind the still-unsolved 2018 assassination of my party compatriot and close friend, the city councilwoman Marielle Franco.

But a report earlier this month by the nation’s largest and most influential media outlet, Globo TV, suggested that the Bolsonaro family may be linked to the assassination itself. Globo reported that hours before Marielle’s murder, the driver of the car that killed her, an ex-police officer, came to Bolsonaro’s gated condominium to meet with the ex-police officer who pulled the trigger. The doorman at the gate noted in his records, and then testified to the police, that the ex-police officer gained entrance by saying he was going to Bolsonaro’s house.

According to the Globo report, someone inside Bolsonaro’s house authorized Marielle’s alleged murderer to enter the gated community.

Perhaps as revealing as the Globo report was Bolsonaro’s reaction. When the report broke, Bolsonaro was in Saudi Arabia – meeting with, and showering praise on, Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi autocrat accused of ordering the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In a rambling middle-of-the-night video, Bolsonaro responded to the Globo allegation with an extended rant against his enemies. Last week he announced he was cutting public funds to Globo, and the justice minister Moro announced that a criminal investigation not against Bolsonaro and his family but against the doorman who said that Marielle’s killers had gained access via Bolsonaro’s house.

The latter report is still saturated with illusions in abstract “democracy” but this trickle of doubts, will turn to a flood. Established prejudice is being shaken to the core.

Minds irredeemably poisoned by non-stop anti-communist propaganda, and refusing to challenge delusions about abstract “democracy”, might continue to be taken in – as will those wilfully ignoring history, to wallow in the shallow petty bourgeois philistinism that allows them to turn a blind eye to the worldwide exploitation which sustains their class-collaborating celeb-and-consumerism “lifestyle”.

So now comes the latest anti-Chinese Uighurs onslaught to prop up the failing Hong Kong provocations and sustain their prejudice.

The groundwork has been laid for some time by the Western media using all the tawdry tricks of ostensibly “secret” filming, outrageously distorted accusations of repression by axe grinding dissidents (never checked, let alone verified, and certainly not cross-examined), silhouette-filmed “witness” testimony and “satellite image discoveries” to imply sinister secrecy, all presented with “analysis” by CIA and similar types to a background of doomy clanking music.

The aim has been to pretend that the People’s Republic of China is actually little different to outright Nazism, running a “brutal regime of concentration camps” where “millions” of the local population have been “forcibly imprisoned” with the not-so-hidden implication that these are virtually the same as the nazi-death camps of the Second World War and the Chinese workers state a regime of “totalitarian nightmares and horror”.

It is the most disgusting and filthy LIE.

These “exposés” ignore completely not only the Chinese explanation of camps but the obvious facts, with wildly exaggerated numbers claimed for people undergoing re-education and of the camps themselves (with never more than one or two actually shown).

Instead a disgusting campaign of outright lies and filthy innuendo, carefully coordinated by the Western intelligence agencies has seen a round of theatrically revealed new “evidence” in form of an allegedly leaked “tranche of secret documents” about “orders to crack down” in the province.

Not by chance this just happens to be a distorted mirror-image of the way that revelations about imperialism’s actual warcrimes and torture, financial corruption and plundering, and spying and surveillance have been leaked to Wikileaks in particular in the last decade.

So this “trope” is used now as a cover by the intelligence agencies to give “verisimilitude” to this outright scam (an even sicker pretence given that they have Wikileaks founder Julian Assange still not only in gaol on trumped-up charges but possibly being driven towards death by mistreatment and torture, as senior doctors have warned).

But a few minutes reading the bourgeois accounts, and reordering their deliberate hype (with the Chinese responses hidden in a few paragraphs as the end) make a different story clear:

Hundreds of pages of leaked internal government documents reveal how China’s mass detention of Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang came from directives by Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, to “show absolutely no mercy” in the “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism”.

More than 400 pages of documents obtained by the New York Times show the government was aware its campaign of mass internment would tear families apart and could provoke backlash if it became widely known.

Beijing has repeatedly refuted criticisms of its crackdown in the predominately Muslim region, which has seen more than 1 million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minorities sent to camps where they are often subjected to political indoctrination. China has organised tours of the camps, which it describes as voluntary “vocational training centres” intended to provide “students” with job skills.

The documents, leaked by a member of the Chinese political establishment who hoped to prevent Xi and other leaders the ruling Chinese communist party from escaping responsibility, contradict those claims. That person requested anonymity, according to the New York Times.

