Back issues

No 1644 28th June 2024

The depravity and holocaust butchery by capitalist backed Zionism in Gaza, and Lebanon, a harbinger of even worse universal war horrors as Catastrophe ridden imperialism heads into the greatest collapse in history, and desperate deadly World War destruction to “solve” its overproduction crisis. The same needs to be understood about the monstrous fascist NATO warmongering in Ukraine. And while setbacks and blows from rising rebellion and revolt may rock the imperialists on their heels there can be no stopping war by ceasefires or truce; only when the rotten ripe monopoly capitalist system of ever more inequality, gross exploitation and eco-damage wastefulness is overthrown by class war struggle will the deadly threat to humanity be ended. Leninist theory crucially needed

The sickness and degeneracy of crisis-ridden imperialism grows daily more obvious in the foul fascist depravities of the Zionist/Western bourgeois genocide on Gaza, and the deliberately maintained “meatgrinder” slaughter of the US-instigated war in Ukraine, set going by non-stop skulduggery, CIA/MI6 psyops lies and calculated provocation against bonapartist Russia.

At the same time it is winding up racism, chauvinism and anti-foreigner scapegoating to frenzied levels in order to find scapegoating excuses for the Slump disaster that the bourgeoisie has brought the world to everywhere, using both the mainstream parties and ultraright fascist parties now encouraged across Europe, Asia and America.

But even as monopoly capitalism’s incompetence and despair at its inevitable inbuilt economic breakdown reaches new levels of inhuman depravity the uselessness and opportunism of the fake-“left” still leaves the working class everywhere vulnerably in the lurch, bereft of any grasp of the full scale of the utter Catastrophe facing mankind.

Worse they do not offer the revolutionary perspectives needed which alone can tackle the vicious fascist reaction, oppression and war being prepared by a desperate bourgeoisie (and already long in train).

Coups and open capitalist dictatorship moves are now almost non-stop, the latest (failed) effort in Bolivia against its soft “left democratic” nationalism; in France’s New Caledonia colonial suppression of national liberation; and in Western stooge Kenya’s cold-blooded street shooting of a dozen protesters against Slump “austerity” – ironically killed by the same corrupt thug police force which has 4000 men now arriving in Haïti at US imperialist urging (and payment) as a proxy force to violently quell the so-far unsuppressible revolutionary turmoil there – labelled “gangsterism” by the Western bourgeoisie and its poodle media voices to disguise its reality as an explosion of the very most downtrodden who cannot take any more.

Across the world the masses are becoming more and more organised from the Port-au-Prince slums to the Houthis on the coastal plains of Yemen, and the Hezbollah resistance in Lebanon – and of course in the astonishing fight of the Hamas-led Palestinians against the Zionist oppression and occupation of their land, itself stirring a volcano of potential upheaval throughout the Arab and wider Middle East, not least among the colossal population of next door Egypt, now numbering at least 110 million.

As it desperately tries to maintain control the imperialist order is degenerating ever more into open fascism internationally and domestically too which can only provoke far more rebellion and upheaval throughout the Third World just as the Iraq and Afghanistan blitzings drove tens of thousands into the ranks of “terrorism” and “jihadism” now spread all across the Sahel and even deeper in Africa – and not excluding Asia too, as the latest Dagestan attacks seem to indicate and the Moscow Crocus Hall attack in March.

Much of this revolt remains confused or inchoate, and as yet without vital Leninist understanding of the need for all-out struggle to have done with this stinking monopoly capitalist system, here and internationally, establishing workers states to build communism and continue the revolutionary struggle to complete it as a world system, the only possible future for mankind.

Its confusion is increased by all kinds of axe-grinding dissidents and the murky manipulation which goes on around this turmoil for counter-revolutionary purposes, trying to disrupt these uprisings, co-opt them for reactionary ends or counter them with completely bogus “popular” movements, bent “self-determination” struggles, and slickly PR coordinated “colour revolutions”, as in Hong Kong or Xinjiang against the Chinese workers state, in Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, etc etc, in Kosovo against the Serbian Yugoslav revisionist remnants and in Serbia itself, in Ukraine’s Maidan nazi-coup in 2014 and its subsequent war, and most recently in Georgia once again (to stop it swinging back towards Russia).

Or, if such stunts cannot be managed, it aims to keep potential anti-imperialist thorns-in-the-side fragmented and disrupted as seems likely in the destructive and brutal Sudan war, by the Syrian civil war, by years of Libyan warlordism following NATO invasion and in Ethiopia trying to break up newly achieved anti-Western bourgeois nationalist unity.

Or it sometimes simply kills people as just tried in an assassination attempt against the newly elected prime minister Robert Fico in Slovakia behind an alleged “maverick” but clearly to stop Fico’s turn towards Russia.

Disentangling all this enormous potential confusion, lies and conspiracy (plenty of them real, like the Reichstag fire or the Gulf of Tonkin, many fantastical, and many deliberate false-flag promulgations by the intelligence agencies who maintain whole departments to dream up such useful diversions) – needs constant analysis and assessment, founded in deeply studied dialectical materialist science, starting with 100 volumes of Marx, Engels and Lenin and using later developments as the EPSR has fought for in over 1640 issues.

Only such a battle for theory carried out by a purpose built party (Leninist party) can identify the different threads in the complex of emerging development and weigh the balance of class forces, to guide class struggle positively as well as avoiding misleadership of all these anti-Slump upheavals (as much popular opinion and celebrity “liberalism” has been misled over Ukraine for example, stampeded behind the foul Swastika-toting nazism of the corrupt Western stooges in Kiev, falsely dressed up by Western propaganda as “tyrannised victims just fighting for their country”).

