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No 1636 30th November 2023

Mass world opinion reels from Zionist child-butchering genocide in Gaza, but still ignored are the real lessons of the imperialist Catastrophe of unstoppable economic and ecological collapse, as Marxism has always warned. Only revolutionary class war Leninist understanding can rescue whole world from even greater depravities than Palestine, as monopoly capitalism disintegrates into World War Three, the only solution the billionaire ruling class has to Slump. Gaza horrors – forced out by Hamas’ justified resistance – of a piece with failing Ukraine war provoked as a Slump diversion by US empire through CIA/Nato controlled Kiev & to destroy both Russia and EU trade war “threats”, plus half a dozen failed wars before, from Iraq & Afghanistan to Libya & Yemen. Fake-”left”ism and Labour opportunism are workers’ obstacle and enemy – Labour & the TUC opportunism now as fascist as the Tories, and much of the fake-”left” lined up with ruling class on Ukraine nazism. Mass Palestine march dismay on Gaza is a good sign but shallow Trot and Revisionist “Stop War” pacifism is only a cover for capitulation to Nato on Ukraine and useless posturing on Palestine. Every group has treacherously “condemned terror” since the 9/11 explosive WTO attack – all still feed chauvinism and delusions about “democracy” “free speech” and “peace in a multipolar world”. All such is disarming petty bourgeois garbage even as imperialism shows its true fascist bourgeois dictatorship face – from Argentina to the Netherlands, Braverman to Trump. Fight for Marxist-Leninist theory crucial

There was no sudden “humanity” in the reluctant ceasefire “pause” forced onto the Zionist monsters’ genocide campaign against the Palestinian people by Washington pressure.

Just the opposite; the most berserk of the fanatical “Greater Israel” Jews in the Zionist cabinet continued to press the already ultra-reactionary prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to refuse any let up at all in this deliberate butchery of men, women and children and its ethnic cleansing “transfer” intent.

The most extreme want to kill or expel the entire population of Gaza, and the West Bank – even at the cost of sacrificing Jewish hostages (as some already were abandoned during the initial “flood” attack by Hamas).

The relentless and deliberate targeting of civilians, civilian infrastructure, hospitals and homes is about terror and destruction making Gaza impossible to live in – far beyond any targeting of Hamas, it has the real aim of expelling the entire people and taking over their pitiful remnant of land (in which most are refugees from the 88% of Palestine already stolen by the Zionist terror-gang and war occupation from 1947-8 onwards).

Their ambitions are for a “Greater Israel” and always have been since the founding of this great fat imperialist cuckoo colony in the middle of the Arab world, seizing all its land behind the risible excuse of some mystical mythological “promise” and playing on capitalist system’s guilt for the horrifying Holocaust scapegoat slaughter of its Great Depression and the Second World War (against not just (mainly poorer) Jews, but also initially, communists, homosexuals, disabled and “retarded” victims and Roma “gypsies”).

Additionally there are now also oil and gas reserves that the Zionists want to get their hands on (further making a mockery of all the eco-protests incidentally).

But US arm-twisting for the imposed truce has intensified because of the weakness of the whole imperialist system itself as its Catastrophic breakdown unstoppably deepens.

Washington (and its stooges like Britain) are not remotely concerned as such about the horrifying genocidal slaughter which has sent world public opinion reeling in shock at the daily images of butchery, suffering, helplessness, and pain suffered as entire extended families and neighbourhoods are wiped out.

They have supported it, with political approval and massive military aid in the form of two major aircraft carrier fleets sent to intimidate Iran, the pro-Palestinian Lebanese Hezbollah and other anti-Zionist regional forces who might try to intervene and at least slow down the carnage.

The Western imperialists themselves already have far more and even more extreme butchery under their belts throughout the entire post-WW2 period, including millions-at-a-time barbarities like the Vietnam war, the Korean war, and endless streams of massacres from Indonesia in 1965 to El Salvador, Guatemala and most of South America, even before turning to the World War Three startups of Somalia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and the nazi-NATO run war against Russia in Ukraine, most replete with carpet bombing, wholesale wedding party slaughter, turkey-shoot helicopter killings and grotesque Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo torture.

They have routinely tolerated, or themselves installed, numerous brutal dictators including Suharto, Pinochet, Idi Amin, Somoza, Marcos (and now son), Batista, Syngman Rhee, Diem, Saddam Hussein, Shah Pahlevi, two Duvaliers and scores more, who have tortured and slaughtered their way through long regimes of suppression and bloody control to smash down all anti-imperialist liberation movements and especially communist rebellion, to keep the Third World safe for ruthless Western monopoly corporation exploitation and plundering.

Most of all they installed the willing Zionist fanatics into Middle East quite deliberately as a dagger in the side of regional Arab nationalism and wider Persian and Turkish (and even Greek) ambitions too, arming and financing the growth of “Israel” as a tool to maintain imperialist power and dominance over this crucially important region – obviously for its oil but mostly for its strategic importance (Suez canal, anti-Soviet surveillance and intimidation etc etc).

Western imperialism has gone along with this latest sick depravity, shocked like the Zionists at the scale and unexpectedness of the Flood eruption and wanting to see the suppression of the Palestinian national-liberation movement and its justified armed revolt (lyingly and meaninglessly labelled a “terrorist” threat) providing arms and money to do so.

Washington and stoogery, has wider interests too, of intimidating all rebellion – of which Palestine is the apotheosis, – particularly in the region, but worldwide too, especially as its shock-and-awe New American Century to restore faltering US authority and writ, has been failing in country after country, from the 2003 Iraq invasion and Afghanistan blitzing before, to now Ukraine and the disastrous Kievite fascist proxy war.

Washington (under the “Democrats!!) did not turn a hair at what have been appalling crimes against humanity from the very first days of the Zionist smiting when the water, food and fuel siege was laid against the 2.3 million population, and one of history’s most intensive bombing campaigns begun.

All of them are gross crimes whatever sanctimonious and self-obsessed “justifications” are presented by the Zionists about “defending themselves” and whatever cynical crocodile-tears propaganda is wrung out of the capitalist media by an effectively Nazi ruling class.

But the US is increasingly dismayed at the scale and intensity of hostility being stirred all around the Middle East region and throughout the world’s masses – including into the heart of the imperialist countries – by this depraved and cynical public slaughter and terrorising of the entire Gaza population (as carried out constantly for the last 75 years against all Palestinians in fact but on a vaster and more degenerate scale than ever before).

“Perhaps” opined the White House’s envoy Anthony Blinken recently backtracking (marginally) on full on support for the Zionists “there are too many being killed.”

Neither he, nor “Joe” Biden, spelt out precisely how many thousand little toddlers, young kids, pregnant women and premature babies blown apart by 1000lb bombs, buried under collapsed apartment blocks, horrifically burned by white-phosphorus, maimed and killed by hunger, thirst, disease and surgical shock from agonising operations without anaesthetic, orphaned or just traumatised for life, would be ‘sufficient’.

Imperialism already faces huge difficulties keeping control worldwide with non-stop eruptions of revolt everywhere driven by the rapidly deepening economic breakdown of this out-of-time and increasingly degenerate profit system, one riddled with grotesque contradictions, unfairnesses, ever-widening inequality, crime, corruption and alienation at the “best” of “boom” times and now heading into the greatest Slump disaster ever (as has been rumbling and sporadically erupting for decades, breaking surface fully in the Global Credit meltdown of 2008-9, (temporarily bandaged with yet more credit which has only made matters worse)).

Were it not for continuing delusions about “democracy”, “freedom” and “peace struggles” inculcated by nearly a century of mind-numbed Revisionist shallowness – and its latest “multipolar world” variant of Stalin’s “permanent peaceful coexistence” idiocies – all promulgated by 50-shades-of-fake-“leftism” (Trot and revisionist alike) it would be in much deeper trouble, as the world’s masses could already have got back to Leninist revolutionary theoretical understanding and the need to overthrow this crisis rotten system and establish workers states to build socialism.

But even without that ultimately crucial scientific leadership, the fighting determination of the world anti-imperialist movement has been growing relentlessly more determined and capable, as the initial Hamas raid into Israel demonstrated and six weeks of determined and self-sacrificing fighting since.

It is that astounding demonstration of the huge unstoppable world revolt and its deepening hostility for imperialist tyranny and domination, pushed to the limit by the capitalist crisis collapse, making already on-the-edge lives completely intolerable, which then panicked the already split and riven Zionist entity into following its most demented 1000-yard-stare fanatical settler wing, into what amounts to a completely historically sick inversion of the holocaust, visited this time on the hapless Palestinians (by other modern means obviously).

But it is not working, as some of the more perceptive bourgeois voices have pointed out – the Zionist/imperialist onslaught is losing despite its immediate “success” – as in these useful comments from the now very well known Scott Ritter, peace campaigning former marine and UN arms inspector:

Israel has [likened] October 7th to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks against the United States [..] citing the number of persons killed (some 1,200, a downward revision issued by Israel after realizing that 200 of the dead were Palestinian fighters) and detailing a wide variety of atrocities it claims were perpetrated by Hamas, including mass rape, the beheading of children, and the wonton murder of unarmed Israeli civilians.

[..this is] demonstrably false or misleading. Nearly a third of the Israeli casualties consisted of military, security, and police officers. Moreover, it turns out that the number one killer of Israelis on October 7 wasn’t Hamas or other Palestinian factions, but the Israeli military itself. Recently released video shows Israeli Apache helicopters indiscriminately firing on Israeli civilians trying to flee the Supernova Sukkot Gathering held in the open desert near Kibbutz Re’im, the pilots unable to distinguish between the civilians and the Hamas fighters. Many of the vehicles that the Israeli government has shown as an example of Hamas perfidy were destroyed by the Israeli Apache helicopters.