According to the report, Xi first called for the crackdown in a series of private speeches given to officials during and after a visit to Xinjiang in 2014, weeks after Uighur militants had attacked a train station, stabbing and killing 31 people.

“We must be as harsh as them,” Xi said, adding, “and show absolutely no mercy.” In the speeches, Xi did not explicitly order – (!!!) – the creation of a large network of camps, but called for the party to use the “organs of dictatorship” to deal with extremism.

Other documents showed that officials looked at the UK as a cautionary tale of a government placing “human rights above security.” Instead, Xi encouraged officials to follow aspects of the US “war on terror” following the September 11 attacks.

Among the most telling of the documents is a script for local officials in Turpan in southern Xinjiang to use when the children of parents being “punished” and sent to a camp returned home for school holidays. Many of Xinjiang’s top students attend university outside of the region, in universities in other Chinese provinces.

Officials were instructed to meet students as soon as they returned home and explain that their loved ones had been exposed to religious extremism and were receiving “concentrated education” to eradicate them of “violent terrorist thoughts.”

If asked why the relatives could not return home if they are only receiving training, officials were to employ the language of disease to justify the prolonged detention and isolation. “Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health,” the script said.

The documents also highlight the extent of resistance from local officials. In 2017, more than 12,000 investigations into party members for violations related to the “fight against separatism.”

According to internal documents, one Han Chinese official was jailed for trying to slow down the detentions and protect Uighur officials.

Another, named Wang Yongzhi in charge of Yarkand county, was made an example of after he defied orders and quietly released more than 7,000 detainees. “He refused,” an internal document said, “to round up everyone who should be rounded up.”

As examined previously, the twisted innuendo and wild exaggerations – the figure of “one million detainees” is complete speculation for example – suggesting that all this amounts to “concentration camps” with the obvious not-so-hidden innuendo of “death camps”, is a complete outrage; they are clearly a firm but humane crackdown on a disruption which challenges the Chinese workers state and the planned society it is developing.

Of course in dealing with major violence and terrorism the workers state uses forced detention camps – but most of the inmates are held for around 18 months the small print reveals – not the “lock them up and throw away the key” draconian and vengeful punishment the British ruling class wants to stampede popular opinion with, locking “radicalised youth” into cells for much of the day in overcrowded prisons with limited educational or vocational resources (a move to prepare for suppressing leftism in the future).

These camps are clean, the inmates fed, and the accommodation reasonable as even the doom-laden TV documentaries are forced to concede, despite the fraudulent “evidence” of a few carefully coached dissident “witnesses” (often living in the West) alleging “torture”.

The “revealed” Beijing instructions include specific orders to avoid mistreatment, brute force, and intimidation, and to allow as much family and outside contact as feasible:

It is strictly forbidden for police to enter the student zone with guns, and they must never allow escapes, never allow trouble, never allow attacks on staff, never allow abnormal deaths, never allow food safety incidents and major epidemics, and they must ensure that the training centre is absolutely safe and free of risk.

For training centres with more than one thousand people, special personnel must be stationed to do food safety testing, sanitation and epidemic prevention work.

But every “revealed” instruction in these reports is twisted around by the bourgeois press. So, for example, the timescale for most of those being re-educated of about a year – is turned, in these report, into a lying suggestion of “indefinite detention”:

These requirements to “complete” courses show how detention is both arbitrary and indefinite. They mandate a minimum stay of a year in the camps, but no upper limits. It does not lay out standardised levels of Mandarin, or other requirements that if reached, would allow inmates – or “students” – to leave.

If inhumane and degrading conditions are to be found, and easily verified, it is in the enormous refugee and impoundment camps in Syria and Iraq holding not only tens of thousands of largely women and children displaced by the imperialist blitzkrieging devastation of the ISIS but many more straightforward civilian refugees, all in overcrowded and desperate tented “shelter” subject to the bitter winter cold and without even the most basic human medical, educational or welfare facilities (seeing small (and therefore obviously innocent) children die for want of fundamentals for example - as in the case of the British “jihadi bride” illegally stripped of citizenship).

Or find them in the much more long term effectively imprisoned lives forced on Palestinian refugees in camps in Jordan, and Lebanon, expelled for generations by the terrorising of the Jewish occupation and its forced ethnic-cleansing landtheft of their country started over 70 years ago and continuing ever since, with non-stop shelling, persecution, intimidation and routinely-imposed all-out massacre blitzkrieg.