But the required leadership, built around a constantly evolving (and consciously polemically evolved) revolutionary perspective, to challenge the whole foul, foetid racket of the historically imploding monopoly capitalist system, remains absent or blocked by the retreats and outright contempt for serious revolutionary understanding from the entire fake-“left” (much of it tapping a particularly sever anti-theory blind spot in the British working class).

Building it is not helped by the near century of anti-communist “democracy” brainwashing by the bourgeoisie and its idiot acceptance by Moscow’s revisionist philosophical decline over the decades of the Soviet Union into “permanent peaceful coexistence” delusions (and by continuing revisionist leadership in the remaining workers states even now).

That Stalinist retreat all needs analysing and challenging too, (philosophically, while at the same time recognising the great achievements of the Soviet camp and while unconditionally supporting the likes of China, North Korea, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam which continue as workers states).

And constant exposure is needed too of the false “anti-Stalinism” of the Trots, biliously pursuing an anti-communist agenda under the fraudulent cover of “sorting out revisionist bureaucratic mistakes and crimes” (see multiple issues of the EPSR eg No 1204, 1206, 1208 and many EPSR books).

The complete vacuum in any coherent left opposition in the farcical once-in-five-years General Election scam underway in Britain demonstrates the absence of leadership from the “lefts” just at the point where the great hoodwinking fraud of “parliamentary democracy” is more completely threadbare and worn-through, than ever before.

The bankruptcy, incompetence, arrogance and sleaze of the ruling class has never been more grossly and crudely exposed with scandal after scandal and degenerate wastefulness to the fore – like the latest gobsmacking gambling cynicism over the election and the revelation that £1.5 billion worth of sound (but overpriced profiteering) PPE equipment for the Covid pandemic has simply been incinerated.

The NHS is collapsing, railways are hopeless, blood is poisoned, Grenfell burns, football supporters are crushed, shit fills the rivers and seas and shit fills the ruling class party too, detested and derided universally.

And shit is all the supposed Labour alternative is offering with no other options but draconian cuts and capitalist Slump disaster too.

This time, staggeringly, its mountebank and shyster “team” has deliberately set out to be exactly the same as the Tories, always the actual reality of class grovelling Labourism in practice but now loudly trumpeted as a virtue (!!).

It will be like warmongering and repressive Blairism but more so, in the pockets of the big billionaires (all switching from the Tories), and offering the same Tory fairy-tales and opium fantasies about “growth and prosperity” – rightly drawing total dismay, incredulity and contempt from workers and much middle-class opinion too who can see what horsedung it all is (especially after 50 years of previous relentless decline by British monopoly capitalism relative to the rest of imperialism, which itself faces ever more breakdown).

When these “fully costed” fantasies fail, as they must in a failing world monopoly system, there will be more savage Slump cuts, with intensified domestic censorship and repression, especially as the working class reaches long-overdue breaking point and explodes into riot and revolt as it has done many times against capitalist slump from the 1980s Thatcherite ascendancy – in Toxteth, Brixton and Bristol – to the wave of riots in 2011 after the ruling class imposed savage new “austerity” in the wake of the great 2009 Global Credit failure and bank collapses.

But those upheavals were in an imperialist world still just about staggering on despite lurches and shakings.

Now it is spiralling into total Catastrophe.

Increasingly the bourgeoisie faces a domestic turmoil that will begin to merge into the growing ferment across the world, including in other imperialist powers.

But it remains without a shred of revolutionary perspective.

Internationally the degeneration, paralysis and vicious warmongering tyranny of the vile capitalist world order has never been more apparent than in the horrifying genocide underway in Gaza, ever more clearly intending to wipe out the entire population while the disgusting pretence continues alongside it that this is anything other than a total fascist barbarity deliberately let run by the Jewish occupation for its Greater Israel plans (as recent prior knowledge IDF intelligence revelations confirm).

Outright lies are told about its sick massacring intent, dressed up in the topsy-turvy notion of “self-defence” by the dementedly fanatical Zionist usurpers who brutally mugged a whole country from its indigenous Palestinian population 75 years ago, backed to the hilt by the whole might-is-right imperialist system because of the intertwining of the Jewish freemasonry with imperialism, and because, conversely, it additionally served general imperialist domination interests in suppressing Middle Eastern revolt and independence.

That backing allowed the Jewish fanatics to violently implant their artificial “Israel” settler colony in 1948 and has stood behind them and with them ever since, supplying the money, bombs, drones, shells, war intelligence and, increasingly, direct military intervention, to keep them in place with endless and ever more horrifying blitzing massacres, from the initial Zionist-terror-forced Nakba expulsion via repeated blitzings, to today’s ethnic cleansing holocaust, even now being wound up for a further extension into Lebanon.

The same too with the NATO war behind the on-the-make corrupt Nazi stoogery in Kiev, to disrupt and devastate the whole of Europe (as well as Russia), cutting down to size the EU (German) trade war competition which has been eating away at America’s top-dog supremacy for decades (which undermining, ironically, also triggered the “collapse” of Sovietism in 1989-91 as idiot revisionism concluded the Cold War was over and liquidated the still viable workers state – see EPSR book 13 on Gorbachevism)).

None of this will or can be stopped until monopoly capitalism itself is stopped in the only way possible, by the class war revolution to overthrow it completely.

In fact it will escalate.

But despite much posturing and preening from the many varieties of Trotskyism and Revisionism (Stalinism) about revolution and even some side references to the “crisis”, they still fail to warn the working class of just how deep and intractable is the breakdown of the entire monopoly capitalist order, and how depraved its response will continue to be because the whole 800 year old rise of the bourgeoisie, still expanding, is simultaneously now facing its extinction as a system.

For all their academic articles and summer schools about “Marxist” education, they don’t really mean a word of it nor really think it would matter anyway, being completely cynical about the impact of, and need for revolutionary theory, however much academic and eclectic verbiage they create around supposed manifestos, or “programmes”, and however radical their lists of demands (minimum or otherwise).