Likewise, the Israeli government has widely publicized what it is calling the “Re’im massacre,” citing a death toll of some 112 civilians it claims were murdered by Hamas. However, eyewitness accounts from both surviving Israeli civilians and military personnel involved in the fighting show that the vast majority of those killed died from fire from Israeli soldiers and tanks directed at buildings where the civilians were either hiding or being held hostage by Hamas fighters. It took two days for the Israeli military to recapture Re’im. It only did so after tanks fired into the civilian residences, collapsing them onto their occupants, and often setting them ablaze, causing the bodies of those inside to be consumed by fire. The Israeli government has publicized how it has had to make use of the services of forensic archeologists to identify human remains at the Kibbutz, implying that Hamas had burned the occupants’ home. But the fact is it was Israeli tanks that did the destruction and killing.

This scene was repeated in other Kibbutzes along the Gaza barrier system.

The Israeli government treats the Kibbutz as being purely civilian, and yet has publicized how armed security teams of several Kibbutzes—drawn from the so-called “civilian” residents—were able to mobilize in time to successfully repel the Hamas attackers. The reality is that every Kibbutz had to be treated by Hamas as an armed encampment, and as such assaulted as if it were a military objective, for the simple fact that they were—all of them.

Moreover, until Israel relocated several battalions of IDF forces to the West Bank, each Kibbutz had been reinforced by a squad of around 20 IDF soldiers who were billeted in the Kibbutz. Given that Hamas had planned this attack for well over a year, Hamas had to assume that these 20 IDF soldiers were still located in each Kibbutz, and act accordingly.

The Israeli government has had to walk back its claims that Hamas beheaded 40 children and has provided no credible evidence that Hamas was involved in the rape or sexual assault of a single Israeli female. Eyewitness accounts describe the Hamas fighters as disciplined, determined, and deadly in the attack, and yet courteous and gentle when dealing with civilian captives.

The question arises as to why the Israeli government would go out of its way to manufacture a narrative designed to support the false and misleading characterization of the October 7 attack by Hamas on the Gaza barrier system as an act of terrorism.

The answer is as disturbing as it is clear—because what happened on October 7 was not a terrorist attack, but a military raid. The difference between the two terms is night and day—by labeling the events of October 7 as acts of terrorism, Israel transfers blame for the huge losses away from its military, security, and intelligence services, and onto Hamas. If Israel were, however, to acknowledge that what Hamas did was in fact a raid—a military operation—then the competency of the Israeli military, security, and intelligence services would be called into question, as would the political leadership responsible for overseeing and directing their operations.

[...]Benjamin Netanyahu is fighting for his political life. He was already facing a crisis of his own making, having pushed for legislation which re-wrote Israeli Basic Law in a way which placed the Israeli judiciary under the control of the Knesset, effectively terminating its status as a separate but equal branch of government (so much for Israel being the “greatest democracy in the Middle East”). This act brought Israel on the verge of a civil war, with hundreds of thousands of protesters taking to the streets to denounce Netanyahu. What makes Netanyahu’s actions even more despicable is that it represented little more than a naked power play designed to prevent the Israeli court system from trying him on several credible allegations of corruption which, if Netanyahu were found guilty (a distinct probability), would have put him in jail for many years.

Netanyahu had billed himself as Israel’s top defender, a specialist on the threats facing Israel abroad, and how to best respond to them. He has openly advocated a military confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program. Netanyahu is also a proponent of political Zionism in its most extreme application and has promoted the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which use tactics that forcibly displace Palestinians from their homes and villages, as part of an overall plan to create a “greater Israel” that mirrors that of Biblical times.

Part of Netanyahu’s strategy to accomplish this dream of a “greater Israel” is to weaken the Palestinian people and their government to the point of irrelevancy, thereby preventing them from achieving their dream of obtaining an independent Palestinian state.

Netanyahu’s plan was working—in September 2020 Netanyahu signed the Abaraham Accords, a series of bilateral agreements brokered by the administration of then-President Donald Trump that sought the normalization of relations between Israel and several Gulf Arab States, all at the expense of an independent Palestinian nation. Prior to the Hamas attack on October 7, Israel was on the cusp of normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, an act which would have proven to be the final nail in the coffin of Palestinian statehood.

One of the main reasons for Israel’s progress in this regard was its success in creating a political divide between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

On October 7, however, this success was washed away by the victory that Hamas achieved over the IDF. The precise means by which this victory took place is the subject for another time. But the basic elements of this victory are well-established.

Hamas effectively neutralized Israel’s vaunted intelligence services, blinding them to the possibility of an attack of this scope and scale.

When the attack occurred, Hamas was able to strike with precision the very surveillance and communication nodes the IDF relied upon to mobilize a response in case of an attack.

Hamas defeated those Israeli soldiers stationed along the barrier wall in a stand-up fight. Two battalions of the Golani Brigade were routed, as were elements of other vaunted IDF units.

Hamas struck the Headquarters of the Gaza Division, the local intelligence hub, and other major command and control facilities with brutal precision, turning what should have been a five-minute response time into many hours—more than enough time for Hamas to carry out one of its primary objectives—the taking of hostages. This they did with extreme proficiency, returning to Gaza with more than 230 Israeli soldiers and civilians.

The Marine Corps defines a raid as “an operation, usually small scale, involving a swift penetration of hostile territory to secure information, confuse the enemy, or to destroy his installations. It ends with a planned withdrawal upon completion of the assigned mission.”

This is precisely what Hamas did on October 7.[...} (Sputnik)

Other reports confirm some of these points:

Hamas fighters who attacked a music festival in Israel on October 7, killing hundreds, likely did not know in advance about the event and decided to target it on the spot, Israeli media has reported.

According to a copy of the first Israeli police report into the attack, obtained this week by Israel’s Channel 12, Palestinian fighters had originally intended to attack nearby kibbutz Re’im as well as other villages near the Gaza border. They found out about the music festival with drones and from the air as they parachuted into Israel.

Some 4,400 people had reportedly been at the event that Saturday when Hamas broke through Israel’s high-security barrier – which includes radar system and underground sensors – and attacked military posts and villages in southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli authorities.

This Saturday, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the “growing assessment in Israel’s security establishment” based on the police investigation and on interrogations of captured Hamas members, is that the group had not planned to target the event.

While police found maps of the target locations on the bodies of killed Hamas members, none was of the festival location. An additional finding supporting the assessment, according to Haaretz, was that Hamas militants did not approach the festival from the direction of the border but from a nearby highway.

In addition, the event had originally been scheduled to take place on Thursday and Friday, with Saturday added to the programme only on Tuesday that week.

The report also found that most of the festival goers had managed to leave the event by the time Hamas showed up and the massacre began.

“The large majority of [people who were at the event] managed to flee following the decision to disperse the event made four minutes after the rocket attack,” according to a senior police source quoted by Haaretz.

The police investigation also found that an Israeli military helicopter opened fire on the assailants but also hit some people attending the festival. No further details were provided, Haaretz reported.

“An investigation into the incident revealed an [Israeli military] combat helicopter that arrived at the scene from the Ramat David base fired at the terrorists and apparently also hit some of the revelers there,” the news report cited an unnamed police official as saying.

Ritter then adds, following the ceasefire:

let no one be fooled into thinking this was anything less than a victory for Hamas. Israel had taken a very aggressive position that, given its stated objective of destroying Hamas as an organization, it would not agree to a ceasefire under any conditions.

Hamas, on the other hand, had made one of its primary objectives in initiating the current round of fighting with Israel the release of Palestinian prisoners, and in particular women and children, held by Israel. Seen in this light, the ceasefire represents an important victory for Hamas, and a humiliating defeat for Israel.

[...]This outcome should not have come as a surprise to anyone. When Hamas launched its October 7 attack on Israel, it initiated a plan years in the making. The meticulous attention to detail [...] underscored the reality that Hamas had been studying the Israeli intelligence and military forces arrayed against it, uncovering weaknesses that were subsequently exploited.

[..]The October 7 attack by Hamas was not a stand-alone operation, but rather part of a strategic plan possessing three main objectives—to put the issue of a Palestinian state back on the front burner of international discourse, to free the thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, and to compel Israel to cease and desist when it came to its desecration of the Al Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest place. The October 7 attack, on its own, could not achieve these outcomes. [...]The October 7 attack was designed to humiliate Israel to the point of irrationality, to ensure that any Israeli response would be governed by the emotional need for revenge, as opposed to a rational response designed to nullify the Hamas objectives. Here, Hamas was guided by the established Israeli doctrine of collective punishment (known as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after the West Beirut suburb that was heavily bombed by Israel in 2006 as a way of punishing the Lebanese people for Israel’s failure to defeat Hezbollah in combat.) By inflicting a humiliating defeat on Israel which shattered both the myth of Israeli invincibility (regarding the Israel Defense Forces) and infallibility (regarding Israeli intelligence), and by taking hundreds of Israelis hostage before withdrawing to its underground lair beneath Gaza, Hamas baited a trap for Israel which the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predictably rushed into.

Hamas has prepared a network of tunnels underneath the Gaza Strip that, in total, stretch for over 500 kilometers. Nicknamed the “Gaza Metro,” these tunnels consist of interconnected deep underground bunkers used for command and control, logistical support, medical treatment, and billeting, along with other tunnel networks dedicated for both defensive and offensive operations. The tunnels are buried deep enough to avoid destruction by most bombs in Israel’s possession and have been provisioned to withstand a siege of up to three months[.]

Hamas knows that it cannot engage Israel in a classic force-on-force encounter. Instead, the goal was to lure Israeli forces into Gaza, and then subject these forces to an endless series of hit-and-run attacks [..] emerg[ing] from underground lairs, [to] attack a vulnerable Israeli force, and then disappear back underground. [..]