Or the inhuman deprivations imposed on two million more, besieged and corralled in the narrow land strip of Gaza, without power much of the day, limited sanitation, restricted education, and stripped bare hospitals, mostly without drugs and just a few ageing bits of obsolete equipment, to deal with disease and injuries inflicted by endless military oppression, sniping, bombing and shelling.

No endlessly sympathising press reports and political statements are made for these people; instead speak out on the Palestinians’ cause and against the Zionist occupation and the worldwide Jewish freemasonry which either supports, or accepts, the “existence of Israel” (however “liberally “anti-Zionist” they claim to be) and there will be an avalanche of demented lies and nonsense poured down, turning reality on its head to pretend you are the “racist” and supposed reactionary purveyor of “anti-semitism”.

This deliberate inversionary untruth, which the grovelling opportunist Labourites and fake-“lefts” are forced to parrot and “sincerely believe”, (staggeringly and cravenly even setting up their own “root it out” inquiries to do the job for the ruling class), is a real life version of the character Winston Smith’s brainwashing in the novel 1984, in which he is finally forced to believe that “two plus two equals five”.

But that was a fiction – invented by the snivelling anti-communist police fink George Orwell (so beloved by the Trots) and deriving not from the Soviet state actions he blames, in his made-up story, but from the actual capitalist society all around him post-WW2.

The demented “left anti-semitic racism running rampant” propaganda stunt is a real version of this Goebbels trick.

And so is this latest bourgeois LIE against China, flinging around its scarey accusations of “dictatorship” to fool the shallow pro-democracy types.

Of course a workers state is a dictatorship, – but of the proletariat, developing society in the interests of the great majority instead of the interests of the tiny minority under the only other form of society there is in a class-divided world, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, exploiting the labour of the masses for its own wealth, power and privilege.

The measures China or other remaining workers states are forced to take by imperialism’s non-stop hostility and subversion, the firmer the better, should always be supported unconditionally by genuine communists.

That does not remotely preclude polemical criticism of Beijing, Havana or other revisionist leaderships to challenge their political or philosophical mistakes.

And a key question to take up here lies in just what the re-education comprises.

Its aim is obviously to head off discontent and build an understanding which will bring around the population in Xinjiang to willingly support the further building and development of China as a workers state (while their own cultural traditions are respected and recognised).

Basic cultural, economic and language integration – teaching Mandarin, job training etc – is not the problem.

But the foundation must surely be a Marxist political and philosophical grasp, with the oncoming crisis of the entire capitalist system at the centre and the need for the revolutionary overturn of the ruling class everywhere, the perspective.

Only such an overarching Leninist understanding can make sense of the great surge of “terrorism” in the world, what has driven it, and how it can be overcome (by defeating imperialism).

But there has not been any sign from Beijing that its approach to “terrorism” differs from the blanket condemnation of terrorism as a thing-in-itself, along the same moralising lines common to all the fake-“left”, particularly since the 9/11 attacks on New York, which has declared all terrorism to be either “unacceptable” or to be “all run by the West”.

This capitulates completely to the philosophically nonsensical notion of a “war on terror” which then leaves the imperialist system a free hand to pretend it is “policing the world”, when it carries out its endless warmongering and intimidation (which is solely driven by capitalism’s relentless pursuit of world domination and armsrace warmongering magnified by its world war needs as the system hits total Catastrophe).

As many times explored by the EPSR, eg (No 1248 14-09-04) the eruptions of terrorism and jihadism worldwide are nothing but the confused eruptions of anti-Western hatred driven by the crisis.

Reactionary, often sectarian or at least backward, as their barmy ideology can be, these are still the early signs of a mass movement that will eventually become (or since development is never straight-line, be dialectically superseded by) a much more coherent revolutionary struggle worldwide.

And that remains the case despite the attempted and sometimes successful manipulation of them by imperialism, as in Afghanistan in the 1980s against the socialist government there and its Soviet support, or in the Middle East to provoke a bogus extension of the Arab Spring in Syria and Libya (trying to head off and contain the revolt in Egypt which toppled the vicious Western stooging Hosni Mubarak regime - a brutal capitalist dictatorship not only supported uncriticised by the West but financed with $billion subsidies, since restored to the General Sisi regime).

In all those cases imperialism has been riding a tiger, with “blowback” coming eventually in the al-Qaeda attacks on the US (and on the Saudi royal stooges for imperialism), or in jihadist anti-Western revolt in Syria, which turned the attempted proxy war against Assad into the hugely problematic ISIS.