Scratch the “revolutionary” varnish from any of their “principles” or sloganising and just beneath the surface is nothing but useless reformism, social-pacifist retreat, and complacency about the world continuing “as usual” if a few tinkering “left pressure” changes are made.

Their complacency, in awe of the ruling class, is not capable of grasping or deep down even wanting the total historic disintegration of this bourgeois class dominated society in which the petty bourgeoisie has its own smug little niche.

So they have no interest in developing genuine objective Leninist science through the broadest and wide ranging discussion (as opposed to their own conceited idealist and entirely unrealisable “perfect revolution” formulas), with all such crucially needed polemic dismissed by the 57 varieties by either censorious sectarianism, or a parody of polemic, such as the eclectic collection of opinion given space in the likes of the Weekly Worker letters pages, endlessly going round in circles and never fought over (except ironically where asserting the individual “democratic rights” of such “lefts” to pursue such eclectic “openness” through factionalising – and even then never reaching any agreed conclusions, let alone using them to test theory in practice).

Imperialism’s fascistic responses will worsen as growing resistance and hatred drives it back, increasing its frenzy and fear, just as the 9 months of yet undefeated Gaza revolt is demonstrating.

What needs spelling out in giant letters to the whole world’s proletarian masses is that these wars, massacres and horrors, (and a dozen others unfolding) are not episodic, nor separate from the Slump breakdown.

Nor are they just extensions of the imperialist rampaging and bludgeoning that has kept its system in the saddle for the colonial and modern neo-colonial (finance led) exploitation epoch.

And they are not even just an extension of the escalated Empire warmongering of the last two decades which has already seen half a dozen countries destroyed by blitzings, invasions or provoked civil wars, from the 100-day NATO pounding of the nationalist Serbian wing of former Yugoslavia in 1999 to the invasions and occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the Yemen and Syria.

They are the next step in the unfolding of the greatest unstoppable crisis collapse in all history in which all seven billion alive on the planet (or just about alive, for the most downtrodden) are facing just as much destruction and horror themselves as the holocausted Gazans, as the monopoly capitalist “over production” crisis brings already cutthroat international competition to a new pitch of hatred and hostility.

The dollar, and the great structure of ever more inflated credit which keeps it propped up, is imploding after nearly 80 years of world trade currency domination established at the end of the Second World War by victorious US imperialism.

War is the only way out for imperialism from its intractable problems, providing a diversionary excuse for its own implosion and the ever more disgusting inequality being imposed by domestic “austerity”.

And far from war being “caused by tyrants and terrorists who hate our way of life”, serving as an “explanation” for the economic difficulties facing Britain, Europe, the US and elsewhere, (such as blaming inflation on oil price rises “caused by” the Russian bogeyman “starting a war” in Ukraine), it is the great economic Catastrophe which came first, (in 2008 and building up for decades before) and is the cause of war.

War is deliberately incited by Western skulduggery, pysops propaganda and NATO military buildups (with the Maidan coup in 2014, and provoked Russia “invasion” in 2022 for Ukraine eg) or by the invasions which stir world “terrorist” resistance, again initially an effect, not a cause.

The “lefts” come nowhere near explaining anything like this and least of all its revolutionary implications.

They barely manage much more than call for a “ceasefire” in Gaza – tapping appalled public dismay and resistance but offering only hopeless pacifist wishful thinking as the answer which is, firstly, impossible and secondly does nothing to explain the intractable reality of the Zionist/imperialist barbarism and its causes (see below), and nothing to alter the seven decades of inhuman refugeehood and murderous savagery inflicted on the Palestinians, expelled from their own country.

Some of them at least call for a break with Zionist Labourism, though a large section still prop it up with “left” illusions either that it is “at least better than the Tories” – (it is not, and potentially is even worse in its imperialist service grovelling) – or by arguing as “tactics” that there are “some ‘lefter’” candidates who could be supported (another craven nonsense propping up rank opportunism) or that Labour “remains a bourgeois workers party” – a specious formulation that had some validity just after the First World War but which is long buried by nearly a dozen experiences of Labourism in power and its eager service, running imperialism abroad and restraining or outright betraying the working class at home.

Groups denouncing Labour outright like George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain appear better but are still trapping workers behind the idea that the whole racket of parliament means something and can be a way forwards, as do the calls from the museum Stalinist CPGB-ML to “break the Labour grip” but still suggesting votes for “lefter” alternatives.

Breaking the “Labour grip” is sound enough but late in the day. Spontaneously it has been breaking for decades as the increasingly disillusioned working class has refused to turn out in election after election – and as the current election vox pop soundings suggest, virtually no one now “believes in Labour”.

And this misses the point anyway; election participation for Bolshevism was never aiming to “pull things leftwards” which only reinforces the parliamentary game again.

The point of participating is to make use of an open public platform (necessarily allowed by the bourgeoisie to give verisimilitude to this great confidence trick of elections) but solely to expose capitalist “democracy” as the lie it is, and explain the revolutionary understanding that the working class is increasingly in need of.

Tactically, vote against Labourism by all means but not for “anti-NATO” candidates whose “Not to War” style social-pacifism does not offer anything close to Marxist perspectives.

The CPGB-ML (Proletarian) line on the election correctly declares that workers need an “unashamedly revolutionary leadership” but remains distant from it with this call, limited to an attack on Labour (and with much other unresolved and covered-up Stalinist baggage as further explored below).

At least in their recent posting on the election, in which they denounce the CPB reformist zombies for their craven call to vote Labour even now (a polemic so easy it makes shooting fish in barrels look challenging) the Lalkar/Proletarian-ites scathingly dismiss the tailending suggestion that British workers are “not ready”.