And it worked. While Israeli forces have been able to penetrate into the less urbanized areas of the northern Gaza strip, taking advantage of the mobility and firepower of its armored troops, the progress is illusory, as Hamas forces harry the Israelis continuously, using deadly tandem-warhead rockets to disable or destroy Israeli vehicles, killing scores of Israeli soldiers and wounding hundreds more. While Israel has been reticent in releasing the figures of armored vehicles lost in this fashion, Hamas claims the number is in the hundreds. Hamas’ claims are bolstered by the fact that Israel has halted the sale of older Merkava 3 tanks, and instead has organized their inventory of these vehicles into new reserve armor battalions to make up for the heavy losses being sustained in both Gaza and along the northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah forces are engaged in a deadly war of attrition with Israel in operations designed to support Hamas in Gaza.[...]

[..]While Israel may have been able to garner the support of the international community in the aftermath of the October 7 attack by Hamas, its gross overreaction has instead turned world public opinion against it—something Hamas was counting on. Today, Israel is increasingly isolated, losing support not only in the so-called Global South, but also in traditional strongholds of pro-Israeli sentiment in the US, UK, and Europe.

This isolation, combined with the kind of political pressure Israel is unaccustomed to receiving, helped contribute to the Netanyahu government’s acquiescence regarding the ceasefire and subsequent prisoner exchange.

Whether the ceasefire will hold or not remains to be seen. [...] But one thing is certain—having declared that victory is defined by Hamas’ total defeat, the Israelis have set the stage for a Hamas victory, something Hamas achieves simply by surviving.

Useful as these points are, demonstrating how the world rebellion has been learning to fight much more cleverly than in the past (as the EPSR has long said would happen – after the 9/11 attacks for example, see issue No1104 18-09-01 eg), they only go so far - and like much of the “left” they still fail to explain “terrorism” in general and why it is happening, tying all such struggle to the overall crisis.

Marxism has no interest in the particular and sometimes even reactionary religious or other ambitions of the resistance or its chosen tactics as such, always keeping its own separate counsel.

It sees the defeat of imperialism alone as the vital question, to avoid creating any illusions (just as with the Ukraine war where there can be no support for capitalist bonapartist Putinism – only a call for defeat of the NATO imperialist forces).

Hamas Muslim fanaticism in itself is not an answer: it is only the astonishingly self-sacrificing revolutionary spirit which is the answer, but harnessed to a scientific Leninist perspective.

In particular it needs spelling out that there is no chance whatever of the revisionist inspired “two-state” solution, which Ritter sees as a step forwards; the Zionists cannot and will not ever accept it because of it would be permanently a focal point for “instability” meaning national-liberation struggle (see EPSR Book Vol 20 on Zionism).

Dismantling of, and retreating from, the non-stop Jewish settlements all across the occupied area is inconceivable, without total defeat of the “Israeli” government, let alone restitution of all Palestinian land and property without which the obvious future “one-state” solution is just as impossible.

On the opposite side Hamas took over the leadership of the Gaza strip (by fairly won election) from the craven and collaborating petty bourgeois Fatah and the CIA/Zionist stooge Palestinian Authority two decades ago (and increasingly is doing so in the West Bank) because of its militant refusal to accept the humiliation and permanent subjugation implied in agreeing to renounce the claims of the Arab people on 100% of their stolen land and property, whilst always being under surveillance and control of their borders in whatever pocket-handkerchief dust-dry land scraps were “allowed” them (from their own country!!) for a two state “solution”.

It was never workable when Yasser Arafat’s revisionist bourgeois nationalism capitulated on the Oslo Agreement at Camp David and is only revived now by the most desperate of paralysed and guilt ridden petty bourgeois opinion to try and head off the seething anger of the whole world at this fascist barbarity, in the classic imperialist way of proffering minor and reversible reform bribes whenever faced with revolutionary confrontation (the foundation of an entire class collaborating philosophy plaguing the working class for a century and a half by disarming and undermining its revolutionary will. So useful is this opportunist corruption of the working class that Lenin once pointed out the bourgeoisie would give up 99% of what it has, if necessary, as long as it held on to state power and thereby the capacity to take it all back again at the right moment (eg Thatcherite (and Blairite) privatisation).

And it is the spread of revolutionary sentiment everywhere (albeit spontaneous and without any Leninist consciousness, yet visible anyway) which underlies the US imperialist “ceasefire” coercion of the Zionists in behind the scenes meetings, using the leverage of their military and weapon support.

Two-state shallowness, and a ceasefire, aim to give the desperate and disgusting stooge bourgeois Arab regimes around Palestine, – who have sat on their hands for decades and even recently done disgusting “diplomatic rationalisation” and trade deals with Jerusalem (in the sick Abraham Accords) – some kind of sop to try and pacify their inflamed populations with.

But it did not work before and it will not work 25 years down the line, especially as the imperialist system is far more rotten ripe with intractable crisis collapse than ever before.

But US imperialist interests are not exactly square with the most fanatical perspectives of the Zionists which are already pressing to expel the Palestinians from the West Bank as well as Gaza and whose Greater Eretz (Israel) “vision” extends not just to dominating the whole of Palestine “between the river Jordan and the sea” (EPSR last issue) but to taking over land as far as the river Euphrates and south into Saudi Arabia as one Gazan journalist said this week.

This nuclear-armed Jewish-Zionist frenzy is a potential keg of highly unstable nitro-glycerine in the Middle East which could explode any moment into massive regional warmongering and potentially further afield too.

Wild warnings have already been voiced by those to the right (!!) of Netanyahu, of flattening Beirut and Damascus which had its international passenger airport bombed even as the hostage exchanges were underway.

The Jordanians, already with millions of exiled Palestinians are facing the impossible task of absorbing 3 million further refugees if the settler fanatics’ wing gets its way in ethnically cleansing not just Gaza but the whole West Bank area as well (itself underlining the lying fraud of “self-defence” by the Government, since Hamas has no control here – despite becoming increasing popular because of its militancy).

Even the highly Western-compliant stoogery of the Jordanian monarchy (whose queen is Palestinian) is now declaring that it will be forced into war if it is confronted with absorbing three million more Palestinians, on top of millions already forced there since the 1948 Nakba.

Despite the Zionists’ usefulness to imperialism for suppressing the region, Washington could well also come into conflict with them as a prediction the EPSR’s Marxism was able to speculate on long ago:

A Zionist-fascist revolt against Washington domination is the likely next development, before a Palestinian-nationalist revolution finally sweeps to power and totally ends the whole colonisation annexation nightmare (No1065 07-11-00).

Washington has a far broader spectrum of stooges and strategic interests to juggle with in the region to maintain its dominance and they are threatening to go out of control.

Apart from the Zionists' threats above, the Hamas rebellion has directly stirred and intensified anti-imperialist sentiment everywhere, in a great volcanic rumbling beneath the surface which is threatening to topple a cascade of Arab bourgeois and corrupt feudal stooges.

The staggering and heroic fight is reinforcing already long running revolt, most obviously the Yemeni Houthis, themselves already pounded and blitzed for over six years by the Saudi feudal thuggery with British and US military “aid” (operational control), suffering tens of thousands of civilian and child casualties and also facing famine but still unbeaten; the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, with its own record of decades of fighting Zionism and one of the first to demonstrate the non-infallibility of the Zionists by pushing back IDF occupation in the south in 2006; in Syria allied with Iranian shia forces, and obviously in huge and well-armed Iran itself.

Biggest problem of all is gigantic Egypt with its rapidly growing (now 110 million) population permanently simmering with revolt and which has already demonstrated its explosively anti-Western and anti-Zionist potential in the toppling of two presidents, first with the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat (ILWP Bulletin No 109 08-10-81) and the second the forced resignation of Western and Zionist stooge dictator Hosni Mubarak by the enormous spontaneous street revolts of the 2011 Arab Spring when uncontainable millions poured into Cairo and other cities, driven by post-Global meltdown crisis poverty.

These great masses have a rebellious anti-imperialist form from the huge Arab nationalist movement post-war under Nasser onwards as well as hostility to the Zionists and sympathy for the Gazans – lately through the Muslim Brotherhood from which Hamas sprang originally.

It has already cost the West dearly to once again suppress this giant population using a brutal military dictatorship established by General Abdel Sisi’s bloody military coup in 2013 to overturn the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi presidency, won in the newly granted “democracy”, and holding the mass population down ever since with vicious censorship repression, torture and prison killings as well as “official” executions by the hundred (subsidised by US contributions).

All the pretences of “democracy” were torn up by the coup, which followed a similar pattern to the General Augosto Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973, Sisi having been Morsi’s Defence Minister, just as Pinochet was invited into Salvador Allende’s cabinet to “suppress” the very bourgeois class sabotage which he was actually acting for and which butchered and tortured Allende’s deludedly trusting “democratically elected” socialist alliance (with CIA backing and collusion).

But there are many more illusions being torn up in the Arab world and further afield by this latest very public butchery.

The entire Arab “community” has rapidly back-pedalled from its creeping collusion with US imperialism and Jerusalem, fearful for its own necks:

Facing growing anger from their own people, Arab countries are intensifying their appeals to the United States to pressure Israel to implement an immediate cease-fire in Gaza or risk sabotaging the security of the entire Middle East.

Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt have all implored American officials, including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, to get Israel to halt its military assault.

“The whole region is sinking in a sea of hatred that will define generations to come,” the Jordanian foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, warned at a news conference this weekend.

As unrest spills into the streets and fear spreads that Iran-backed militias in the region will enter more directly into the conflict, some Arab leaders are worrying for their own security, said Elham Fakhro, an associate fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Program.

