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No1645 28th July 2024

Imperialism’s degeneracy and systemic failure deepens by the day as the crisis exposes the total lie of its “freedom and justice”, nothing but a lying cover for barbarism and brutality. Worldwide “democracy” racket disintegrating in this “year of elections”. But fake-”left” responses to the stitched-up British election coup for unwanted Labour; to Trumpite throwback fascist populism and to sick Democrat genocide support for demented Zionism’s Gaza holocaust and the Ukrainian nazis’ war butchery are beyond useless. Petty bourgeois fear of revolution, revisionist and Trotskyist alike, refuses to give workers the lead they need to overturn this stinking out-of-time system or examine and debate both triumphs and errors of past attempts. None explain the colossal breakdown facing civilisation as the intractable contradictions of its system reach their nadir in imperialist war genocide and depravity to suppress rising world rebellion. They disarm the working class with “voting for change” and multipolar pacifist delusions. Total dollar collapse is coming and aggressive isolationism of doomed topdog US imperialism lashing out in all directions to escape its fate. The crucial need now is to revive revolutionary Marxism.

The bourgeoisie is more and more losing its hidden “democracy” class rule grip as it turns to even more open fascism to survive its economic Catastrophe.

But this further turn extending its vicious war and repression is also a giant weakness for the ruling class, forced to show ever more of the truth about the bourgeois dictatorship behind the mask of “parliament and freedom”.

It can only lead to a greater explosion of revolt and world hostility to its sick degeneracy, war, planet-threatening plundering and barbarity.

But the vital revolutionary lessons the world proletariat needs are not being drawn by the useless and opportunist fake-“left”.

Symptoms are everywhere of the system’s breakdown from the chaos in the US election with Biden’s ousting and Donald Trump’s Milwaukee bullet-dodge; to the ludicrously false “landslide” electoral coup for the actually despised Labourites in Britain; and from the already disintegrating “New Popular Front” pantomime of “left” anti-fascism in France.

These and at least a dozen other voting meltdowns, twisted ballot box manipulations and bent electoral coups in this bourgeois-trumpeted but utterly hollow “year of elections” are leaving capitalism’s voting racket more exposed than ever for the hoodwinking pretence it is.

Imperialist tyranny beneath the voting façade is ever more sharply revealed as the capitalists prepare for the all-out class war they know is coming. as their Slump forces them to impose ever greater domestic austerity, welfare cuts and exploitation, in order to maintain enough profitability to fight the cutthroat battles of Depression-time international trade war, and to fight the inter-imperialist shooting war it is already becoming (as the US/UK sabotage destruction of Germany’s NordStream energy supply demonstrated).

A desperate ruling class is heading into open dictatorship and war, dragging mankind into the hell of World War Three already underway in the Middle East and eastern Europe over two decades (and Serbia before that).

The sick and deadly nature of this out-of-time system is ever more intolerable.

It has to go.

But the entire “left” spectrum from Trot to museum-Stalinist revisionism sustains this lying moribund voting racket in practice, for all their pictures of Marx, red flags and socialist or even sudden new and bold “communist” names, claims and ultra-left posturing.

So in the just-held UK election eg they simply called yet again for votes to be “more left” than usual perhaps and with “more militant” demands, and maybe even associated with extra-parliamentary strikes and protests, but still, just votes which might “have an influence”.

It is pure disarming reformism.

Participating in elections is not wrong – in fact to do so is mandatory for revolutionaries when circumstances allow; they are a hugely useful platform for exposing the bourgeoisie and its endless lies.

But to imply in any way that voting as such can achieve anything while a tiny minority continues to own everything is just reformism.

Spelling out that “democracy” under capitalism is a stinking fraud and nothing but ruling class dictatorship, which must, and can only, be replaced by working class dictatorship, is the essential point of any such intervention.

It needs shouting from the rooftops (and certainly the election platform).

Only when the working class takes power by class war struggle to overturn and forever hold down (until it finally disappears) the stifling, corrupt, sleazy and incompetent domination of bourgeois rule, with its philistine brainwashing, non-stop surveillance, state intimidation, murderous repression and genocidal war, can ordinary people really begin to participate in building a new fair and equal society.

Real democracy lies only in the steady education of the masses after they have taken power when the old bourgeois reaction is pinned down and everyone else (the vast majority) can steadily be drawn into society’s running, as become able, by a leadership party of ever developing rational Marxist-Leninst science serving workers’ interests, humanity and nature beyond that.

But even those groups with the biggest hammers-and-sickles on their banners, now routinely declaiming the need for a “new mass communist party” still avoid these issues, refusing to spell out that a revolutionary communist future can only be built by disciplined workers states.

They baulk at the need for firm proletarian dictatorship.

They baulk at the revolutionary struggle to achieve it.

And they baulk at the rising development of spontaneous anti-imperialism across the world, labelled “terrorism” but in fact the inchoate and confused beginnings of revolution that will eventually end this stinking system.

It is crying out for Marxist perspectives.

Scratch any of the individualistic petty bourgeois Trots, however boldly they talk “revolution” (mostly as a tacked-on thought in articles) and you will find they hate any such collective prospect at all, finding a thousand ways to snipe and attack it (under cover of looking for the idealist “perfect” revolution).

It is what they have done for decades against the Soviet Union, and still do against remaining workers states like China, Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea and even left-leaning anti-imperialism in places like Zimbabwe or Venezuela.