They are right to. Conditions have never been riper for the (re)building of the Marxist-Leninist science now needed as the masses across the world turn away from the hoodwinking fraud of elections in country after country, with votes collapsing from India and South Africa to Ireland, Britain and France, and contempt for the bourgeois order never more profound.

The whole post-war edifice of lying, hypocritical pretence of an international “United Nations” pursuing “freedom, democracy and the rule of law” is now torn to shreds by the most publicly degenerate butchery and torture yet seen, but not only unpunished but actively supported by a system which lives by nothing but non-stop tyranny and repressive exploitation behind its preposterous façade.

Imperialist weakness was no better symbolised than at the mid-June gathering of the G7 “advanced” country leaders, virtually all of them reeling from electoral defeats and declines, and all kowtowing to the Fratelli Italia host who alone is making electoral headway, an out and out fascist, in order to pledge new credit-created war funds to another piece of disgusting fascist scum, the little green croaking toad from Kiev, Volodimir Zelensky.

As a the bourgeois press commented:

When Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy convenes the leaders of the Group of 7 countries on Thursday at a luxury resort hotel overlooking the Adriatic Sea, she might be forgiven for thinking her guests are seeking a refuge.

Except for Ms. Meloni herself, every one of the leaders is arriving at the meeting beleaguered, embattled or endangered — an ill-starred convergence that speaks to the political tremors rattling across the West. It also doesn’t bode well for the results of a gathering that already faced vexing challenges, ranging from Russia’s war in Ukraine to China’s global economic competition.

Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is three weeks away from an election in which his Conservative Party is expected to be swept out of power. President Emmanuel Macron of France has called a snap parliamentary election after his party suffered heavy losses to the far right in European elections.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and his Social Democratic Party were humbled in those elections as well, while President Biden is in a dogfight with his predecessor, former President Donald J. Trump. Even Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan faces rising unrest within his Liberal Democratic Party and may lose his job this autumn.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, who faces his own disenchanted public after more than eight years in office, spoke for his fellow leaders when he lamented the surge of populism in Europe and the United States.

“We have seen around the world a rise of populist right-wing forces in just about every democracy,” Mr. Trudeau said on Monday. “It is of concern to see political parties choosing to instrumentalize anger, fear, division, anxiety.”

Anxiety about the role of the Group of 7 is nothing new: These seven countries account for a diminishing share of global gross domestic product. The leaders of China and Russia are conspicuously absent. (Russia was suspended from the group in 2014 after it annexed Crimea and left permanently in 2017.)

In a gesture to the changing world, Ms. Meloni has invited an A-list of non-Western leaders to Italy: Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, and the president of the United Arab Emirates, Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. She also invited President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and Pope Francis.

Some of these leaders shoulder their own burdens. Mr. Modi was just elected to a third term, but his party’s parliamentary majority vanished. Mr. Erdogan suffered setbacks in local elections. While these leaders will not take part in the core sessions, some will hold separate meetings with Mr. Biden and other leaders, serving as a reminder of how power dynamics in the world are shifting.

Add in too collapse in support for the ANC/SACP in South Africa, a triumphant revolutionary anti-apartheid leadership but always limited by its bourgeois nationalist perspectives, and now driven by the crisis in a completely reactionary direction by allying with the once white-supremacist and still out-and-out reactionary Democratic Alliance.

Add in too the Irish nationalist Sinn Féin also beset by voting fallbacks. SF itself is the result of an even more historic victory by armed struggle against centuries of imperialist domination (as the EPSR alone battled to say for 30 years (see Books vol 8,15,22, and 25,26-28 on Ireland)) but just as hampered with limited bourgeois nationalist perspectives, saying nothing about the world crisis, and showing its flaws more and more in condemnations of the rising “terrorist” revolt against imperialism since 9/11 (with Hamas excepted) and lining up with imperialism in support for the Ukrainian-NATO warmongering, trapped by its own mechanical “sovereignty” sentiments and failing to see the overriding imperialist manipulation and participation in this world war stunt (just like the Trot “left” wrongly supported Albanian gangsterism in Kosovo against Serbia on “self-determination” grounds EPSR No1070 12-12-00).

The whole “left” effectively continues to accept the existing framework of the world imperialist system, and its “democracy” in fact, instead of explaining how this monstrous war destruction and butchery is trampling across and exposing every fraudulent pretence of “building a world of prosperity” “freedom” and the “rule of law”, the anti-communist mantra behind which imperialism has bludgeoned its way through the entire twentieth century, and particularly the post-WW2 American dominated extended boomtime.

They ask only that it be “contained” or reined in from its appalling war-making and massacres; that it should “pay attention” to increasingly dismayed and alienated global opinion; that it follow the prescriptions of assorted international courts and “rule of law” treaties as urged by South Africa for example; and that it accept some unspecified “counter balancing” by other powers in an allegedly newly emerging “multipolar” world.

Just like the old Cold War balance then under which tens of millions were starved and butchered throughout the colonialist domination including the Palestinians????

It is all the most disarming garbage.

It fails to see the complete breakdown of imperialism let alone welcome the disintegration of nearly a century of such “freedom” lies and the counter-revolutionary anti-communism they sustain.

No amount of “opposition” to the Gaza slaughter, demands for “ceasefire”, calls to “end arms supplies” (to Ukraine or Zionism), exposés of the twisted hypocrisy of the Zionists’ “all opposition to us is just racist anti-semitism” aggression, etc will make any difference unless and until all such protest is allied to a conscious grasp of just what a destructive and paralysing impasse has been reached in humanity’s history.

The old class based domination cannot move forwards and is stifling the world with its degeneracy, corruption, indifferent incompetence and ever-widening gross inequality, a fetter on development as Marx and Engels put it in their Communist Manifesto, 170 years ago and still valid.