ISIS then consolidated the Syrian revolt with the Iraqi Sunni and Ba’athist anti-occupation insurgency against the Baghdad Shia stooge government which was set in place by the US (a government itself now partly toppled by the working class Shia movement which has been in revolt for weeks at a cost of hundreds of lives).

In all this seeming complexity since the Arab Spring, and particularly the Syrian war, the only way to make sense of things is with an understanding of the imperialist crisis, its warmongering “solution” and the spontaneous revolt against it.

The Uighur revolt has clearly reflected this upheaval, and while possibly pushed by Western manipulation too, to make life difficult for Beijing, the spontaneous discontent against the imperialist crisis driving most jihadism is the major factor.

It spills into China because this is a shared religious ideology which for the moment has become the common conscious expression for tens of millions in the Third World of their rejection of Western armsrace colonialism and the non-stop exploitation tyranny it has imposed on them.

It does so because there is a crying need for revolutionary leadership.

But there is a giant philosophical and political vacuum left in the world, on just this question, the result of decades of retreat by (originally) Stalinist revisionism from Lenin’s revolutionary perspectives, and the temporary disillusionment with “communism”, which the masses equated with Moscow’s revisionism.

It was no such thing, and its reliance on “permanent peaceful coexistence”, “democratic” gains being just as good as revolution and “step-by-step” advances in world struggle – starting decades ago (Germany 1933, Spanish civil war etc) – led to the eventual idiotic liquidation of the Soviet Union itself by Gorbachevism (see Unanswered Polemics book Vol 21 for deeper analysis).

But that left the world’s masses with nowhere to turn for the vital scientific leadership they need to guide the fight they are increasingly being pushed into by the ever greater crisis collapse.

Of course jihadism is not the answer, and in particular, when it sets itself against a workers state, it becomes reactionary.

Only defending and strengthening workers states (including by polemicising with them on their leadership errors), and even more importantly, defeating imperialism, and overthrowing it to establish communism everywhere, can take the world forwards.

China’s suppression of the Uighur upheavals is correct on that count.

But merely declaring “terrorism is bad” is far from the best way to do it, failing to get to the materialist causes driving it to the surface worldwide.

Relative to imperialism, and when inflicting blows on it, such “terrorist” movements are not “bad” at all and are even cheered on by tens of millions in the Third World as in the 9/11 attack on New York, for example.

Marxism does not support such movements as such but it certainly does not stand with imperialism against them.

That would be counter to the deep and profound understanding of the Bolsheviks, as Lenin clearly explained over and over again (in his 1916 writings about Ireland’s Easter Uprising for example, (Discussion on Self-Determination summed up- Section 10) or the 1906 essay on Guerrilla Warfare), who refused to condemn any such eruptions however petty bourgeois or non-proletarian, declaring all of it to be an inevitable part of revolution, including all the ideological baggage that came with it.

If terrorist movements have backward notions (including anti-communism) Lenin said, then that is an indictment of the revolutionary party which should be striving to win the masses with better understanding and leadership.

It is no easy task but China has a far better chance to do that inside its own country with a literally captive audience than most.

It is with a perspective grasping the need to fight against, and end capitalism, that the militancy currently finding expression in religious backwardness inside China, can best be channelled in a sound direction; and that includes understanding the difference between attacking a workers state and mass movements aimed against capitalist imperialism.

Working to build a workers state, and to develop better revolutionary grasp, is to be against imperialism.

Beijing revisionism gives no clues at all that it even grasps that much itself, with its constant efforts to stabilise the world capitalist economy and a total dearth of any public analysis about the onrushing world crisis, or the world’s revolutionary need to overturn this vile system.

Diplomacy and trade relation considerations obviously set a time and place for political statements, but the very lack of anything at all from Beijing in itself reflects the weakness and retreat of revisionism, failing to give the vital lead to the world working class that its power and position would allow and demand.

Worse still is its capitulation on questions such as “terrorism” going along with all the condemnations and denunciations that pour out of capitalist hypocrisy.

But condemn all terrorism? Would that include the Islamic Jihad or Hamas (both Islamic terrorist movements) fighting the vile Zionist occupation of their land using whatever methods they can find in their conditions of deprivation, suppression and oppression?

Or perhaps the nearby Sunni Islamic fighters in the Sinai desert with a long record of anti-Zionism and attacks on the brutal dictatorship running Egypt?

Or what about the Houthi fighters in Yemen against the corrupt and degenerate mafia-gangster tribalism running Saudi Arabian and bombing their entire country into famine, maiming and killing tens of thousands?

Or those confronting French imperialism in Mali and the Ivory Coast etc (which the reactionary President Macron wants to see NATO orientate more towards).