The revisionists meanwhile refuse the vital polemical discussion needed to examine the philosophical weakness of history’s titanic but flawed efforts to build socialism so far (most obviously in the USSR).

That leaves the working class blocked from progress by the shallow sneering bourgeois propaganda about “communism not working” (aided by the smug middle class opportunists and Trots).

Until that question and many others are sorted out, and the philosophical difficulties understood, that eventually led to the Soviet liquidation (not an economic or social “collapse” as the bourgeoisie paints it but a collapse in leadership grasp of revolution) the working class will continue to be held back.

Denying there were any errors until the bogeyman Nikita Kruschev took over, after which supposedly everything was on a downhill path, is doubly useless as explanation – covering up the complexity of the errors which began in Stalin’s time as well as writing off continuing Soviet progress for decades more.

As the EPSR has long pointed out the crucial issue is to hold in mind both sides of the contradiction of both titanic achievements by the Soviet Union and the disastrous mistakes (ultimately) which let to its self-imposed demise.

History’s first great experiment taking mankind to a new level (and that just the beginning), Soviet society, worked 98% excellently for 70+ years (continuing positively long after Stalin’s death).

Colossal achievements were made in many fields, artistic, social, technological and scientific, and most of all militarily in the teeth of huge resistance, not only destroying WW2 fascist aggression from Germany at huge sacrifice, and then standing up to nuclear encirclement and existential threat, even while aiding, inspiring and supporting many countries struggling against colonialism, with arms, infrastructure development (the Aswan dam eg) and with massive educational and training help.

All this continued long after the supposed “Kruschev treachery” period incidentally – material support for Cuba’s revolution in 1959, six years later and surprising the world, alone proves the point as does the Vietnam war, great struggles in Africa, in Asia, and throughout Latin America.

But Soviet leadership, despite heroic and brilliant achievements fell back relatively early after Lenin’s death, and increasingly from the 1930s, from the towering heights of his hugely complex revolutionary dialectical materialist understanding, needed to sustain and take forwards the struggle (see EPSR books on Gorbachevism or Unanswered Polemics on Stalinism).

Despite the USSR’s indelible impact on history, accumulating bureaucratic revisionism eventually turned to its opposite in the deranged Gorbachevite liquidationism (counter-revolution) around a deluded notion of merging Soviet society with Western democracy.

It was not a necessary or inevitable development and it was not “unstoppably brewing” in the post war decades; only in the mid-1980s did the dialectical shift into Gorbachevite counter-revolution take place, not because of increasing Cold War pressure but ironically the opposite, when Western trade war turned Washington’s attention against its imperialist trade rivals (Germany-led Europe, Japan) and Reagan/Thatcher-ism diverted resources away from the most expensive elements of the Cold War, seemingly relaxing the enmity (but only superficially of course).

Moscow deludedly concluded it too could relax, disastrously abandoning the proletarian dictatorship and embracing the “free market”.

Now everywhere the world is being shown the reality of this giant bourgeois freedom and “rule of law” hypocrisy and lie in the “year of elections”.

Among notable examples recently is the risible 99+% vote for Western-backed and Tony Blair beloved killer-dictator Paul Kagame in Rwanda (an embarrassing outcome for the migrant-hating British ruling class especially) an outcome calmly reported downpage, if at all, by the Western media without a hint of the hysterical denunciations such a ridiculous and outrageous result would attract in say, Russia, Hong Kong, Zimbabwe or Belarus or other imperialist designated “demon” or “rogue” nations; the collapse of Narendra Modi’s reactionary and murderous Hindu-nationalist vote in India, despite his six week campaign of huge bribes and death-threat intimidation; by the outright bullying attempted imposition of a new government in Haïti once again, using American money and imported Kenyan police thuggery; and by the nonsense of the Pakistan election in the spring when the entire Imran Khan opposition was simply arrested and imprisoned unless it renounced its own party; sadly too by the disillusioned vote meltdown for the ANC nationalists in South Africa and subsequent coalition with the throwback white bourgeois Democratic Alliance – and many other examples too, like this in January:

There is little doubt that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will seize a fourth consecutive term when Bangladesh goes to the polls on Sunday. The bigger question is what will remain of the country’s democracy.

The main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, has been crushed and left with little mobilizing capacity. Its leaders who are not already in jail are bogged down with endless court appointments or are in hiding with the police on their tail. Ms. Hasina’s Awami League, in power since 2009, has cleared the way for a race so one-sided that the party urged its own contestants to prop up dummy candidates so it does not look as if they won unchallenged.

The B.N.P. has boycotted the vote, after Ms. Hasina rejected its demand that she step aside during the campaign period so the election could be held under a neutral administration. Even as Bangladesh has appeared to be finding a path to prosperity and shedding a legacy of coups and assassinations, the uncontested election shows how politics in this country of 170 million remains hostage to decades of bad blood between the two major parties.

The possibility of violence hangs in the air. The opposition’s effort to protest the vote, with repeated calls for nationwide strikes and civil disobedience, has been met with an intensified crackdown. More than 20,000 B.N.P. members and leaders have been arrested since the party’s last major rally, in October, according to party leaders and lawyers.

Diplomats in Dhaka said they had received reports of appalling conditions inside overcrowded prisons. At least nine opposition leaders and members have died in jail since the Oct. 28 crackdown, according to human rights organizations and reports in local news media.

and its consequences in July:

When Bangladesh’s near-total communications blackout was partially lifted last week after a vicious crackdown on a student-led protest, one of the first things to emerge online was a digital yearbook of the dead.