The huge exponential genius of mass cooperative humanity which can solve all the great contradictions through socialist planning and collective human rationality, is untapped, blocked, suppressed and bound tight in ignorance, want, and sweatshop and plantation servitude by tyrannical oppression which becomes more overtly fascist by the minute.

Where revolution has unleashed mass consciousness to some extent then giant strides are possible in spite of revisionist leadership errors and dullness, as there were for 70 years in the Soviet Union (well beyond the supposed “genius” period of Stalin alone) and as there are still in Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and China (as just demonstrated with the staggering dark-side-of-the-moon soil sample mission).

But non-Leninist limitations still hold back the world’s great majority which needs to take over everything, seizing all the great resources and production capacity of the planet from the hands of their “owners” – the ever more concentrated billionaire-ism of the ruling class – in order to put them to work in a rational coherent manner for the common good and for the good of the planet’s ecology and environment and ending the insane, wasteful consumerism which is drowning humanity in philistine pointlessness and philosophical emptiness, riddled with pollution, crime, anxiety, debt, alienation and hatefulness at best, and mostly starving and destroying hundreds of millions of the most ruthlessly exploited.

No ruling class ever let go willingly and least of all the gigantic wealth and power of the colossal capitalist monopolies, finance houses and corporations, and their middle-class managers, accountants, PR people, lawyers etc etc and other attendants, (Paula Vennels anyone?) ruthlessly prepared to go to any lengths of repression and destruction to hold on.

They will take their profit-driven insanity far beyond even the first great imperialist conflicts, the “dress rehearsal” Franco-Prussian war of 1871, the Great War of 1914-18 and its much more devastating sequel in World War Two.

There is no stopping this total world war.

Only when the great and ever growing spontaneous revolt of the masses defeats this entire global exploitation system and moves on to consciously complete its total overturn, holding down the old class (while it remains) with proletarian dictatorship, so that rational planned economic development can be instigated, will this anarchic insanity of the “free market” and its deadly world war threat be ended.

It is happening, as the gigantic and mind-numbingly heroic sacrifices of the Palestinians demonstrate and much other allied struggle around the Middle East from the Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and a ferment of growing anti-imperialist hostility throughout the Arab world (and especially in the giant pressure-cookered Egyptian population) and further afield (Kenya lately, and the whole Sahel, Haïti, Sri Lanka, Philippines, building up in many more and just as much in the city sinks in Europe and the US itself).

It is happening in the confused nationalism of the war against Nato/Kiev Nazism.

But staggering as these eruptions have been and will be, with a colossal world changing impact reverberating through and inspiring mass opinion internationally, they will still not provide the ultimate long term answer.

For that the working class needs to go all the way to taking power completely from the world bourgeoisie including in the rising capitalist powers making a “multipolar” opposition to America.

But none of the “lefts” come near to such understanding in practice whatever claims about their “Marxist” credentials.

Many do not even try, lining up with the imperialist bourgeoisie itself in full on class collaborating stoogery, most obvious with the “official” trade union movement still stuck in the imperialist era of crumbs from the table of imperialism’s colonial superprofits and therefore class collaborating identification with bourgeois interests (like recent calls to “protect jobs in the arms industry” or in the oil industry, trampling across the real enough fears about the ecological damage done by imperialism and lining up with the big bourgeoisie, like the boss of BP abandoning alternative energy).

They are four-square behind the depraved war on Ukraine in the same way the “socialists” of the Second International turned to support the imperialist governments in 1914, with only Lenin’s Bolsheviks standing clear, calling for defeat of the imperialists.

And most of the rest – notionally “opposed” to the Ukraine war, and NATO – still “blame Russia” for “starting it”, swallowing the imperialist story wholesale and effectively lining up with it.

Their “No to War” pacifism is completely useless, failing to recognise that Western imperialism is the cause of the world’s aggression and that defeat for Kiev/NATO is the crucial call.

As discussed in many previous EPSR issues, the counter to this, advocated by a few of the more fly “left” groups including the CPGB-ML, is not all out support for Vladimir Putin’s bonapartist Russia.

For all its balancing act with still lingering pro-Soviet sentiment in the masses, Putinism is an oligarch-pandering capitalist regime, and an imperialist one at that, at least in ambition, and in a few places where it has scope to be, such as Chechnya, and other exploited nations of the former Soviet Union.

Putin’s hostility to communism and advocacy of Greater Russian nationalist chauvinism, mixed with his embrace of Russian Orthodox religious mumbo-jumbo is a major problem which will have to be overturned by the once-soviet working class eventually in order to return to a communist path (along with the rest of the world proletariat).

It is only because of the huge disparity with the now overwhelming monopoly concentration of capital in the US Empire that “defeat for NATO” takes temporary precedence over the need to take on this now bourgeois orientated restoration in Moscow and return it to soviet relations.

Such equating of Putin’s backward Russian nationalism with revolutionary progress reflects the dire retreat from Leninism of the revisionists who have virtually abandoned calls for ending capitalism in favour of mere declarations for “the fight for sovereignty” which lays workers wide open to chauvinist notions (including the disastrous Brexit nationalism supported by the CPGB-ML which is a mainstay of the fascist-minded Reform Party run by Nigel Farage).

This and much other revisionist confusion and cover up severely undermines the earlier quoted Lalkar/Proletarian election polemic against the CPB and its bold “revolutionary” call.

For example consider the thundering denunciation that

snivelling, social-democratic, parliamentary cretinism is precisely what has turned the much of the world communist movement into an irrelevance over the last 70 years. The working class needs tailist, Labour-promoting charlatans who brandish a red flag and intersperse their writings with the odd quotation from Lenin like it needs a hole in the head.