It makes no sense and will make none to the Uighurs either.

And this is not just an issue of falling short in seeing the revolutionary movement in the world.

The mechanical and one-sided “logic” of revisionism can twist understand around so far it ends up entirely on the wrong side.

So it is with the Lalkar/Proletarian Stalinist CPGB-ML (now calling itself “The Communists”), which routinely denounces “terrorism” as nothing but “jihadist headbangers” and “mercenaries for imperialism", as it has done all through the Syrian civil war.

Seemingly it does not notice that US imperialism has poured in special forces troops, bombing raids and military resources to help obliterate the ISIS, working with the Baghdad stooge government’s army and the Shia militias in Iraq first of all, and then the Syrian YPG Kurds – a strange strategy if the ISIS was not only a “tool of imperialism” but in fact set up by Western intelligence in the first place.

By declaring ISIS the enemy, and in practice the main one in Syria, the Brarites have ended up on the same side as US imperialism (even while notionally declaring it, and the British and French NATO allies to be the enemy).

Worse still, it ends up supporting other reaction such as the brutal torturing regime of General Sisi in Egypt, which colludes with next door Zionism to suppress the Gazan Palestinians, and which is heavily subsidised by Washington firstly and by the corrupt gangster tribal “royalty” running Saudi Arabia, and which stands alongside French imperialism, and the UAE sheikhdoms backing the General Haftar side of the civil war tearing Libya into even more devastated shreds than have already been left by the 2011 NATO invasion to topple (and brutally murder Muammar Gaddafi).

So, for example, in a recent piece on Trump’s troop pullout it quotes approvingly at length from Russian statements on the Middle East including from a certain Evgeny Buzhinsky, vice-president of the Russian International Affairs Council, not to mention “formerly Lieutenant-General in the Russian military, graduate from the MV Frunze military academy and member of the general staff of the Red Army, 1976-92” as the Proletarian adds for further authority, (somewhat surprisingly perhaps since it usually maintains that the Soviet Union of that period was already irredeemably under the control of “Kruschevite revisionists” and presumably so too the education provided by such academies):

In an article for the Russian Council, Gen Buzhinsky neatly summarised the growing diplomatic strength of Russia in the middle east:

“Our diplomacy is very effective, especially in the middle east. There is not a single country in the region with which Russia has tensions or bad relations or no ties at all.

“During Soviet times, we had no relations with the Saudis and had very complicated ties with the Gulf monarchies. We were on very good terms with the countries we supported – Libya, Egypt, Syria and Sudan. They all collapsed in the 1990s. Now everyone is looking for our mediation, Egypt, for one.

“Egypt has a good historical memory and remembers our support in the 1970s and our attitude to the overthrow of Mubarak. The US, for whom Mubarak faithfully served for 30 years and who was the main supporter of its policy in the middle east, immediately betrayed him and denounced him as all but a criminal and a bloody dictator, applauding the Muslim Brotherhood that came to power.

“Russia occupied a very balanced position in this respect and welcomed the return of the secular authorities, although they were dressed in military uniforms.

“In general, attempts to impose western-style democracy on countries that are founded on tribal principles are not feasible. Russia is not involved in this and this is why it has good relations with Saudi Arabia, despite shouts from Washington.

“Military-technical cooperation is making headway and it has always been and will be the foundation of relations in the middle east.” (Middle east: everyone for himself, 27 February 2019)

But these are not “Soviet times” for a start, someone should remind the general, and the Proletarian too, which continues its wishful thinking pretence that Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation is little different to the USSR in political significance.

But there was a capitalist restoration there, following Gorbachev’s liquidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1989-91, and the ascendancy of the gangster oligarchs.

And while Putin has been obliged to use the remnants of the state (KGB etc) to rein them in to some extent, to prevent total collapse of the economy through carpet-bag plundering, and thereby head off the total mass desperation which would rapidly lead to demands to return to communism, this is not a socialist state.

At best it might be a Bonapartist balancing act between the socialist-nostalgic masses and the new capitalism.

Putin’s denunciations of Soviet communism, and kissing of saintly bone relics in the Orthodox Christian cathedrals, is no encouragement for thinking he will move it back towards socialist economic relations.

And nor therefore can its actions be measured as those of a socialist state, even when it is obliged to fend off the aggression and hostility of Western imperialism.

Just the opposite - in its suppression of the Chechens for example it has behaved as an imperialist power (see EPSR No1248 above).