It put names and faces to days of carnage unleashed by government forces seeking to quell what had begun as a peaceful demonstration against quotas that reserve sought-after government jobs for specific groups. Conservative estimates put the death toll at near 200. Thousands were injured; in one hospital in the capital, Dhaka, alone, more than 250 people required eye surgeries after being shot in the face by pellets or rubber bullets.

Most of the victims were young, in their 20s. They had been brought together on the streets by the bleak prospects of a stagnating economy. They were also fueled by anger at what they saw as government corruption, cronyism and impunity, as the country’s leaders dismissed their demand for a merit-based distribution of jobs.

The demonstration descended into chaos about 10 days ago, as the country’s iron-fisted prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, sent the full array of Bangladesh’s security forces into the streets. Thousands of people have been swept into jails already overcrowded with political prisoners. Security forces have been surrounding neighborhoods, combing through houses and stopping people on the street to search their phones for footage of gruesome abuses that could be posted online.

Ms. Hasina’s forces have also continued to try to break the protesters. On Friday, three student leaders — one of whom had been tortured — who were receiving treatment for wounds were picked up from the hospital by law enforcement agents.

The whole worn fabric of Western imperialism’s “freedom” and “rule of law” is now rotted right through, with the usually obscured reality of bourgeois dictatorship ever closer to the surface, the vicious and barbaric face of monopoly capitalist domination showing ever more ever clearly beneath the mask, where it has always been hidden (see Lenin’s State and Revolution).

Nowhere is this stinking Western scam more brutally shown up than in the public holocaust horrors visited on the Palestinian people in Gaza and increasingly into Lebanon and Yemen, by the fanatical US-backed Jewish “democracy” occupation of their stolen land – with a true death toll after nine months of indiscriminate ethnic cleansing slaughter now approaching 180,000 (a terrible 8% of the population) according the very respectable Lancet doctors’ journal, plus bestial maiming and bereavement of many, many more.

Men, women and thousands of children have suffered appalling injuries with many amputations, frequently with no anaesthetic and no remaining family to comfort or look after them.

The grotesque and numbing inhumanity is daily, as always using the thinnest of lying “justifications”, and while reported, its fascist reality is downplayed or buried downpage by cynical Western media and politicians:

The evacuation order jolted Munadil Abu Younes one morning earlier this week as he scrolled on his phone reading the news. Israeli forces ordered thousands to flee, including from the area where he was sheltering. His eighth displacement was like nothing that had come before.

“Israeli forces told us about the evacuation order as they entered the area,” he said. “We barely had time to collect our things, most people fled without taking anything. During previous evacuation orders they gave us a day or two, but this time we didn’t even have half an hour.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued a forcible order that covered much of western Khan Younis and part of Al Mawasi, a sandy strip previously designated a “humanitarian zone”.

Gaza’s second largest city was already reduced to little more than shattered cement and piles of rubble. Across Khan Younis, hundreds of thousands began to flee without knowing where to go. The order affected about 400,000 people.

The IDF said it was about to “forcefully operate” against militants in eastern Khan Younis, accusing Hamas of using the area to fire rockets into Israel.

Some received news of the evacuation order through voice messages on their phones. Muhanna Qudeih, 43, from Khuzaa neighbourhood in eastern Khan Younis was on his regular morning trip to the local market to buy vegetables when he began hearing people around him screaming about it.

“I started asking those around me, and they said there were recorded messages on mobile phones ordering everyone to evacuate the area,” he said. He grabbed some essentials and ran to his sister’s house to tell his family. His wife, Qudeih, and their three children have lived with his sister since their house was destroyed during the first Israeli ground invasion of Khan Younis. This would be their fifth displacement.

“The bombing was initially light, but an hour after the evacuation order it intensified,” he said. “Then, shells came at us from all directions. I wanted to move quickly, but suddenly the street was full of people.” The family drove east towards Salah al-Din Road, only to see Israeli tanks approaching.

“We found people running, racing to escape like judgment day had come,” he said. “Bullets were falling around us like rain, and many people got hit ... We prayed to be able to flee this disaster safely.”

When Qudeih and his family fled their house closer to the centre of Khan Younis, he said they encountered “a shower of bombardment” along with tank and helicopter fire. Several drones hovered above them, “watching everything and shooting,” he added.

People scattered in all directions in search of safety. Many, including Qudeih and his family, fled towards the Nasser hospital in the city, as hundreds of wounded people also poured into the grounds, overwhelming the already struggling facility.

Gaza health officials said that by the evening, the renewed bombing campaign had killed more than 70 people and wounded at least 200 more. Medics pleaded for blood donations and supplies to try to treat the injured, many of whom were laid out on the floor or between beds for lack of space.

Some of those gathered outside the hospital had fled there on foot, leaving their belongings behind in the rush to escape. “As we ran away from the bombings, I saw dead and wounded people laying on the ground,” said a woman who gave her name only as Amal.

“There was no way anyone could save them or even retrieve the bodies, because the bombing was so bad … aircraft of all kinds were hovering low to the ground the entire time.”

Israeli tanks drove deep into Bani Suhaila on the edge of Khan Younis, while soldiers positioned themselves on rooftops. Others reportedly searched the town’s cemetery, and the IDF later described fighting in “close-quarters combat,” amid reports of street battles with Palestinian militants.