“Long-term resentment among the Arab public is fuel for extremist groups,” she said. “The region is already walking a delicate balance,” she added. “This is what drives Arab governments to use their available leverage to call for a cease-fire.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has so far rejected calls for even a temporary cease-fire until hostages are released by Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that broke through the Israeli fence surrounding Gaza on Oct. 7 and launched a brazen attack, killing roughly 1,400 people, according to Israeli authorities. The attackers also took about 240 people hostage.

Israeli officials have insisted that their military campaign must destroy Hamas, which rules Gaza and is estimated to have tens of thousands of fighters inside the territory. But Arab officials and scholars who study the Iran-backed militia argue that goal is not only impossible, but counterproductive in that it would likely generate even more violence.

This weekend, Arab countries will gather in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, for a summit where the conflict — and their response to it — will top the agenda.

Saudi Arabia will also host an extraordinary meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation that President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran is expected to attend — his first trip to the kingdom since Saudi Arabia and Iran restored diplomatic ties earlier this year. His visit would be another sign of how the war has united disparate voices across the Muslim world in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Even officials in the United Arab Emirates — which led a push for Arab countries to build ties with Israel in 2020 — have condemned Israel’s conduct in the war.

“As we continue working to stop this war, we cannot ignore the wider context, and the necessity to turn down the regional temperature that is approaching a boiling point,” Noura al-Kaabi, an Emirati minister of state for foreign affairs, said recently.

One month into the war, the predominant emotions in the Middle East are despair and rage, which have pushed tens of thousands of people to join protests denouncing Israel across the region.

Further afield mass petty bourgeois opinion has been shaken to the core by the contempt displayed for the great racket of “international justice”, “freedom of speech”, United Nations, and Geneva conventions, all a gigantic lying hypocrisy as Marxism has always said is the reality of bourgeois rule, a hidden dictatorship:

Even some at the anti-communist Guardian are obliged to speak out:

for the first time that I can think of, western powers are unable to credibly pretend that there is some global system of rules that they uphold. They seem to simply say: there are exceptions, and that’s just the way it is. [...]

You can write to your MP, you can march, you protest[..]killing continues.

I see people who say they feel they are going mad. That there are things they will never unsee.

As that happens, a jarringly bloodless account of the conflict is given by political leaders in countries like the US and UK, [...in] an almost surreal language that calls for “every possible precaution” to protect civilian life. UN officials, not known for intemperance, now lose their cool and use the strongest terms possible

Part of that inability to reach for convincing narratives about why so many innocent people must die is that events escalated so quickly. There was no time to set the pace of the attacks on Gaza, prepare justifications and hope that eventually, when it was all over, time and short attention spans would cover up the toll. Gaza has been a uniquely, inconveniently, intense conflict. “Experts say that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century,” the New York Times says. A military expert commented it was like nothing he’d seen in his career. The area is so densely populated that the toll of civilians is too high, and evidence for having undermined Hamas’s capabilities, the only possible justification for the casualties, is too low.

And so the past few weeks have been a speeded-up lesson in the illusory nature of international law. Unlike Iraq, it has not taken years for the bodies to pile up, for the evidence to mount and to prove that the venture made no one safer, was merciless and misguided – and ultimately for confidence and trust in political leadership to leach away.

[....]Humans can be taught to accept an awful lot that does not make sense, but there is a limit to what people can be plausibly told is not possible. Much of consent in politics is secured by popular agreement that there are things that are simply above the average citizen’s pay grade, and even beyond government control. Not being able to persuade “the only democracy in the Middle East” of something that seems plainly obvious, that the horrific events of 7 October cannot be erased by even more horror, is not one of them. The lesson is brutal and short: human rights are not universal and international law is arbitrarily applied.

[...] Whatever happens with the fragile truce that has released a thin ray of light, a darkness has also been released into the world. Its final form is yet to take shape, but take shape it will.

The excellent John Pilger too:

There is one ‘precise’ provocateur now; it is clear to see for those who want to see it and foretell its actions. It is a gang of states led by the United States whose stated objective is ‘full spectrum dominance’. Russia is still the hated one, Red China the feared one. From Washington and London, the virulence has no limit. Israel, the colonial anachronism and unleashed attack dog, is armed to the teeth and granted historical impunity so that ‘we’ the West ensure the blood and tears never dry in Palestine. British MPs who dare call for a ceasefire in Gaza are banished, the iron door of two-party politics closed to them by a Labour leader who would withhold water and food from the children of Palestine.

In McCarthy’s time, there were bolt holes of truth. Mavericks welcomed then are heretics now; an underground of journalism exists (such as this site) in a landscape of mendacious conformity. Dissenting journalists have been defenestrated from the ‘mainstream’ (as the great editor David Bowman wrote); the media’s task is to invert the truth and support the illusions of democracy, including a ‘free press’.

Social Democracy has shrunk to the width of a cigarette paper that separates the principal policies of major parties. Their one subscription is to a capitalist cult, neoliberalism, and an imposed poverty described by a UN special rapporteur as ‘the immiseration of a significant part of the British population.’

War today is an unmoving shadow; ‘forever’ imperial wars are designated normal. Iraq, the model, is destroyed at a cost of a million lives and three million dispossessed. The destroyer, Blair, is personally enriched and fawned over at his party’s conference as an electoral winner. Blair and his moral counter, Julian Assange, live 14 miles apart, one in a Regency mansion, the other in a cell awaiting extradition to hell.

According to a Brown University study, since 9/11, almost six million men, women and children have been killed by America and its acolytes in the ‘Global War on Terror’. A monument is to be built in Washington in ‘celebration’ of this mass murder; its committee is chaired by the former president, George W Bush, Blair’s mentor. Afghanistan, where it started, was finally laid to waste when President Biden shop-lifted its national bank reserves

There have been many Afghanistans. The forensic William Blum devoted himself to making sense of a state terrorism that seldom spoke its name and so requires repetition:

In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries. It has attempted to murder countless leaders.

Perhaps I hear some of you saying: that is enough. As the Final Solution of Gaza is broadcast live to millions, the small faces of its victims etched in bombed rubble, framed between TV commercials for cars and pizza, yes, that is surely enough. How profane is that word ‘enough’?

Afghanistan was where the West sent young men weighed down with the ritual of ‘warriors’ to kill people and enjoy it. We know some of them enjoyed it from the evidence of Australian SAS sociopaths, including a photograph of them drinking from an Afghan man’s prosthetic.

Not one sociopath has been charged for this and crimes such as kicking a man over a cliff, gunning down children point-blank, slitting throats: none of it ‘in battle’. David McBride, a former Australian military lawyer who served twice in Afghanistan, was a ‘true believer’ in the system as moral and honourable, He also has an abiding belief in truth, and loyalty. He can define them as few can. On 13 November he is in court in Canberra as an alleged criminal.

‘An Australian whistleblower,’ reports Kieran Pender, a senior lawyer at the Australian Human Rights Law Centre, ‘ [will face] trial for blowing the whistle on horrendous wrongdoing. It is profoundly unjust that the first person on trial for war crimes in Afghanistan is the whistle blower and not an alleged war criminal.’

McBride can receive a sentence of up to 100 years for revealing the cover-up of the great crime of Afghanistan. He tried to exercise his legal right as a whistleblower under the Public Interest Disclosure Act, which the current Attorney General, Mark Dreyfus, says ‘delivers on our promise to strengthen protections for public sector whistleblowers’. Yet it is Dreyfus, a Labor minister, who signed off on the McBride trial following a punitive wait of four years and eight months since his arrest at Sydney airport: a wait that shredded his health and family.[..]

You can’t run a fully-fledged democracy and a colonial war; one aspires to decency, the other is a form of fascism, regardless of its pretensions. Mark the killing fields of Gaza, bombed to dust by apartheid Israel. It is no coincidence that in rich, yet impoverished Britain an ‘inquiry’ is currently being held into the gunning down by British SAS soldiers of 80 Afghans, all civilians, including a couple in bed.

The grotesque injustice meted out to David McBride is minted from the injustice consuming his compatriot, Julian Assange. Both are friends of mine.

Whenever I see them, I am optimistic. ‘You cheer me,’ I tell Julian as he raises a defiant fist at the end of our visiting period. ‘You make me feel proud,’ I tell David at our favourite coffee shop in Sydney.

Julian and David are Spartacus. The Palestinians are Spartacus. People who fill the streets with flags and principle and solidarity are Spartacus. We are all Spartacus if we want to be.

Neither of these last are Marxists and their agony will not change anything despite the eloquence. Only revolution will do that. It will come. Build Leninism. DH

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EPSR leaflet for the 25 November pro-Palestine march – text

The vicious genocide against Palestinian men women and children in Gaza is the sickest expression yet of a failing and collapsing world imperialist system and its Zionist attack dogs.

Specific conditions underlie the dementedly inhuman killing, maiming and terrorising of tens of thousands in Gaza, those being the logical end point for an artificial colonial “Israel” built on terrorist thuggery and ethnic cleansing occupation from its very 1947-8 US ordered inception.

There can never be peace while this land-thieving colonial occupation continues, because the dispossessed and oppressed indigenous population can never stop fighting to get their land, farms, olive groves and homes back – all of them.

Which means the occupiers can never stop their ruthless suppression and expansionism.

It can end only when the entire Palestinian people is killed, expelled or reduced to a rump, like the First Nation Americans and the Aborigines before them (and even they have not gone away).

Or it can end when revolutionary struggle of its people – and the Arab and Middle Eastern world around it – finally defeats this nazi-imposition, expelling the nonsense “state” of “Israel” for good and recovering their land and property (the Jewish population remaining, under Palestinian statehood, or returning to the countries they came from).

But peace will demand more too as the entire capitalist world is dragged into similar horrors.

The Gaza butchery reflects, and is completely entangled with, the same path being trod by the entire monopoly capitalist order faced with the unsolvable contradictions of its profit system heading into the greatest breakdown Catastrophe in history (as clear from 2009’s global bank collapse and non-stop “austerity”).