Quite so. But it was the CPGB-ML’s “unblemished” hero Stalin who promoted the entire “permanent peaceful coexistence” post-WW2 Soviet perspective (disastrously revising Lenin to say imperialism could no longer expand - see EPSR Book Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics) which led to the parliamentary “British Road to Socialism” put forwards by the then CPGB (from which the CPB has descended) and long before Stalin’s death (pre-dating the usual scapegoat Kruschev).

There was not a word of criticism from Moscow which published it (and mostly an understanding it was approved) because it was Stalin’s retreat that “turned the world communist movement into an irrelevance” as finally became tragically clear under Gorbachev, the bureaucratic inheritor of the revisionist line (traceable all the way back to pre-war Stalin), who turned liquidator of the entire still viable Soviet workers state.

And the Lalkar/Proletarian perspective now for the world struggle against imperialism only compounds the problems.

Good to see that they now recognise the anti-imperialist significance of the turmoil across the Sahel and in Haïti etc which the EPSR has been pointing to for years, (though the CPGB-ML, still wrongly, is “condemning terrorism” and denouncing “jihadists” - but Hamas?). But they say nothing of the need for a Leninist leadership to be fought for, and head straight off in the wrong direction uncritically supporting all and sundry, and even advising the same for the working class in Britain:

if handled correctly, the coming period could see the workers and oppressed peoples inflict a decisive defeat on the entire global imperialist system. At such a time, what is needed in every country is the development of the forces that will ensure the success of this effort. What we need in Britain is not a Labour government but the development of the British front in the worldwide anti-imperialist Axis of Resistance.

But this is disastrous.

It advocates nothing more than a giant lash up with every kind of disparate and potentially reactionary philosophy on the planet, from Putinism to the Iranian Islamic state (a regime of the religious “headbangers” which the Proletarian routinely sneers at elsewhere) to the reactionary Hinduism of the Modi government in India, all on the grounds they are against the US.

Such a notion is effectively a giant extension of the Popular Front which proved so disastrous in the 1930s Spanish civil war (see archive pieces below) and a complete abandonment of Leninist scientific perspectives.

It can only cause mass confusion for the working class.

By all means let there be all kinds of tactical but wary common stands, as the Bolsheviks made with treacherous Kerensky against Tsarist General Kornilov in 1917 (or, more cautiously, alliances if appropriate) if, and for as long as, they contribute to setbacks for imperialism.

But to suggest to the working class that such a temporary united front is the answer, without warning the working class of the flakiness and distrustfulness of all such regimes or providing a single a word of how any defeat for imperialism can only be the beginning, (and far from “decisive” yet) offering an opening for the development of Leninist perspectives for the struggle to end capitalism and establish workers states, is irresponsible beyond belief.

This whole notion is part of the disarming and impossible notion of a “multipolar world” advocated by every kind of revisionism and liberalism, which leaves imperialism intact over a large part of the world, and therefore huge sections of its population still in the same near slave tyrannised servitude as always.

It is a nonsensical and impossible attempt to revive the “Cold War balance” which left tens of millions oppressed and exploited even when there was a powerful Soviet Union.

An additional suspicion has to be that the notion of a “British front” in this “Axis” reflects the chauvinist backwardness seen before from the Lalkarites.

What it does not make clear is the need for building Leninism.

Jacob Tremain

Back to the top

Release of Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder is a defeat for US ruling class ruling class reaction despite the dirty deal “spying” plea forced from this hounded hero, who endured 15 years of de facto prison for exposing imperialist warcrimes. But fascist censorship will go on until capitalism overturned by revolution

The “plea bargain” deal to force a meaningless “guilty of spying” admission from Wikeleaks founder Julian Assange in exchange for his release is a grotesque piece of arm-twist bullying by Washington to cover up its outright censorship of “free speech” and especially revelations of massive arbitrary civilian killing and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The aim is to win a cod-legal “justification” for the nearly two decades of vicious hounding and savage forced incarceration of Assange to “punish” him for exposing the fascist reality of the 2003 Iraq invasion by the US and subsequent occupation of Iraq in particular, as well as Afghanistan before it (and much other imperialist depravity and corruption too).

Both have seen butchering and terrorising of just as many of the population in relative terms as anything the Zionists are doing in the Gaza genocide and up until now far more in absolute numbers – to the extent that Benjamin Netanyahu uses them as examples to pretend that the horrifying warcrimes onslaught on the Palestinian people is “nothing out of the ordinary” and par for the course.

They are par for the course in fact, because the course is one of outright Nazi degeneration and inhumanity by the whole of imperialism and its turn to additional warmongering in all directions at the beginning of the 21st century (on top of its routine colonialist tyrannies) to cover up its crisis break down, and by the US particularly to intimidate and bully all challengers (and especially imperialist rivals) to its domination, despite total bankruptcy after decades of unsustainable credit fueled “boomtime”.

The Empire knows these can only reach a new level of a total battle for survival as its system hits the buffers of complete Catastrophe and cutthroat trade war, as became obvious in the 2000 dotcom collapse and the global credit failure in 2008.

But imperialism is determined to maintain the gross hypocrisy and lie that it is fighting for “freedom and democracy” - the great fraud which has served it well for two centuries of wool-pulling brainwashing of the working class, abetted by the idiocies and opportunism of the class-collaborating workers movement (trade unionism, Labourism and fake-”left”) colluding all down the line with the ruling class to help head workers away from the revolution which is the only path mankind can take to escape onrushing disaster.

That way it can continue to hide the dictatorship reality of bourgeois rule and keep workers away from understanding the necessity of their own class imposing its own, proletarian, dictatorship to replace it, by class war, in order to develop communist rational society.