For the thousands who escaped the bombs and artillery fire, their latest displacement brought new problems. With nowhere to run to, many like Amal spent the week sleeping in the open, unable to find a place in the shattered homes that remained in southern Gaza. Health officials said 30 more people had been killed and almost 150 injured by Thursday evening.

“We’ve been displaced over and over again, but this time was different and we were stripped of our possessions. These have been the hardest days we have experienced in this brutal war.”

Younes said he eventually found refuge in a south-western area of Khan Younis, but within days it too had received an evacuation order.

“We wish to die, but we continue to live. We are tired, unable to go on,” he said. “We became twice our age during these 10 months.”

Deafening silence by Western governments, and particularly the US and its grovelling sidekick in Britain, over the virtually unanimous recent judgement from the International Court of Justice that the Zionist occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem (and parts of Sinai), is both illegal and a monstrous act of apartheid oppression, additionally underlines the hollowness of the whole sham edifice of a supposed “international community” of justice and “freedom” through the “United Nations”, which is nothing but a stooge for imperialism and its dominant US power.

Only rarely does it stand against dominant US interest and never with more than powerless protest when not outright serving imperialism’s anti-communist agenda with lies against North Korea, China, or Cuba etc or a dozen states deemed to be “rogue powers” (or “an authoritarian network” as the ghastly anti-communist intellectual Anne Applebaum has just declared them to be in a weirdly sudden, universally hyped-up book filled with fear-filled reactionary rage).

Firstly, “morally” telling though the ICJ judgement might be (adding to anti-imperialist sentiment everywhere), it still leaves the local population dispossessed of the territory “legally” handed over to the Zionist terror gangs by colonialist diktat through the United Nations (imperialism) in 1948, tearing away a huge section of the country inhabited by the Palestinans for nearly 2000 years, to found the artificial colonial settler “state” of “Israel”, expropriating much of the best land, and violently terrorising the local population from their homes, cities, villages, farms, grazing and olive groves.

Secondly it will not remotely be enforced.

Cynical “democracy” hypocrisy is shown equally in the Western provoked war by NATO against Russia in Ukraine, carried out by the swastika-tattooed Hitler-loving killers installed in the Kiev “parliament” by the CIA and MI6 organised Maidan “colour revolution” violence in 2014, and bombarding, torturing and sniping thousands of Russian-speakers ever since in the Donbass (long before Putin’s response) and backed-up, advised and financed ever since by the same Western powers and their politicians who arm, supply and encourage the Zionist genocidaires.

World “justice” a joke

Every pretence of “international justice”, the “rule of law”, “freedom” and “basic human rights” is in shreds in other words. And that applies to all sides of bourgeois rule from the “ultra-right” to the most “liberal”.

It makes no differences in southern Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza or the West Bank whether bombs and missiles come with shark-teeth fascist-aggressive symbolism painted on them or apologetic assurances that a “ceasefire” is “being urged”.

The whole of Western butchery is fascist in that sense and its world colonial domination has been so for several centuries, as hundreds of millions of dead slaves, massacred local warrior resistance and worked and starved to death plantation and sweatshop labourers could testify (and still can throughout the Third World).

The old imperialist powers, Britain, France, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands etc (and not excluding the US) have butchered, tortured and tormented far greater numbers than even the nightmare Nazi rule of the Hitler-Mussolini-Tojo axis was able to “achieve” – and indirectly twice that again in the hunger, disease, ignorance and exhaustion imposed by tyrannical exploitation.

But it will get far worse yet and right into their own heartlands, where the small share of these colonial superprofits previously used to pacify and bribe the petty bourgeoisie and upper layers of the working class (via opportunist trade unionism and its political expression in Labourism) has almost gone.

With it goes the old ability to keep the class struggle within “safe bounds”, as has becoming increasingly clear throughout the major imperialist countries – not least in the UK where explosive riots and upheaval are increasingly frequent, like the recent bus-burning eruption against heavy handed “social services” in Leeds or against the racist police face-kicking attack at Manchester airport.

The obvious moves are now for far more overt tearing up of past “democratic rights” and “freedom of speech” as all kinds of middle class protest is finding out and decrying from eco-naturalist and global warming reformist protestors like Chris Packham and George Monbiot, to even one-time Labour loyalist Owen Jones, dismayed by astonishingly vicious long prison sentence punishments being handed out for Just Stop Oil disrupters and other single-issue “activism” and censorship laws with them.

These intimidatory moves, shaking petty bourgeois “couldn’t happen here” complacency to the core are all part of a turn to increasingly draconian and violent suppression of all class struggle, in conjunction with the escalation of international warmongering as both a diversion from increased slump conditions and as a “solution”.

Renewed fascism

This time the biggest power of all, the US is at the forefront (and the tame stooge UK immediately behind), of the new nazism with 20 years of blitzing under its belt already but still failing to solve its problems.

Hyperbolic hysteria about foreign bogeymen “threats” from White House spokesmen or plummy-voiced but sinister British admirals and generals (unelected of course but given endless deferential interview time on all the colluding mainstream media) and the escalation of viciously racist scapegoating of minorities, migrants, Muslims and “lefts” of all shades by assorted thuggish fascists and jingoists at home is being deliberately and consciously ramped up daily.

A working class lulled by a century and a half of class-collaboration and decades of boomtime consumerism and philistine celeb “culture”, is being forced to wake up.