Not for nothing does the monstrous fascist Benjamin Netanyahu justify himself by pointing to the total razing of city after city in Iraq and Syria (Mosul, Tikrit, Falluja, Raqqa) where 10,000s of civilians were butchered by American airpower suppression of “terrorism” and by the savagery of its corrupt Iraqi sectarian stooges in Baghdad.

Half a dozen countries have already been blitzed and pulverised over 25 years by Washington imperialism or its proxies, from Serbia to Iraq, Afghanistan to Libya, Syria, Yemen and Somalia, with Russia still in the gunsights via NATO’s Kiev Nazi stooges and their degenerate Ukraine war forced on Moscow (with a major inter-imperialist conflict between the US and the EU also in the mix as the US Nord Stream sabotage showed).

Imperialist provoked or generated turmoil and war is underway or being prepared in a dozen more countries from Sudan and Ethiopia to the West of Africa, in Myanmar, the Philippines, in Latin America, Haïti and Taiwan against China.

They are all opening shots for the slide into Third World War, the same devastation and conflict used to “solve” the last two great crises, in 1914 and in 1939 but on a far greater scale.

Only by destroying the great “surplus” of uninvestable capital accumulated by the system’s relentless exploitation and credit creation can the imperialists restore profitability (for those of the bourgeoisie left standing) (see p6).

Far more war is coming as populist chauvinism, scapegoating and racist diversions are deliberately whipped up as now seen in Argentina, the Netherlands, France, Italy and in the USA itself with Trumpite reaction (with Biden no better).

But resistance and rebellion against imperialism is growing constantly in the world’s street-wise proletarian billions, daily less willing or able to tolerate the gross injustice and unfairness of ever more unequal monopoly capitalism.

However crude or seemingly “reactionary” the forms it takes (temporarily inevitable in a world where Leninist revolutionary science has still to be re-established after disillusionment caused by the great retreats and mistakes of Moscow revisionism) it is more and more competently taking on the fight.

The Hamas rebellion demonstrates the point, stunning the world with its incredible fighting organisation, and heroic willingness of its cadres to sacrifice their lives.

Marxist-Leninism is not religion and does not support Islamic ideology. But neither does it “condemn terrorism” and welcomes every blow struck against imperialism and its fascist instruments.

Already resisting one of the most powerful armies on earth for six weeks the Gaza revolt has stirred anti-imperialist sentiment across the world, especially among billions of the Third World but deep into the imperialist countries too.

The entire lying racket of bourgeois “democracy” “rule of law”, “international justice”, “Geneva Conventions” and “United Nations peace progress”, has been shattered beyond repair. So too the disgusting treachery of TUC/Labour opportunism four-square supporting Zionism (and the Ukraine Nazis too) propping up its “anti-semitism” bullying censorship and self-righteous “justification” for aggression.

But fake-“left” revisionism (all shades) still feeds democracy illusions, “Israel’s right to exist” and even swallows sudden revival of the never possible “two state solution” which would give the Palestinians just 22% of their own land under permanent supervision, surveillance and Zionist access control.

Fake-”left” ceasefire sloganising panders to petty bourgeois pacifist sentiment, which while usefully expressing mass dismay will solve nothing leaving the Palestinians tomorrow just as oppressed as they were before. Anti-communism is the fatal flaw/

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Proletarian posturing on the October revolution a giant cover-up for CPGB-ML pretences hiding retreat from revolution and evasion of the great discussion needed to re-establish Marxist political understanding. Celebrating Lenin’s revolution with stop-the-war pacifism and misapplied “Imperialism” lessons leads workers up the garden path. And why no mention of Stalin’s backing for the founding of the Zionist monstrosity??

Well meaning it might have been but the regular October Revolution celebration rally organised by the Brarite CPGB-ML this month, showed only how far this museum Stalinist group has slipped from any grasp of real revolutionary politics, if it has ever had any.

Certainly it is always important to bring the 1917 Russian revolution, and the following 70 years of giant achievements of the USSR, to the attention of the working class.

Countering the deluge of non-stop brainwashing lies about the “failure” or “unworkability” of “tyrannical” communism is a crucial question and growing more so as the imperialist Catastrophe deepens.

The bourgeoisie pumps out nothing but such vicious propaganda morning, noon and night (aided by all kinds of reformist (TUC/Labourite and some revisionist) opportunist treachery and Trotskyist anti-Soviet subjective poison in endless assortment) to head workers away from any thoughts of ending capitalism, by establishing the workers states that alone can take society forwards from imperialist barbarity to a communist future.

So, the great lesson needs to be constantly discussed in proving for the first time that giant strides in social, industrial, military, scientific, and cultural development were not only possible, on a new, fair, just and cooperative basis, without a single profiteering boss or billionaire in sight, but that a society firmly led by the working class could rapidly start to overtake the technological advances produced by the “entrepreneurial spirit” of the “free market” (and without its staggeringly brutal inequality and injustice).

Huge advances in culture, science and technology for the benefit of humanity were made by this first great historical advance; – increasingly that will only be possible at all through socialism as the out-of-time imperialist order drags the world ever further into degeneracy, corruption, breakdown, slump and planet-threatening plunder, pollution and appalling world war.

The absence of want, of homelessness, of unemployment, and the positive provision of education and health for all (forcing capitalism to try and emulate it for a while post 1945 in the richer countries after the great sacrifices of the Red Army and its titanic victory over imperialism’s last Nazi onslaught) are all crucially important to explain, as well as the colossal generous and disciplined sacrifices made to aid emerging nations and their struggles against imperialist exploitation, not least including outright communist revolutions like Vietnam, Korea, Cuba and China.

Yet for all the declamations of the historic significance of the 1917 which established the USSR – undeniably history’s most significant event so far and worth repeated loud commemoration in the teeth of the anti-communist propaganda – not one ounce of understanding was adduced about its vital current significance for the working class as the great breakdown of the imperialist system drives the world further into the greatest slump collapse and warmongering crisis yet.

The revolutionary lessons for the crisis warmongering currently unfolding were not drawn out.

The politics on offer were saturated in social-pacifism, chauvinism and subjective wishful thinking as well as a sectarian contempt for polemical and living theoretical struggle that leaves most of the group’s supporters devoid of any capacity to develop and grasp theory independently and even in most cases even understand the importance and significance of theory at all.

At the meeting at least two of them declared a major political question – whether US warmongering can be “stopped” as urged by a large banner stretched across the platform speakers’ table, – to be either “beyond my pay grade” or of no great significance, and just a “quibble about words”.

That rather writes off one Vladimir Lenin who spent much of his life disputing and polemicising about words, or to be more accurate, about the precise dialectical description and grasp of concrete and emerging phenomena in the class struggle and the ever shifting world balance of class forces, which words delineate and which is vital to guide revolutionary struggle.

One of the issues he wrote about was precisely contempt for theory, and the particular weakness of the British working class with its long imperialism-corrupted history of pragmatism.

He particularly considered inter-imperialist world war a crucial question and wrote reams about it, including the impossibility of stopping it, other than by defeats for the ruling class and its revolutionary overturn.

These casual interchanges at the end of the usual set of formalised speeches, (themselves typical of the petty bourgeois approach to restricted discussion) reflect a sectarian attitude relying on handed down “theory” from the party gurus.

Ostensibly upholding the need for theory – the CPGB-ML puts Lenin’s famous dictum on its masthead, that without theory there can be no revolution – in its practice the group gives no encouragement for comrades to make challenges (of a serious kind obviously) or to raise issues and debate, to develop the independent grasp that is vital for training and educating revolutionary cadres, capable of offering leadership to the working class.

Non-stop interchange with both cadres in party polemical discussion and outwards both with the working class around it, and against petty bourgeois confusion and opportunism, is crucial to build a Leninist party and constantly push its understanding higher.

Without it, mistakes or differences in understanding are not only left unexplored but covered up, the Stalinist revisionist method par exellence, which leaves all and sundry high and dry about crucial questions and the understanding that can be gleaned from them.

The world still awaits some kind of enlightenment for example on the CPBG-ML’s breakaway from the George Galloway Workers Party of Britain, which only quietly filtered through the fake-“left” gossip ether in the months after the split in November last year (and even that date stands to be corrected).

It is obviously of some significance since the CPGB-ML’s Joti Brar, one of the rally’s speakers was joint founder of the WPB and was its deputy chair.

Whatever the political differences with Galloway might be they are of great importance and usefulness to the working class, particularly as the Palestinians’ Gaza revolt against the vile savagery of the Zionist genocidal occupation continues, and the imperialist provoked and sustained fascist war against Russia in Ukraine stalls, both material developments in capitalism’s Catastrophic breakdown which are shaking mass consciousness and issues on which the WPB and the Brarites are ostensibly in agreement.

So what were the differences??

When the Lalkar (CPGB-ML) finally broke with Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party in 2004, after “eight years of silent servitude” as the EPSR put it (EPSR No1245 24-08-04) they did at least set out some reasons, one of which was Scargill’s theoretical ignorance. Although as the EPSR queried at the time:

Was it really only after being expelled at the end of 8 years of silent servitude behind Scargill that these Brarites finally became aware of the need to denounce the opportunist majority of the SLP, led by Arthur Scargill, saturated through and through with the politics of trade unionism (i.e. bourgeois politics), — who have been busy trying to rid the SLP of all serious theoretical thought and turn it into yet another outfit completely characterised by eclecticism and lack of principle”????

And if it isn’t really possible that such a long view of Scargill’s total political rottenness could only become clear to the Brarites at the moment of their expulsion at the end of 8 years’ loyal back-scratching for Scargill in public, then where is the CPGB-ML’s explanation for the POLITICAL SILENCE of their total membership and leadership throughout that period on a matter of such crucial importance for the entire British working class???????