Even in the erratic support it has given to the east Ukrainian workers against the 2014 fascist takeover in Kiev engineered by Western intelligence (in a similar way to its Hong Kong provocations) – and the refusal to handover the Crimea – has more of a greater Russian nationalist character to it than class solidarity.

For the Ukraine the EPSR analysed that the overwhelmingly significant imperialist onslaught was that of Washington and the Western NATO “allies” (despite the US-EU insults exposing growing splits already at that stage), rather than a conflict of equal imperialist powers, so that a call for defeat of the Western intriguing was the only line to take in workers’ interests.

But that still implied no support for Putin’s cretinous politics, which at best, in part, reflect only the worst aspects of revisionist confusion from the late Soviet period.

The same applies for the Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war, which has even seen Moscow Russia coordinating its actions with US imperialism‘s reactionary “war on terror” at times, particularly in the last period in blitzkrieging ISIS.

It reflects a total delusion that “terrorist” turmoil and upheaval is the problem in the world, rather than being the confused result of the only real problem there is – imperialist crisis and its drive to war.

And it reflects the delusion that “stability” can be restored or be “achieved” by “clever diplomacy” as the Proletarian further approvingly quotes:

Whilst those lairs of thieves and medieval backwardness [the Gulf and Saudi states - ed] will not easily break from US imperialism, and indeed we hope that they are overthrown by their oppressed peoples, it should be welcomed that Russia might be able to exploit contradictions between the stooges and their master, and begin to play a role in undermining the worst of their influence in the region.

It is in that context that communists must view the development of Russia’s foreign relations, as commented upon by Mr Dolgov:

“As a result of the visit of Russian president Vladimir Putin to Saudi Arabia, Russian-Saudi cooperation can gain a new impetus, especially in the economic sphere: namely, in hydrocarbon projects, innovation-related areas, and the development of the latest technologies. It also it strengthens the role of Russia in Opec+.

“In the political sphere, a rapprochement of the positions of the Russian Federation and Saudi Arabia on the Syrian conflict is possible, as well as the Yemen conflict, to a certain extent. However, we should keep in mind that in these conflicts, a stable anti-Iranian position prevails among the Saudis.

“Moscow could contribute to a possible mitigation of the confrontation between Riyadh and Tehran, for example, by providing a Russian channel for possible contacts to be maintained between the Saudis and Iranians. In any case, this is a complex, multifaceted and longstanding conflict.

“The Russian leadership should also take into account that the United States is a strategic ally of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi business elite and the military are closely linked with the United States, which largely ensures that the current ruling Saudi dynasty remains in power. This factor plays an important role in Saudi foreign policy and may contain the development of Russian-Saudi cooperation.

“However, Russian weapons have every chance to enter the Saudi market, especially since the Russian Federation and Saudi Arabia already have experience engaging in military-technical cooperation. However, the Saudi army mainly relies on American and western European weapons.

“In any event, the Saudis can also purchase Russian weapons for political reasons, and expect Russia to take into account Saudi political interests in the region in exchange for these purchases.

“The visit of the president of the Russian Federation to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which heads the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), provides a significant impetus for the development of cooperation between Russia and the GCC countries.

“Such a development in the economic, political and cultural spheres is certainly in the interests of both parties, and will also play a positive role in finding ways to resolve conflicts that take place in the region.

“Russia’s collective security concept for the Gulf offers real ways to restore and maintain stability in the region. Nevertheless, the countries of the region have their own interests, which often lead to confrontations.

“To overcome them, political contacts and compromises are needed, which can be facilitated via the visit of the Russian president and the Russian security concept, if implemented.”

“Resolving conflicts”??? Mitigate confrontations???

Overthrowing the feudalists a “hope” but “undermining the worst of their influence” the real perspective???

What kind of happy-clappy peace struggle nonsense is this, which completely ignores the gigantic elephant in the room of capitalism’s unfolding Catastrophe, which is driving the whole world into war, and on a far greater scale than the Middle East, which has been the just the warm up to accustom the world to daily bombings and massacres, and to pull mass opinion behind the all out inter-imperialist war which is brewing, almost certainly between the great blocs of the US, Europe and Japan (as the splits and spats at the NATO 70th anniversary “celebration” were reflecting).

There is no “undermining” that will change this crisis path except the revolutionary overturn form of “undermining” imperialism.

The Proletarian’s enthusiastic eulogies for this Russian nonsense –

Of particular pleasure for progressives, anti-imperialists and peace lovers will be the increased influence of Russia in the Middle East

– it gushes, are an indication of how far its own revisionist brain rot has progressed.