But the “left” still does not warn it of the staggeringly cataclysmic meltdown facing the whole monopoly capitalist system.

Capitalism has hit a brick wall of total disintegration caused by the contradictions inherent in the now bankrupt profit making system, the great Catastrophe as Marxism has long warned in the teeth of cynicism and dismissal from the fake-“left”.

That is the driving force in history, leading to the great Slump disaster and the now non-stop warmongering which is the ruling class’s only “solution” to this collapse.

It will go on, deepening into greater and greater chaos and planet threatening mayhem until so much of the world’s “over-production” – the inevitable consequence of the production for the sake of capital accumulation system – is destroyed that “profitable” investment can get back into its stride (see box).

Or until revolution stops it.

As two world wars, and the inter-imperialist component of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war (an historical “rehearsal”) have already proven, the scale of the devastation required is horrific.

Marxist theory demonstrates (see the Communist Manifesto, Capital’s three volumes and much more associated material, Lenin’s Imperialism and more), and the great 20th century wars showed concretely, it can only be a far greater destruction each time.

Potentially it is so great it will be the last ever.

Huge swathes of Europe had to be wiped out in 1914-18 and millions of lives with it, as the imperialist powers ran into economic failure, forcing them to battle like giant dinosaurs for dominance and supremacy over the colonial world and the juicy super-profits of its exploitation to rescue their economies, while pushing down the “losers”.

All that secured only a pause in the destruction while the imperialists gathered breath for World War Two on a much greater scale and dragging in much more of the world (as well as attempting, mistakenly, to destroy the Soviet state which had arisen in revolutionary disgust from the intolerable degradation of the Great War and which went on to beat back Nazism, albeit at huge human cost).

Even that bought only a few decades of restored “boomtime” growth for the now top-dog American Empire “winner” (in the imperialist world) before inevitable crisis kicked in again – fended off time after time by non-stop credit creation by the unprecedented monopoly domination of US financial and military power, set in train by Richard Nixon’s 1971 forced uncoupling of the printed dollar from its “good-as-gold” fixed value reference point set at Bretton Woods.

Dollar collapse

The “mighty dollar” has been colossally and irrevocably inflated beyond recognition since, propped up by ever more credit extensions, and unrepayable US debt in the now incomprehensible trillions, its economy kept upright only because no rival creditor wants or yet dares to ask for their property in the teeth of imperialist “shock and awe” aggression, and even more for fear of triggering a gigantic economic implosion – a bank deposit run which would create a financial black hole “singularity”, sucking in the entire world trading system.

Credit creation

That almost happened in 2008-9, only partially staved off by insane further credit creation, not least by the Chinese workers state investment boosts post 2009 – reflecting its huge growing influence but also, to some extent, continuing revisionist delusions of being able to “stabilise things” in a fanciful and entirely impossible “multipolar world”.

Despite the international financial interventions, there has been massive slump austerity everywhere else since (in capitalism) even as imperialism’s billionaires (and even trillionaires) and their middle-class servants (lawyers, managers, engineers, accountants, PR people, etc etc) have cynically creamed off ever more “compensation” (!) from an ever more indebted world and the impoverished workers and proletarian masses everywhere as the bourgeois press reports:

Developing countries are facing the worst debt crisis in history with almost half their budgets being spent on paying back their creditors, a study has found.

The report, by the campaign group Debt Relief International for Norwegian Church Aid, says more than 100 countries are struggling to service their debts, resulting in them cutting back on investment in health, education, social protection and climate change measures.

Debt service is absorbing 41.5% of budget revenues, 41.6% of spending, and 8.4% of GDP on average across 144 developing countries, according to the study.

It said that without urgent action problems would persist into the 2030s, and that pressures were greater than during both the Latin American debt crisis of 1982 and the debt crisis of the 1990s. The latter prompted relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Country Initiative (HIPC).

In 2020 the G20 group of leading developed and developing countries launched the common framework, a scheme designed to speed up and simplify the debt relief process. However, progress has been much slower than hoped, reflecting the fact that much poor country debt is now owed to China and private bondholders.

The report said the common framework was falling “way short of expectations in terms of timeliness, participation by creditors, and the scale of relief provided”.

Countries would still be paying an average 48% of their budget revenue on service after relief and as a result few were applying to join the process.

No charity-minded call to repeat the “debt relief” measures of the late twentieth century is going to happen of course, nor well meaning calls to “rein in” the so-called “vulture funds” that callously prey on the Third World by buying up their debts and enforcing payment (through world finance linked courts that have far more powerful teeth than the deliberately ineffectual ICJ).

Sticking plaster “debt forgiveness” was a hypocritical joke even before the Great Credit Crash (“generously” handing back a fraction of the plundered profits to try and suppress explosive and potentially communist revolt) but as slump deepens and international trade war hostilities intensify it is now impossible.

The scale of the profit system’s breakdown is magnitudes greater now than even the 1930s collapse into Depression and the fascist warmongering which attempted to escape it then.

The spread of imperialism in the world and the incredible intensification of its monopolisation has gone much further since.

The scale of destruction needed from the 3rd World War goes far beyond the half a dozen countries already wiped out in the Middle East – and now threatens human existence itself, as does the modern technological means of warfare and genocide to be unleashed, as partially seen in Gaza, or the Yemen etc, already.