If Scargill is such a completely shallow opportunist rogue, than what has this CPGB-ML membership been up to deliberately hiding this fact from the British working class for the past 8 years??????

What manner of political animal are these Brarites that only after their sudden summary expulsion from the SLP’s ranks (with an appeal for reinstatement turned down!) was the discovery made about

“Scargill’s total ignorance of scientific socialism, his utter contempt for theory in the worst traditions of British trade unionism, his proclivity for Christian petty-bourgeois pacifism, his complete devotion to the bourgeois politics of trade unionism, his inability to get rid of the baggage of shallow lib-lab politics which he acquired through his membership of the imperialist Labour Party over a period of four decades, combined with his insufferable vanity.”

(all quotes from issue No 1 of the “new” Stalinist gobshite newspaper)????

Is the working class going to get any better enlightenment now on the arch-opportunist George Galloway, especially explaining both why the Brarites joined up with his chauvinism-saturated Brexit-favouring party, with its Spitfire roundel “British patriotic” symbol, in the first place, given their dismissal of Galloway in previous times as a parliamentary opportunist, – and then having to split again????

Will there particularly be some clarity on the Brarites’ own disastrous backing for British chauvinism, taking the Leave position in the great Brexit debate alongside such ultra-reactionaries as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees Mogg, a clutch of billonaire fatcats like Jim Ratcliffe and Tim Martin, and confusion mongers like Galloway??

Not at the rally anyway.

But that had a different “celebratory” purpose it could be said.

Perhaps so, but putting out the bunting amounts to nothing but complacency if the anniversary it is not seen as a means of educating and inspiring the working class for ever more crucial class war struggles unfolding now.

Appreciating the great positive triumph and significance of the Soviet Union, the first giant step towards mankind’s only possible future as a rational scientific society, and the inspiration for much 20th century anti-imperialist and communist struggles and development, is rendered completely hollow if the reality of its alleged “failure” in 1991 is not also tackled.

Covering up those difficulties does not help.

Without exploring and analysing in depth the philosophical and political mistakes and errors which accumulated in Moscow’s revisionist leadership over decades from the 1920s onwards, and ultimately led to the appallingly stupid and philistine liquidation of the workers state by Gorbachevism, the confusions will remain that somehow communism itself is “nice idea but fatally flawed”.

It is not remotely a “failed project” of course.

In fact the USSR, and the Soviet camp, continued to be perfectly viable with a steady if uninspired economic growth, until the late 1980s when the addle-brained notions of an (ironically) complacent bureaucratic leadership finally capitulated to delusions about the “free market” and class collaborating notions of a “common democratic future”, as ways to handle various problems and difficulties, and effectively simply gave up the fight to maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat, the very foundation of the new society’s ability to develop and advance, while fending off endless subversion, intimidation and sabotage by a hate-filled imperialist system.

As usual, these complex and difficult questions were swiftly skipped over by the CPGB-ML hosts, with hoary old explanation that “counter-revolutionary” forces had developed within the leadership under the essentially “infallible” Stalin, which then pounced when he died, in the form of Nikita Kruschev, setting the Soviet Union on a path to eventual liquidation (inexplicably this 1956 counter-revolution being deferred until 1989 behind a convincing “pretence” of a still continuing workers state – or perhaps it was not a counter-revolution at all?).

Understandably a rally might not allow detailed analysis of this question, (such as the EPSR has published in multiple papers and in its Book Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics) but offhandedly promulgating this shallow nonsense undermines just about all the benefit the working class might get from better understanding the USSR, its gains and eventual flaws.

But that excuse slyly evades all the uncomfortable questions, once again loading everything onto Kruschev’s back who was selected, trained and promoted by the “genius” Stalin himself, over a 30 year period, and whose revisionist mistakes were founded in the errors that had gone before.

The EPSR has long polemicised with the Lalkar/Proletarian CPGB-ML on this Kruschev cover-up as for example during the eight years the Brarites propped up the Socialist Labour Party, long after its bureaucratic anti-Marxist nature had been made clear (from EPSR Nos 1023,1031 and 1191):

The sturdily-formed long-established CLASS character, quickly assumed by Scargillism and typified by an arrogant/philistine refusal to reply to difficult criticism, came ready-perfected in the SLP’s Lalkar supporters who have for nearly 20 years been studiously avoiding the EPSR’s voluminous exposures of their own Revisionist idiocies (eg see Book Vol 18 Five Polemics for the IWA) and especially those of their hero Stalin in his monumental nonsense-work, ‘Economic Problems of Socialism, 1952’ which part-encapsulated his already well-worn theoretical muddle (which turned Moscow’s wishful-thinking opportunist-compromise hopes for continued avoidance of war with Western imperialism into lunatic ‘Marxist’ theories about finding ‘peaceful roads to socialism’ and ‘an end to imperialist economic expansion and renewal’ as ‘justification’ and ‘security’ for such war-avoidance hopes and fears AND FOR ALL THE TREACHEROUS ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY POSITIONS and PARANOID SOCIALIST-CAMP TACTICS taken up in the name of such hopes and fears).

Exposing the Revisionist/petty-bourgeois socialist drivel of Lassalle, Bakunin, Bernstein, Kautsky, Trotsky, etc, helped to create all the essential central material of Marxism-Leninism, from the 1850s to the early 1920s. Exposing the undeniable Revisionist MIS-leadership in the subsequent 70 years which prepared the way for Kruschevism and ultimately Gorbachevism must equally be the material for re-establishing the dominance of Marxist-Leninist theory today, and Stalin’s opportunist-bureaucratic ‘theorising’ howlers must come top of the list.

But the Lalkar Scargillists refuse to budge, or even to polemicise. Once enshrined, museum Stalinism is to stay enshrined, – even down to the not insignificant historical detail of protecting a ‘great leader’ who on no account must suffer the indignity of criticism.

 

But just as this crucial role for revolutionary theory starts becoming clearer, up pop the middle-class Revisionist relics in Lalkar and the SLP to try to queer the pitch for a return to Marxist-Leninist science by putting new life into their deliberate OBSTACLE to theory. Feigning total commitment to the headline notion that “The 21st century belongs to communism”, this museum-Stalinism puts the SLP’s contribution to working-class politics as the central plank in the fight for theory!!! The crude manipulations of proceedings by Scargill’s trade-union mafia at the Conway Hall in November are reported as having made it “abundantly clear that the overwhelming sentiment at the Congress was that not only was Marxism a science but also that the SLP was a party subscribing to the philosophy of Marxism.”!!! And this is claimed in the same paragraph admitting that an amendment from Wansdyke (rebutting an anti-Marxist motion from Colne Valley anti-communists) had been rejected by Congress (overwhelmingly) on the NEC’s (i.e. Scargill’s) recommendation!!

This lunatic deception of the working class is accompanied by routine museum-Stalinist gibberish devoting pages to praise of Stalin as a theoretical genius continuing the work of Marx and Lenin but passing over the post-1945 climax of Stalinist Revisionist stupidity (which finally destroyed all REVOLUTIONARY understanding for defeating imperialist crisis) in just a few deliberately vague phrases, blaming Kruschev’s subsequent continuation of all Stalin’s collaborationist delusions as the CAUSE of the problem instead of the CONSEQUENCE.

This longstanding criminal nonsense helps no one and is a continuing disaster for the working class. Stalinist party remnants continue everywhere to repeat exactly the same Revisionist mistakes which finally led the Third International to disastrous failure and collapse, – for example mouthing useless ‘No to war’ social pacifism at NATO’s nazi blitzkrieg on Serbia instead of concentrating minds on imperialist DEFEAT which alone can be the next great development in the international class struggle; but at the same time declaring ‘Defend Yugoslavia’ solidarity with the hopeless Milosevic bonapartist-gangster regime which can only add to the deepening confusion in the international workers movement relentlessly sown by bourgeois propaganda.

 

So dominant was the mood of peaceful, class collaborative, reformist pressure after 1945 that the British CP actually opposed having the khaki election (when an enormously enthusiastic anti-imperialist population gave Labour its first ever landslide majority government, bringing in wholesale nationalisation as “socialism” in Britain).

The CP agitated for the imperialist warmonger Churchill’s wartime coalition-government to be allowed to continue ruling without an election.

Soon, the totally class-collaborative British Road to Socialism was adopted, not just with Moscow’s approval, but mischievously rumoured to have been “written by Stalin”.

At the time, the CP had 50,000 members, two MPs, scores of councillors, and a flourishing daily paper. The “peaceful road” shite totally destroyed all that, and where are those programmatic illusions now?? Still throttling the last dregs of life out of the pitiful, tiny, factional remnants of that once great movement.

But even the several more thousand anecdotal notorieties allegeable against the Comintern’s 60-year Revisionist reformist legacy, will not convince some diehard fake-‘left’ posturers that Stalin himself can be blamed for any of the disasters which occurred.

The continuation of this “revolutionary” fantasy-world depends on blaming “anyone but Stalin” for the ludicrous mess which the international communist movement ended up in.

Even if some of the worst Revisionist formulations CAN first be traced to the Soviet bureaucracy AFTER Stalin (e.g. Kruschev, etc), what kind of “towering genius” was this to have only succeeded, in 30 years of unchallengeable authority and power in the Comintern, in leaving it in the hands of such TRAINED Revisionist dolts who signed the 1960 declaration from 81 communist parties??????

The same sleight of hand now covers up yet further disarming social-pacifism as the meeting’s platform banner made clear, calling to “Stop the US imperialist drive to war”.

It is a slogan drawn straight from Stalin’s misanalysis of imperialism post-WW2, which he said was now hamstrung and hemmed in by the socialist camp to such an extent that it could no longer expand, and its undeniably aggressive nature could be contained by “peace struggle”.