The starting point was not encouraging.

Despite a seemingly sound enough position of opposition to the US skulduggery against Syria, plotted by the Pentagon as part of a long term programme of toppling “rogue” states and less than compliant regimes (Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, etc) it slipped immediately into support for the opportunist and sectarian bourgeois nationalism of the Assad regime (just as previously it gave outright support to the thuggish Saddam Hussein or the imperialist-compromising egoist Gaddafi).

Such all out support has nothing to do with a Leninist understanding of world revolution and wrongly creates the mistaken and dangerous illusion that such a regime can take the working class forwards to socialism.

Lenin’s position, outlined most clearly in the August counter-revolution period in 1917 when the fascist-monarchist general Kornilov attacked the new bourgeois reformist government of Kerensky, was always to call for defeat of the more reactionary enemy (Kornilov then, US imperialism now) but without giving workers the tiniest shred of confidence in the bourgeois opportunism they were obliged to stand alongside for the moment in doing so.

This Proletarian outright support reflects the notion that the fight to see off imperialism is served just as well by supporting bourgeois nationalism as it is by outright revolution.

It derives from the mistakes made by Stalin’s leadership as far back as the 1930s - for example in the Spanish Civil War, where the working class was encouraged to trust in the petty bourgeois democracy of the “anti-fascist” republicans, rather than develop its own revolutionary understanding (while continuing to fight Franco). As the EPSR book Unanswered Polemics puts it – p2):

Moscow’s weak-minded determination to discourage “revolutionary provocations”, which led the mighty German CP to sleepwalk into total annihilation in 1933 and the Indonesian CP (even bigger and even more impressive) to do the same in 1965, - never stopped pretending that anti-imperialist nationalism (e.g. the Sukarno regime pre-1965 in Indonesia) was just as good for the eventual triumph of world socialism (via the Soviet camp winning the peaceful competition with the imperialist camp) as all-the-way revolutionary socialist regimes.

In such Revisionist thinking, once Saddam had stopped being a totally tame stooge of US imperialist policy in the 1970s and had started doing arms deals with the Soviet Union, - then nothing further should be anticipated than the continued onward triumphal march of Moscow’s international “anti-imperialist” coalition of the Socialist Camp, the Non-Aligned states of national-liberation, and the world communist movement.

The obvious total collapse of this Revisionist nonsense post-1990 still cannot register with Stalin worship sectarianism. Naturally, in the world of such long-standing gradualist delusions, such spontaneous “anti-imperialism” resistance (as Saddamism had evolved into under decaying monopoly capitalist pressure) would “inevitably go the whole hog one day into total socialist defiance and independence”; - just like it was supposed to happen the whole world over in the good old days of Stalinism. What sad rot.

Leninist science, freed from Revisionist blinkers, would surely have reached the completely different conclusion that the opportunist tyrant Saddam (admitted by SLP Youth) was first and foremost never to be identified as anything but TOTALLY UNRELIABLE, - a petty bourgeois class-treachery, anti-theory disaster just waiting to happen, - going completely rotten just like so many other Moscow Revisionism protégés of the treacherous “peaceful road/peaceful coexistence” era.

Any defeat or setback for the imperialist occupation policy, - by any means, - was the only sensible perspective to educate the world revolutionary movement's understanding with, concentrating on the CLASS ENEMY as the only fixed point in this swirling, anti-theory, anti-communist chaos that has been unleashed on the world by the ultimate failure of Stalinist Revisionism, - and encouraging no confidence whatever in any chance defiance of monopoly imperialism that opportunist nationalism might produce (but didn’t under Saddam, - but might usefully yet, under the Shias).

This deep seated revisionist flaw, combined with a capitulation to petty bourgeois public opinion ready to condemn all “terrorism”, produces a total failure to see or understand the significance and import of the great jihadi upsurge, and the insurgencies erupting everywhere for the last 20 years.

In 2011, this jumped a level to become the giant street revolt in Egypt (and Tunisia before) christened the Arab Spring, in the crucial country in the region, with the biggest population and a long history of anti-imperialist revolt.

It threatened to lose all the Middle East.

It was to contain that, that the West pulled out all the stops to activate already half-prepared “rebellion” in Libya and Syria, both utterly reactionary upheavals bogusly declared “more of the Arab Spring” but tapping completely different class elements, –monarchists, petty bourgeois opportunists and in Syria, religious opposition already inflamed over years by the deliberate stirring of sectarian hatred in next door Iraq (consciously done by the US occupation).