By wringing a token “confession of espionage” from Assange the bourgeoisie hopes to pretend a bit longer that it still upholds “free speech” - “as long as it is within reasonable bounds” ie does not expose or threaten its rule too obviously or in fact at all (and therefore is not “free” at all).

The minimum 103 (probably more) journalists and cameramen already deliberately targeted and killed by Zionist/imperialist drones, snipers, and missiles on Gaza and more on the Hezbollah occupied south of Lebanon, tell a different story of course (again following a pattern of media assassinations and bombings already established in the Gulf wars, Afghanistan, and the rest of the Middle East, to hide its atrocities).

The most aggressive elements in the US bourgeoisie wanted the same for Assange in fact, either by extracting him to the US, courtesy of a grovelling and supine British ruling class prepared to override all its own “legal” principles, (see the disgusting inquest grovel over the death of young Harry Dunn, knocked off his motorbike by a US CIA agent, now back “home”) so that he could be “found guilty” of multiple spying charges.

Either Assange was to be sentenced to death directly or given one of the extreme prison sentences the US uses for dissidents and independence fighters, – like many black civil rights nationalists such as the Angola Three, Puerto Rican Oscar López Rivera and native Americans such as Leonard Peltier, kept in prison since 1976 (ie 48 years) on stitched up murder charges, – which would have been the same thing, an outright death sentence, in practice.

His release is a significant retreat in that respect, to try and head off the damage done to liberal illusions still swallowed by petty bourgeois opinion and promulgated by the fake-”left” and its “democracy” delusions, founded in Stalin’s steady revisionist retreats from revolution, beginning in the 1920-30s Popular Front disasters (about to be disastrously repeated all over again in France - see further down).

But it will still intimidate and constrain the media as reported by the Guardian (dismayed by the ruling because its whole “liberal” ethos is a mainstay of the “freedom” racket and expert at using it for non-stop anti-communist propaganda against “totalitarianism”, which is to say, any working class state or other anti-imperialist resistance to the West):

The release from a UK prison of Julian Assange is a victory for him and his many supporters around the world, but not necessarily a clear win for the principle underlying his defence, the freedom of the press.

The charges Assange is anticipated to plead guilty to as part of a US deal, and for which he will be sentenced to time served, are drawn from the 1917 Espionage Act, for “conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information related to the national defense of the United States”.

So although the WikiLeaks founder is expected to walk free from the US district court in Saipan after Wednesday’s hearing, the Espionage Act will still hang over the heads of journalists reporting on national security issues, not just in the US. Assange himself is an Australian, not a US citizen.

US prosecutors argued that Assange was not a proper journalist, but a hacker and an activist with his own agenda, who endangered the lives of US sources and contacts, so the Espionage Act could be applied without harming press freedom.

But press and civil liberties advocates took the view that it was irrelevant how Assange was defined. The things he was accused of doing, “obtaining and disseminating classified information”, are what national security journalists do for a living.

The revelations WikiLeaks published about the Iraq and Afghan wars in 2010, leaked to the organisation by an army intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning, brought to light possible human rights abuses by the US military in those wars, among other things. .

The petty bourgeois liberal, Trot and Revisionist campaigning around Assange has embarrassed imperialism but simultaneously further holds back the working class by continuing the pretence of abstract “free speech”; there is no such thing within capitalism as the EPSR has long spelled out:

The question Marxist-Leninist science has always insisted on asking when “democratic rights” have been demanded within and around the workers movement and the general parliamentary racket, is “democracy for who?”.

The bourgeois democracy which has allowed world domination by monopoly-finance capital appears to allow the freedom of the press, assembly, and political representation to workers just as much as to the ruling class.

But the reality is that the press and television, and the news agencies, are totally owned and controlled by their richest owners, investors, and state supervisory committees which are all completely ruling-class in character.

Workers are allowed “freedom of the press” only because they are never going to be able to compete on the slick sleaze-governed news stands and radio and television schedules with the monopoly-finance groups and bourgeois-minded controlling committees which finally dictate what reaches the masses in terms of propaganda. From the cradle to the grave, it amounts to total domination by anti-communist ideology.

Workers have “freedom of assembly”, but it is the bourgeoisie which has the money and the ownership to guarantee themselves as plentiful and convenient assembly as their class could ever want wherever they choose to assemble.

Workers organisations are always struggling for somewhere to meet, and always struggling to pay for it. And when workers assembly does start to get too big and threatening from capitalism’s point of view, there are instantly plenty of laws on hand to decree a perceived “threat to public order”, etc, if the crowds either refuse to not meet at all, or refuse to disperse when ordered. (EPSR No 887 21-01-97)

That even such a confidence trick “freedom” is being steadily eroded indicates the fearfulness and loss of confidence of the imperialist system as it plunges deeper into crisis – fascist aggression always being a sign of weakness historically.

One final aspect worth noting is the way in which single-issue reformist feminism played into the hands of this vicious persecution, with the ruling class using the self-centred self-righteousness moralising of the man-hating extremists to entrap Assange early on in Sweden, and then to force him into a refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy, amounting to a seven year long incarceration in itself (ended when US imperialism was able to topple the “left” government in Quito, installing a compliant stoogery which evicted Assange on CIA instructions).

The charges from some highly suspect sources, with possible links to US intelligence, were based on the absurd enough notion that every sleepy sex interaction with someone willingly in bed requires a separate round of explicit negotiated permission to avoid being a “rape” (a conceit that ignores vast and fraught complexities of human and sexual interactions on many levels) and ignored the obvious worldwide warmongering significance of an obvious stitch-up.

That this was so, apparent to anyone not fanatically obsessed with their own self to the exclusion of all context and collective human interest, only emphasises further the debilitating effect of these petty bourgeois PCisms, willing to pursue such obsessions all the way for their own subjective idealist ends to the exclusion of all the great danger now facing humanity, including nuclear war and undermining of the fight against it.