And it is a principle which has frequently found wide application in the CPGB-ML’s campaigning against imperialist war, where it is declared that the working class can “stop war” with sufficient resolve and coordinated action to prevent arms or supplies reaching the imperialist military and war machine.

The point has been made repeatedly about the Ukraine war as the rally heard.

The Brarites have avoided the treachery of much of the fake-“left which has succumbed outright to the tsunami of propaganda lies propping up the nazi-NATO manipulated Kiev fascists and the pretence that they were “invaded” by Russia, all ignoring a decade of fascist skulduggery and war beforehand by the swastika-toting Kievites, installed by the US manipulated Maidan coup in 2014, with every group either outright supporting this totally fascist NATO-run war or taking a useless social-pacifist position which blames Russia for “starting it”, de facto giving credence to the West’s warmongering, whatever pretences are made about opposing it.

But the CPGB itself still argues that “war can be stopped” and that trade union action could “stop arms being loaded” as happened during the “Hands off Russia” working class blockade of ports in the first years of the Soviet Union as their correspondent Steve Sweeney, based in the Donbass argues for example.

Or as the rally was told by speaker Joti Brar, “if journalists were to stop producing the propaganda; printworkers refused to handle it; supermarket workers refused to deliver, rail workers to refuse arms deliveries etc” a whole cascade of different non-cooperation actions could paralyse the warmongers and there would be a political movement “the trade unions could no longer ignore”.

This is just reformist “left” pressure and anyway nonsensical.

Conditions are nothing like the immediate post-WW1 time when working class disgust at four years’ slaughter in the trenches was running high, and the revolution erupted in Russia (as well as several attempts in Europe, in Hungary and Germany). Long decades of brainwashing anti-communism, & Labourite and Trotskyist treachery have temporarily killed such working class spirit.

The trade union bureaucracy is also completely corrupt as it just proved by voting through a foul motion at its Congress declaring support for Ukraine.

But even if it were possible to build a large enough political movement to win so many disparate sections of the working class to action that would be “difficult to ignore”, why stop there?

Why not win them further to an understanding of the need for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism?

And if investing so much effort why not do that in the first place?

In fact it is only that perspective which will make more and more sense to them as the crisis kicks them harder and harder.

Battling for revolutionary understanding is easier than organising a pacifist boycott among multiple separate workforces.

Mass pacifist action is impossible to achieve anyway because there is no stopping the descent into imperialist war as Lenin explained:

“We shall retaliate to war by a strike or a revolution” that is what all the prominent reformist leaders usually say to the working class. And very often the seeming radicalness of the measures proposed satisfies and appeases the workers, co-operators and peasants.

Perhaps the most correct method would be to start with the sharpest refutation of this opinion; to declare that particularly now, after the recent war, only the most foolish or utterly dishonest people can assert that such an answer to the question of combating war is of any use; to declare that it is impossible to “retaliate” to war by a strike, just as it is impossible to “retaliate” to war by revolution in the simple and literal sense of these terms.

We must explain the real situation to the people, show them that war is hatched in the greatest secrecy, and that the ordinary workers’ organisations, even if they call themselves revolutionary organisations, are utterly helpless in face of a really impending war.

We must explain to the people again and again in the most concrete manner possible how matters stood in the last war, and why they could not have been otherwise.

We must take special pains to explain that the question of “defence of the fatherland” will inevitably arise, and that the overwhelming majority of the working people will inevitably decide it in favour of their bourgeoisie.

Therefore, first, it is necessary to explain what “defence of the fatherland” means. Second, in connection with this, it is necessary to explain what “defeatism” means. Lastly, we must explain that the only possible method of combating war is to preserve existing, and to form new, illegal organisations in which all revolutionaries taking part in a war carry on prolonged anti-war activities - all this must be brought into the forefront.

Boycott war - that is a silly catch-phrase. Communists must take part in every war, even the most reactionary.

Examples from, say, pre-war German literature, and in particular, the example of the Basle Congress of 1912, should be used as especially concrete proof that the theoretical admission that war is criminal, that socialists cannot condone war, etc., turn out to be empty phrases, because there is nothing concrete in them. The masses are not given a really vivid idea of how war may and will creep up on them. On the contrary, every day the dominant press, in an infinite number of copies, obscures this question and weaves such lies around it that the feeble socialist press is absolutely impotent against it, the more so that even in time of peace it propounds fundamentally erroneous views on this point. In all probability, the communist press in most countries will also disgrace itself.

I think that our delegates at the International Congress of Co-operators and Trade Unionists should distribute their functions among themselves and expose all the sophistries that are being advanced at the present time in justification of war.

These sophistries are, perhaps, the principal means by which the bourgeois press rallies the masses in support of war; and the main reason why we are so impotent in face of war is either that we do not expose these sophistries beforehand, or still more that we, in the spirit of the Basle Manifesto of 1912, waive them aside with the cheap, boastful and utterly empty phrase that we shall not allow war to break out, that we fully understand that war is a crime, etc.

I think that if we have several people at The Hague Conference who are capable of delivering speeches against war in various languages, the most important thing would be to refute the opinion that the delegates at the Conference are opponents of war, that they understand how war may and will come upon them at the most unexpected moment, that they to any extent understand what methods should be adopted to combat war, that they are to any extent in a position to adopt reasonable and effective measures to combat war.

Using the experience of the recent war to illustrate the point, we must explain what a host of both theoretical and practical questions will arise on the morrow of the declaration of war, and that the vast majority of the men called up for military service will have no opportunity to examine these questions with anything like clear heads, or in a conscientious and unprejudiced manner.

I think that this question must be explained in extraordinary detail, and in two ways:

First, by relating and analysing what happened during the last war and telling all those present that they are ignorant of this, or pretend that they know about it, but actually shut their eyes to what is the very pivot of the question which must be understood if any real efforts are to be made to combat war.

Secondly, we must take the present conflicts, even the most insignificant, to illustrate the fact that war may break out any day as a consequence of a dispute between Great Britain and France over some point of their treaty with Turkey, or between the U.S.A. and Japan over some trivial disagreement on any Pacific question, or between any of the big powers over colonies, tariffs, or general commercial policy, etc., etc.

Perhaps on a number of questions the mere quoting of facts of the last war will be sufficient to produce serious effect. Perhaps on a number of other questions serious effect can be produced only by explaining the conflicts that exist today between the various countries and how likely they are to develop into armed collisions.

Dec 1922 Notes for the Hague Delegation

War has “crept up” on the masses over and over again, sold to them with every kind of lying fraud about “weapons of mass destruction in Iraq”, or “the Vietnamese just attacked our battle fleet in the Bay of Tonkin” (with two tiny torpedo boats) or of the need to defend “plucky little..Poland...Kuwait..Kosovo...Ukraine..Iraq...the Libyan people...or even ‘Israel’,” (under possibly the most twisted and bent fraud of all, that the monstrously brutal and terrorising 75-year long Zionist terror occupation of another people’s land is “being attacked because we are the innocent victims of anti-semitism”).

The last issue incidentally raises one of the most glaring cover-ups of all by the Stalinists who say not one word about the most central current issue of all, the foundation of Zionist “Israel”, not only agreed to by Stalin himself (in 1947-8, long before Kruschev was running things) but actively encouraged by sending arms to help it “defend itself”.

Without any kind of perspective of the capitalist crisis and its contradictions, relentlessly heading into the greatest Slump disaster of all time, with all the social rebellion and turmoil that will ensue, the majority public opinion will repeatedly be misled as many (mostly in the Western rich nations anyway) have been over Ukraine for example, or as they have been repeatedly dragged into denouncing “terrorism” as if the ever growing upsurge of violent anarchic and/or jihardist outbursts were some “new evil” and the suppression of them by imperialist blitzkrieg therefore necessary to “save the world and its stability”.

What “stability” and why would communists want to aid imperialism in maintaining its “stable” world exploitation anyway??????

So far gone is much petty bourgeois opinion that it even ignores the most obvious pointers, like the reactionary “Lord” David Cameron flying in to support the fascist Zelensky-ites on his first day as the latest (very much unelected) Foreign Secretary, in the footsteps of Boris Johnson and the rest of the international bourgeoisie.

Some small effort to raise the theoretical understanding of crisis was heard during the meeting but despite referencing Lenin’s profound understanding in his 1916 book on Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, its major lessons was ignored.

It was that book which spelled out how the bitter and intractable inter-imperialist battle for colonies and world markets, intensified by the deepening economic crisis of “overproduction” had unstoppably produced the First World War (see box).

Along with much other constantly polemically developed scientific Marxist understanding, this was the guiding philosophy for the Bolsheviks’ which enabled them to win the leadership of the masses as the horrors of the industrial butchery and war deprivations finally drove millions into revolutionary struggle.

Lenin’s leadership carried the great spontaneous upheavals through from the overturn of the defeated feudal Tsarist order to the proletarian led October founding of the Soviet workers state (necessary to head off the new bourgeois regime’s reversion to international warmongering and reaction).

The great crisis contradictions of the monopoly capitalist system explained by Imperialism and which unstoppably produce war and always will, were cited but then promptly ignored in favour of the disastrous Stalinist theories of “bad imperialism” (fascism) and “good imperialism” (“democratic” capitalism) which took root after the Second World war as part of Stalin’s revisionist retreats from revolutionary perspectives (which began as far back as the late 1920s and found their full expression in the post-war perspectives set out by Stalin’s 1952 book on Economic Problems of Socialism).

Staggeringly, it was denied that the Second World War was an inter-imperialist conflict at all, and instead it was declared an “anti-fascist war”, as is the Western provoked war in Ukraine, the extension of 20 years of non-stop belligerence and blitzing from Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya, Syria and Yemen, all on a path into World War Three.