It was a proxy war, by a US imperialism already shattered by the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, and reeling from the economic global credit collapse, and fearful that direct intervention would have stirred far more rebellion in the Middle East, and potentially domestically too.

So it was a sound understanding to call for the defeat of the obviously outside stirred disruption (for which the evidence rapidly piled up of Saudi, Gulf and American funding, CIA training etc.)

But no more than with Saddam, does that mean support for the Assad regime.

It has led to all kinds of mistakes, most of all in missing the breakdown and collapse of this attempted coup-at-a-distance.

The attempt to recruit jihadism to topple Assad rapidly backfired just as it did eventually with al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan - becoming the ISIS Caliphate movement, hugely attracting world wide recruits precisely because of its initial success and ruthless rejection of all Western-ism.

Once it did that, quite rapidly, it was no longer a “tool of imperialism” – just the opposite, it rapidly became a problem and particularly so in Iraq where its merger with the festering former-Saddamite anti-occupation movement took over most of northern Iraq and almost reached Baghdad, to overturn the US approved corrupt stoogery now running Iraq in the wake of the 2003 occupation.

Its rising attacks inside the Western countries, made it clear that this was now part of the crisis breakup of imperialism and a major embarrassment for it.

Washington’s strategy was thrown into confusion - not knowing whether to keep on trying to topple Assad or turn on ISIS, as it eventually did.

At which point to keep on declaring that “terrorism” is the enemy, is to find yourself on the same side as imperialism. That is exactly what has happened to the Syrian Kurds, who have been fighting alongside the US special forces and with massive air and artillery support, in the barbaric destruction of city after city in Iraq and Syria.

As repeatedly stated by Leninist politics, it is complete shaming treachery for any Marxist even to condemn such upheavals, and even more so to join with the brutal military onslaught against them.

Revolutionaries can only welcome any blows and defeats delivered to imperialism which is the sole cause and generator of the violence and destruction in the world, including all hate-filled revolt against its system.

That implies nothing about supporting such outbursts, and particularly their negative methods and reactionary attitudes.

It does imply a huge responsibility for revolutionary politics to do much better in understanding the world and winning the leadership of the masses being driven by the crisis into these great spontaneous outbursts.

The one-sided revisionist view of the Assad regime as a “step on the road” towards a socialist world, is not a revolutionary perspective.

It is in fact an obstacle to revolutionary communism – which needs to be cleared out of the way as much as any other capitalism, just not when the anti-imperialist stance it has been forced into, puts it in the immediate line of fire for imperialism.

Outright support for Assad in fact leads to all the wrong positions via the one-sided undialectical logic of petty bourgeois thinking.

So when Damascus declares it is fighting “terrorists” the CPGB-ML joins in too, and from there takes a step further to declare all “terrorism” an enemy too.

But that runs into appalling difficulties - what then of many other “terrorist” groups like the Lebanese Hezbollah, with a long record of anti-Zionist struggle including defeat of the “Israeli” army, forced out of its occupation of south Lebanon in 2006?

Or the various Palestinian militancies like Hamas, inside occupied Palestine itself and with a record of using every method they can to attack the Zionists including suicide bombings, street knife attacks and waves of rockets on towns and villages?

And what of their allies, (and original parent organisation) of the Muslin Brotherhood - are they to be condemned too?

In the Proletarian world the answer is yes.

Which leads to another step, supporting the grotesque tyranny of the General Sisi dictatorship installed by bloody coup, to topple the fresh new democracy just “granted” after 30 years of Mubarak and Saddat dictatorship.

Sisi massacred over 3000 men, women and children in 2013 when the CIA/Zionist subversion was able to get its act together and mobilise the middle and upper class in Egypt to overturn the new Muslim Brotherhood government under president Morsi (since murdered by his mistreatment and torture in prison where he was held on trumped up charges for 6 years).

The same Western approved and funded dictatorship (with money from the US, and from Saudi Arabia) is in cahoots with the Nazi-zionist regime in “Israel” and has shut down the links and connections between the Gaza strip and Egypt’s Sinai that the Muslim Brotherhood government was maintaining.

It hunts down the Sinai jihadist resistance which has a long record of attacks on Zionism and now against the Sisi regime too.

Wooden logic and rank opportunism turns things upside down!

To cheer on toppling Morsi is to take the wrong side.

To play along with the imperialist blitzing of “terrorism” the same.

What the Uighurs need is what the world needs - a Leninist revolutionary perspective. Build Leninism.

Don Hoskins

Back to the top