(And this is equally demonstrated currently in petty bourgeois condemnations of the Palestinian struggle and its Hamas leadership for not matching up to the high-handed moralising declarations of Western feminism and LGBTetc, contentious enough anyway and not necessarily accepted or even correct at all, ready to undermine a gigantic revolutionary struggle. There are not many of the tens of thousands of maimed, bereaved and slaughtered women in Gaza who would thank them for such a pompous and self-righteous stand.)

No rational, peaceful, coherent and equal society – ending past contradictions and injustices like sexism, racism, eco-disaster and much else – can be worked out and developed until the hatreds and antagonisms of capitalism are ended.

That demands revolutionary struggle, and consciously fought for Leninist science.

Lee Tubbs

Back to the top

D-day – duplicity and hypocritical hype

The gross hypocrisy and decline of degenerate imperialism was on full display (medals and all) when many of its leading failures gathered on D-Day to pour out crocodile tears for the (genuine) sacrifices made by ordinary US and British soldiers and sailors during the Second World War.

Quite apart from the rank insincerity of the bourgeois leaders (and feudal remnants like “King Charles”) and their disgusting lying claims to have “saved the world from Nazi tyranny” when not one of them would have come anywhere near a battlefield, there was the outrageous snub to the Russian Soviet Union whose proletarian masses who did nine-tenths of the fighting and sacrifice which destroyed German fascism, as just about reflected in a disgusted letter or two in the bourgeois press (suitably downpage of course):

The D-day 80th anniversary events were really moving, especially hearing from the veterans who survived. Much has been made of Rishi Sunak’s failure to attend the international event (Furious Tories turn on Rishi Sunak over D-day commemorations snub, 9 June). I was more saddened by the repeated claim in TV programmes that D-day was the turning point of the second world war, without mention of the 27 million Soviets (including Ukrainians) who lost their lives and were ignored in this commemoration.

The eastern front was crucial to defeating Hitler and the Nazi armies well before 1944. Moscow in 1941, Stalingrad in 1942, three battles for Kharkov in 1941, 1942 and 1943, the great tank battle of Kursk (1943) and the siege of Leningrad (1941 to 1944) decimated the best German troops and were, collectively, the war’s true turning points. How Erwin Rommel would have welcomed defending Normandy with just a fraction of the 152 German divisions (3 million men) that invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. I feel great sadness for all deaths, including on D-day, and wake up every morning well aware that I owe my happy life to so many courageous men and women who gave their lives or were injured.

Prof Colin Green Harrow, London

He could have added that the D-Day “Second Front” was opened by the Western allies only after two years of prevarication and then only because of Western dismay at the great advances of the Red Army and the huge welcome it got from the masses in Europe (as just spelled out in the latest book from middle-class “liberal” broadcaster turned historian Jonathan Dimbleby “Endgame 1944”, laden naturally with the usual petty bourgeois hostility and fear of “communism” but obliged to give due recognition to the gigantic battles and conflicts on the long Eastern Front, each of which numbered prisoners or killed in the half million plus level and where 10 million were killed on the battlefield, part of a 27 million total butchered during the entire war).

The staggering successes of the great Soviet advances not only destroyed Hitler’s fascism but inspired the masses throughout the whole of Europe with socialist possibilities and revolutionary energy.

They were also the best side of Joseph Stalin’s leadership which can be criticised for multiple revisionist errors, retreats and crimes (and is – see EPSR book Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics and Popular Front comments next page) but which led a disciplined Soviet Union through the turmoil of attempted counter-revolution in the 1920s and 1930s with a forced pace industrialisation without which the USSR could not have outproduced and outfought the originally six times larger Nazi-Germany, and which cleverly carried through the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact so sneered at by the Trots, which in fact bought two years of extra time for the Soviet workers state to build up its defences and industry against an eventual expected fascist onslaught.

The real Western purpose of D-Day was anti-communism, Dimbleby concedes, to halt the Russian advance halfway before it reached the Atlantic and all Europe became socialist.

Nor should it be forgotten that it was capitalism and its crisis which is the tyranny, generating the horrors of the two world wars in the twentieth century in the first place – including the fascist counter-revolution in Italy under Mussolini and then setting up Hitlerism and encouraging its war aggression from the start, the West hoping to turn aggressive expansionist Germany onto the rapidly growing and working class inspiring Soviet workers state; backing its interventions in the Spanish Civil War; turning a blind eye to the Anschluss with Austria and handing it permission to takeover Czechoslovakia and then to press on eastwards.

A giant lie, even smellier than whatever it was President “Joe” Biden did in his trousers during the presentations (ignored by the grovelling media), is the notion that the West’s prior or subsequent rule constitutes any kind of “freedom and democracy” at all or in essentials, or is any different to “fascist” rule as such.

For most of the planet it has been nothing but the most vicious domination and exploitation ever since, with the great majority brutally suppressed by imperialism itself or a by string of fascist stooge regimes from the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos (with the family dynasty once more back in power now) to the Duvaliers in Haïti, Mobutu in Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo), Suharto in Indonesia, Sadat and Mubarak in Egypt, and assorted massacre regimes in Latin America, to mention just a few, as well as being blitzed and bombed regularly, including in several major wars like Vietnam, Iraq, Korea, killing millions, or suffering invasions, butchery and sabotage from Angola and Mozambique to Grenada, Panama and Serbia, and then Libya, Iraq, Syria, Sierra Leone, Yemen etc.

And all that on a scale of bombing, torture and butchery reaching totals far greater than anything Hitler ever “achieved” and still continuing, most historically ironically by the Jewish occupation in Palestine, the greatest victims of imperialist holocaust become one of its leading perpetrators. DH

Back to the top