Ruling class split

It is the mind boggling extent of the fascist onslaught it must impose that is now splitting the American ruling class, almost paralysed by its fearfulness of the future, not out of regard for humanity but because twenty years of “shock and awe” beginning with the Serbian, Afghanistan and Iraq blitzings, has failed to solve any of its problems.

Just the opposite – Iraq is a mess, Afghanistan a retreat and Libya a warlordist hell hole.

The 800 years-old capitalist world order is doomed.

The Empire’s bludgeoning has hugely magnified world anti-imperialist hostility and hatred to unprecedented levels and destroyed all “respect” or belief in the once “magical” American way of life.

Even more importantly its capacity to fight back has grown too, like the Palestinians, Hezbollah and the Houthis, and a raging “terrorism” everywhere (as imperialism designates the crude and often confused early expressions of revolutionary upheaval) across Africa and Asia.

The great mass street explosions in Egypt in the 2011 Arab Spring, pushed down by a violent CIA/Zionist aided counter-coup massacre in 2013 (so much for the new “democracy” in Cairo) continue to seethe, always threatening to boil over.

Anti-imperialist turmoil is non-stop in Latin America, needing ever more overt fascism to suppress it like Argentina’s demented pro-Zionist president Javier Milei or the lurking Bolsonarists in Brazil (a permanent coup threat to a working class kept away from revolutionary perspectives by the soft-brained “parliamentary” leftism of Lula da Silva), or similar disarming reformism in Mexico, where the “left” president Manuel Lopez (AMLO) has just passed on his incumbency to the newly elected Claudi Sheinbaum without solving any of the rampant state corruption and deadly drug cartel gangsterism which has terrorised the whole population for decades (which would require challenging the massive influence of US imperialism right next door, possible only by developing an all out revolutionary fight (as Cuba’s workers state did and continues to do)).

Soviet nostalgia

And the doggedness of the east European legacy of past soviet nostalgia determinedly confronts Western barbarity, in eastern Ukraine of course and is stirring all around, despite the CIA propaganda and “colour revolution” manipulation as in Georgia, or Slovakia, to delude a gullible youth about the supposed “good life” in the West (ask the millions in poverty in the UK about that) as even the imperialist media occasionally concedes:

Kazreti, nestled in the picturesque mountains of Georgia near the border with Armenia, once boasted a cinema, a bank, musical fountains, two schools and a kindergarten. Dance ensembles and volleyball teams from across the Soviet Union would come to perform and compete, and central heating and electricity were free.

“It was a true Communist oasis,” said Davit Jakeli, 52, who worked as a carpenter in a state-run vocational school in the town of about 5,500 people, about 50 miles southwest of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.

But after the Soviet Union’s collapse in the 1990s, he said, everything also came crashing down in Kazreti. No longer supported by the Soviet command economy, the unprofitable local gold and copper mines and an enrichment plant were shut, putting hundreds of people out of work. They reopened years later on a much smaller scale under private ownership.

Now there is just one school in the town and the cinema and bank have closed. The fountains, which once adorned a central square, are long gone. Stray dogs roam potholed roads flanked by decrepit apartments.

“It is a huge injustice what happened here,” said Mr. Jakeli, who now resells scrap metal from the courtyard of his home.

Over the past three decades, Georgia, a country of 3.6 million, has been one of the most pro-West of the former Soviet states. Polls still show that more than 60 percent of its residents favor joining the European Union and NATO.

But tensions remain between those who see Georgia’s future in the West, and those, particularly in poorer parts of the country, who pine for a Soviet past that delivered them stable incomes and basic social infrastructure.

Earlier this year, thousands of activists in Tbilisi protested against a law pushed by the government to curb the influence of Western-funded organizations. Critics say the law, which passed in May, will push Georgia into Russia’s arms, and the European Union says it could complicate Georgia’s hopes of joining the bloc.

Those tensions have been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. While the Russian invasion galvanized the pro-Western opposition, which saw the government’s neutral stance toward sanctions as proof that it sided with Moscow, other Georgians have been wary.

In Kazreti and other Georgian towns across an industrial heartland that has been battered by high unemployment over the past few decades, the protesters’ demands — and their fears of Russia — ring hollow.

While many urban residents see the Soviet period as a time of occupation and political repression, for many people in rural areas it was a time of plenty, when they had jobs and prosperity. Outside the capital, unemployment is rife, and drug and alcohol abuse is rampant.

Datuna Kaplanishvili, 62, who worked at the ore processing plant in Kazreti when it was state-owned, said the Soviet era represented the best days of his life.

“They don’t see anything clearly,” Mr. Kaplanishvili, 62, said about the young people who protested in Tbilisi. “There won’t be anything here without Russia.”

In half-empty villages and towns devastated by decades of neglect, the prospect of a distant European future looks like a mirage to many.

One such town, Chiatura, was once considered a Soviet workers’ paradise, known for the cable cars that carried workers to manganese mines and residential areas in the surrounding mountains.

The population of Chiatura is less than half what it was before the Soviet collapse, with the mines requiring fewer people to operate them and the town’s social infrastructure deteriorating.

Now, the town center is a shell of what used to be, with shuttered businesses and entertainment venues, and cable cars taking only a few residents to half-empty Soviet-era apartment buildings, many of them with smashed windows.

A daily overnight sleeper train used to connect Chiatura with Tbilisi, and the town itself was served by two trolley bus routes that ran along the banks of its river. Today, the train station stands empty and in ruins. The Tbilisi route was canceled along with all the others; the trolley buses were cut up for scrap metal.