So, the meeting was told, the Second World War was different to the First, as it was “not an inter-imperialist war” but a “war against fascism”. So too the unfolding World War Three and particularly in its latest manifestations in Ukraine.

Allied to this is a cascade of nonsense and academic justification for supporting the oligarch pandering Vladimir Putin regime (trickily hidden behind the pretence that the Brarites are “against Putin and only supporting the Communist Party of the Russian Federation CPRF”, (which in turn currently “fully supports Putin in the war against Ukraine”)).

All kinds of hair splitting has gone on for years pretending that Putin’s Bonarpartist Russia (a balancing act between billionaire plundering oligarchs and the Soviet nostalgia prevailing in much of the working class) is “not imperialist”, in order to get away with this nonsense and avoid Lenin’s understanding that the working class needs to call for defeat of all imperialists, and particularly its own ruling class, the key policy which guided the Bolshevik revolution.

As the EPSR has explained from the beginning of the war in Ukraine, world conditions are such after decades of ever more concentrating monopolisation, that the overwhelming influence and power on the planet is now the American Empire and its acolytes (particularly the Anglo-Saxon world).

A formally “correct” Leninist position of defeat for both sides, as many of the fake-“left” have adopted (notably another brand of former revisionists in the Weekly Worker CPGB) now makes no sense and amounts to a sly evasion of the revolutionary perspectives by declaring “not our fight” under cover of “the main enemy is at home”.

But Leninism does seek the defeat and downfall of imperialism and that means the downfall of the big power which alone dominates the world, namely American imperialism and its instrument NATO, running the war through the nasty little squawking fascist green toad Zelensky and his CIA installed Swastika toting crew.

Only the fight Russia has been forced into is in a position to do that, and it is just treachery to call for its defeat too.

But it is also completely confusing to call for Putin’s victory.

His capitalist regime, with its internationally exploiting billionaires, is also part of world imperialism and needs toppling too, just not right now in the middle of this fight.

The only possible call is for defeat of Ukraine/NATO but without implying any support for the second (or even third) string imperialism of Putin (see multiple past EPSRs, particularly No 1614 08-08-22 and similar issues around Saddam Hussein in No 1054, Slobodan Milosevic in No 1006 and Lenin’s arguments on fighting the General Kornilov royalist fascist coup attempt without supporting the Kerensky bourgeois government it was trying to topple in 1917).

Looked at from this perspective it turns out the Brarites’ advocacy of Imperialism is not all it seems either.

It is cited precisely to academically “prove” that Putin’s Russia is “not really” imperialist, and thereby to justify calling for its outright support as a “self-determination” anti-imperialist struggle.

The argument is a twisted sophistry of confusion and wishful thinking, built on a failure to put the world imperialist crisis at the forefront and the revolutionary imperatives it creates.

It consequences are just further confusion and cover-ups.

It means telling the working class to support an outright anti-communist, god-fearing holy-relic-kissing idiot, hostile to Lenin and to the dictatorship of the proletariat and all understanding of internationalism.

What kind of “communists” would go along with, (or fail to challenge which amounts to the same thing) Putin’s endless denunciations of Lenin’s workers state and its subsequent struggles, such as the latest denunciations of the Soviet Union and its vital interventions against fascist counter-revolution in post-war Eastern Europe:

12 Sep 2023: It was unwise of Moscow to impose its will on its Eastern European allies, the Russian president has said.

The Soviet Union’s decision to send its troops into allied Hungary and Czechoslovakia several decades ago was ill-judged, Russian President Vladimir Putin has admitted, adding that those incursions ran counter to the interests of the people of those countries.

Speaking at the plenary session of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on Tuesday, the Russian leader was asked to address criticism from the West accusing Moscow of colonialism over its decision to deploy tanks to Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 to quell popular unrest.

“We have long admitted that this element of the Soviet policy was a mistake that only led to strained relations. One should not do anything in foreign policy that obviously contradicts the interests of other nations,” Putin said.

The president went on to note that the leading Western countries, including the US, are now “stepping on the same rakes” the Soviet Union did. “They put pressure on their allies [and] so-called partners. They don’t have friends, they have only interests,” he noted, referring to the phrase famously coined by British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston in the 19th century.

Last month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that while Western countries were trying to preserve their hegemony by blackmailing and whipping the international community back into line, their efforts were having the opposite effect as many countries seek to move away from the US dollar and switch to transactions in national currencies.

The Soviet Union sent troops into Hungary, its Warsaw Pact ally, in 1956 to quell a revolt against a heavy-handed crackdown on political dissent, with ensuing clashes resulting in the deaths of several thousand people, including civilians.

Then in 1968, Moscow and several of its Eastern European allies sent forces into Czechoslovakia, which at the time was plunged into turmoil, after a more liberal Communist faction came to power. The Soviet intervention – which resulted in about 100 deaths – lead to the reshuffle of the Czechoslovak government, which then abandoned political and economic reforms.

These were not “more liberal communists” at all as this bourgeois press report lies, but sly counter-revolutionary attempts to overthrow the workers states, just as the later Solidarnosc bogus “trade union” was no such thing but a CIA/Vatican funded movement to overthrow communism, (supported by all the Trots or effectively unopposed by fence-sitters like the RCG and the then “Leninist” (now Weekly Worker) and with the disastrous consequences glaringly apparent in ultra-reactionary post-Soviet Poland, currently one of the main fascist cheerleaders for the NATO war on Russia.

The Hungarian “uprising” has close parallels with the Western Ukrainian fascist movement which the CIA/MI6 tapped into for its 2014 Maidan coup.

In fact, in one of its better bits of scholarship, the Proletarian has excellently detailed the history of Western Ukrainian nazism and the non-stop subversion which went on post-WW2, with killings and sabotage against the Soviet Union authorities by these fascists, supported and financed by Western intelligence agencies and the hidden Nazis in Western Germany etc etc.

Exactly the same Hitler-allied east European remnants were a crucial part of the attempted overthrow of the Hungarian workers state just next door, geographically speaking, correctly supported by the USSR when it was requested to help by Budapest (see ILWP Bulletin [EPSR] No 365, 366 and 368 eg].

If it was right to oppose the fascists in Ukraine now, why not in 1956 when exactly the same elements are attempting to overthrow communism?

Putin’s bourgeois “Great Russian” nationalism (hated by Lenin) cannot answer but the ostensible “Communists” of the CPGB-ML should be delivering full clarity on this if their supposed dedication to “Leninist theory” means anything at all.

To do otherwise is to thoroughly mislead the working class

Of course it creates some awkward other complications since it was the Brarite-denounced Kruschev scapegoat for all Moscow’s failings who sent the tanks in to defend the Soviet camp from this Western nazi subversion, notwithstanding Moscow’s deepening revisionist flaws.

And the Soviet Union was still sufficiently firm to do the same in 1968 against the Prague Spring counter-revolutionary movement long after Kruschev.

Some deep dialectical contradictions need exploring obviously as the EPSR has been doing and constantly presenting for polemics and discussion, the only way these tangled and fraught questions can begin to be understood, and a revolutionary movement be re-established (see EPSR Book Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics against museum-Stalinism).

Or will all this just be covered up like a thousand other questions and mistakes the Lalkar/Proletarian evades and refuses to discuss????

Continuing Western provoked, funded and sustained war horrors by the Zelensky fascists in Ukraine and backing for the ever more degenerate Zionist butchery of the Palestinian people in Gaza, are only the latest and most urgent signals yet of capitalism’s planet-threatening crisis collapse.

But still their apocalyptic significance is effectively ignored by fake-”left” routinism, Trot idealism and play-acting revisionist-Stalinist “revolutionism” that is anything but revolutionary.

The same old useless pacifist demands are wheeled out in a complete evasion of the need to build a serious Leninist revolutionary movement, and to warn the working class of the unstoppable collapse into total warmongering fascism which is coming.

Even these latest nazi-NATO and Zionist depravities, following on top of twenty years of savage invasion, blitzing, torture and killing in the Middle East and Afghanistan, are only the start.

Far worse, callous and ruthless butchery and genocidal destructiveness is on its way for as long as imperialism continues, and its unstoppable plunge into economic and political breakdown, trade war hostility and antagonism deepens into the total slump Catastrophe which emerged in full in 2008’s global bank failures and has been unravelling ever since (with the insane QE dollar printing to fend it off only deepening the contradictions and making things far worse).

Monopoly capitalism, ever more degenerately unequal, incompetent, decadent and corrupt, has never had any other “solution” to the crisis caused by its inbuilt contradictions but to destroy all the “surplus” capital clogging up the profit system (see box) wiping out all “troublemakers” and rivals as it does so.

Two World Wars have already demonstrated what horrors that means for humanity, the 1939-45 war already far worse than the first “War to end all wars”.

The Third World War a despairing imperialism is dragging the whole planet into, will be one hundred times more extreme if it is not stopped by revolution.

But the urgent imperative for the world’s ever more hammered masses, - including more and more even in the hoodwinked “rich” populations of the developed world - to forcefully bring down the entire bourgeois order and to establish the firmest possible workers states, run by the dictatorship of the proletariat, continues to be avoided by the entire “left” spectrum as the central perspective which needs to be developed and fought for.

Instead of making conscious this only possible path forwards for mankind through class war/revolutionary civil war to overturn the entire degenerate imperialist system, nearly a century of revisionist retreat from Leninist science and revolutionary clarity, begun soon after Lenin’s death, continues to hamper and hold back understanding.

Plenty of “left” groups pay lip service to what they call “Marxism” and occasionally “Leninism” too, and some even mention here and there the overthrow of capitalism though rarely without tacking on an “ultimately” or an “in the long run” or an “in the meantime” reformist caveat, effectively excusing themselves from offering any such leadership in actual practice.

The urgent task is to build Leninism.

Tony Lee

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