“We used to live well under Communism,” said Mamia Gabeskeliani, 68, who lives in Zodi, a mining village outside Chiatura. “Recently things have turned for the worse.”

Mr. Gabeskeliani said he did not trust either the protesters or the government. “There is one truth and one hundred lies and it is very difficult to differentiate,” he said.

[]Sopo Japaridze, an American-educated workers’ rights activist in Tbilisi, said she wanted to see a closer examination of all sides of Georgia’s Soviet past.

Western-funded organizations and media outlets in Tbilisi focused too much on the dark side of the Soviet period, such as repression against artists and the intelligentsia, she said.

But life in Georgia since the collapse of the Soviet Union “has degraded in every way,” with many people falling into alcohol and drug abuse, she said, so the benefits of Soviet rule also need to be considered.

“Life was much richer,” said Ms. Japaridze, a co-founder of a podcast about Soviet Georgia. “Not richer money wise, but there was more diversity; it was not as monotonous as it is now.”

Twenty years of blitzing has inevitably failed to intimidate the world back into once ignorant tyrannised servitude of past colonialism or neo-colonialism.

But it has succeeded in adding vast sums to the Empire’s gigantic bankrupting debt mountain which alone props up the boasted “economic success” of Bidenism (which has added vast new dollar credit in the absurdly named “inflation reduction act” and the vast infrastructure renewal programme for example).

Everyone knows the whole thing is on course for far worse collapse than yet seen, bursting the dollar into an inflationary nightmare.

Trumpism

All of which is the context for the populist rise by Trumpism.

The monopoly ruling class is torn apart over what to do – keep bullying the world in all directions as it has since 1999 and the Democrats continue, while more dollars can be printed to “maintain living standards” (for the metropolitan middle class) or follow Trump and withdraw into neo-isolationism to cut costs and focus US belligerence and bullying more sharply onto the “main enemy”, namely China, first and foremost.

Let the imperialist “allies” pay their own way in NATO says the Trumpite strategy while we look after our own, scapegoating foreigners and migrants and whipping up chauvinist hatred.

If the dollar goes down, so be it – we shall be as aggressive as need be against allcomers demanding recompense, ie a slew of rising rival powers like Japan and Germany, long outcompeting the US (see EPSR Perspectives 2001 eg) who now hold vast “surpluses” in dollar bonds and US properties.

China

Most of all that means against Beijing, now a double foe for anti-communist America, as both a continuing workers state, (contrary to shallow “left” opinion that it has “reverted to capitalism” – when exactly???) and as an economic rival, growing at an extraordinary pace precisely because it remains a workers state despite making extensive use of capitalist methods and granting giant “concessions” for external capitalist investment.

Kept under overall direction at the strategic level by the Chinese workers state, the capitalist sector of a still state economy, has been able to tap previously unavailable overseas resources while the state has restrained, if not all, then the very worst aspects of raw exploitation seen during imperialism’s development (which took four centuries, not four decades) and is still the reality in the imperialist sweatshops or plantations in countries like Indonesia, Kenya, Colombia and Bangladesh and dozens of others.

China continues to grow despite some wobbles, and even significant instances of corruption or excess, badly policed by revisionist leadership weakness possibly (now changing) and which may or may not be “inevitable” in such a rapidly expanding and developing circumstance – but which comes nowhere near the ludicrous lies about “forced labour” and “workcamps” (with all the unstated but deliberately implied implications of “deathcamps”) pumped out by hate-filled Western imperialist smear propaganda.

Combined with a rational channelling of the otherwise anarchic decision-making, which has plagued capitalist development historically, directing investment into undeveloped areas geographically and technologically and avoiding some of the pointless competition that leads to overproduction, in the short term at least, this intensive use of Lenin’s New Economic Policy methods has allowed China (and Vietnam similarly) to grow at an astonishing rate taking hundreds of millions out of poverty (which was never an aim for Western colonialism).

It has outstripped the West, historically and in current conditions now reaches a point of overtaking it in some respects.

But while revisionist-directed capitalism can go a long way, now drawing other countries into its plans through the Belt and Road projects, it cannot avoid the crisis overall, and particularly conflict with imperialism as it increasingly outcompetes and outsells it.

Far from constraining imperialism in some “multipolar” world through alternative trade in groups like BRICS this success can only intensify the contradictions driving imperialism to war.

Such “peaceful development” perspectives reflect the very worst of revisionist delusions, no different to Stalin’s Economic Problems 1952 schema of overtaking an allegedly hamstrung imperialism in peaceful competition.

They might be good diplomacy but as a perspective they are total garbage, dangerously dulling brains and seriously disarming the masses everywhere.

Leninist understanding is that imperialist war cannot be stopped.

The whole war system must be stopped – by revolution.

Imperialism confirms it, its only argument being how quickly to push matters.

Slap on tariffs and trade restrictions says the Trumpite wing of the US and the ultra-right UK bourgeoisie, and ramp up public opinion hostility with non-stop bogeyman psyops fantasies about “Chinese spies”, Chinese “secret data gathering” “slave labour”, the non-existent Tiananmen “massacre” (see EPSR book Vol 16 on China), specious arrests and international “human rights” bullshit provocations, most grossly hypocritically in the former British dictatorship colony of Hong Kong.

Splits over China

Except that does not suit large sectors of the US and Western monopolies, until now intertwined with the Chinese economy for both their own cheap-labour “offshored” production and as a colossal market – particularly such mega-corporations as Apple and other tech companies.

Hence the antagonisms until now between international profit-hunting corporations in the “Washington elite” – The Democrat “swamp” – and the rising domestic discontent of the consequently jobless in the abandoned “Rust Belt” that Trumpism taps into, whipping up the jingoism and fearful narrow-minded hatreds needed for the all-out war conflicts.

They will come once Biden’s credit-fueled interregnum inevitably implodes, and all the Western powers increasingly resort to the jingoism and nationalist aggression which is the essence of bourgeois rule.

It gets closer not least because setbacks and defeats for the turn to “shock and awe” world intimidation from Afghanistan and Iraq onwards to maintain imperialism’s tyrannical and unjust world exploitation system have not restored the Empire to its once virtually uncontested supremacy or ensured a “New American Century” as the neocon plotting was aiming for in the late 1990s and through the George W Bush presidencies.

An ever more rebellious Third World will not passively watch its resources plundered forever, while paying over ever higher debts to the big monopolies (as do even lesser imperialist powers like Britain, forced to pay ever higher water bills, health bills, power bills etc to rapacious asset stripping hedge funds, pension pots and monopolies).

Even America cannot sustain the middle class for much longer in it its deluded smugness based on decades of artificially maintained boomtime conditions.

Failing imperialism has to find ways to impose its will if it is to survive, at home and abroad – only if it dominates all can it ride out the crisis and survive.

It needs to tear up the democracy pretences even further but it is a fraught business, particularly in a country built on one of the first anti-imperialist bourgeois democratic revolutions, pre-dating even the 1789 bourgeois French Revolution.

So Trumpism now is winning huge donations and support from large sections of the very biggest bourgeoisie, including Elon Musk, the biggest cheese of all.

It is fascism, hiding itself behind the populist pretence of overcoming “the elite” and “restoring” the democratic process itself, just as Hitler became Chancellor through parliament – before shutting it down.

Imperialist war is already fascist anyway?

A major difficulty understanding this phenomenon lies in the completely artificial distinction created by “Popular Front” revisionist ideas as far back as the Spanish civil war (and to an extent even in China in the 1920s) between “ordinary” imperialist “democratic” capitalism (the Republican government) and “fascism” (barbaric Francoist military reaction) and its subsequent philosophical extension by Stalin’s post-WW2 Moscow revisionism into the notion of good ”non-aggressive” imperialists and bad, belligerent ones, (the role Germany and Italy took).

It is a nonsense – fundamentally there is no difference; and there has been no shortage of outright fascist action involved in the last twenty years of blitzing and bombardment of country after country so far, and especially in Gaza and the Ukraine.

All has been laced with death squadism, kidnap and brutal torture, Guantánamo forever-incarceration, drone assassination and mass intimidation, terrorising invasion and genocidal obliteration of whole cities like Mosul, Tikrit, Allepo, and Raqqa, and entire countries like Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan (plundered of its tiny resources by Washington and abandoned to feudal backwardness once again).

Fascism is just the more extreme and obviously intimidating face of imperialism in crisis, with or without any special forms – pre-1914 British and German and other imperialism butchered and bombed everywhere without changing uniforms.

Certainly historically the imperialists have sometimes used particular fascist parties when required, ruthlessly suppressing society directly.

In the 1920s Germany borrowed Italy’s new Fascism to use its chauvinist theatricality and belligerence for the Nazis, with its marches, pomp, leather uniforms and street aggressive “patriotism”, to pump itself up again from the defeat of 1918 and the humiliation of the savage Versailles Treaty.

“Special” Hitlerism and thuggery was needed because of bourgeois weakness, needing to impose a draconian discipline on the working class (and poorer petty bourgeoisie) to up its exploitation and ruthlessly punish resistance and rebellion.

It was an uncomfortable ride for the bourgeoisie and middle class but accepted and eventually backed by the big monied combines like Krupp etc to preserve their interests against the Depression breakdown and potentially uncontainable rising working class struggle, (which had made three revolutionary attempts in the early 1920s) including a huge Communist Party- led redshirt street movement confronting the brownshirt thugs.

Trump echoes some of that in tapping working class discontent (in the same way France’s Le Pen movement does as the EPSR said in issue No1133 (quoted at length again last issue). It began:

The shallow ‘intellectual’ thug Le Pen feeds off the deserved growing contempt for “Western democracy” (i.e. US imperialism) which is leading the world to warmongering chaos but whose fraudulent “parliamentary reformist” games the entire fake-‘left’ still insists on playing. The inevitable failure of anti-racism (until the divisive capitalist exploitation system is abolished completely) is the essence of the “old politics” which the despicable philistinism of Le Pen and the BNP scores votes against by denouncing.

Trump’s denunciation of the “establishment” does the same to divert justified working class sentiment against the ruling class and the slump, into similar chauvinist channels, with whipped-up scapegoating of foreigners, communists and other blame targets – particularly the black population in the US with its long history of past slavery, and the native Americans.

In this sense there certainly are parallels between Trump and Hitler, also an outsider from the mainstream bourgeoisie tapping “primitive incoherent disgust” which swept up some of the working class along with the still large population of a small farmer class (petty bourgeois peasants) in Germany at the time.

The Nazi (national “socialist”) party declared itself to be anti-financier (ie anti-“Washington swamp”) at the beginning (with additional anti-Jewish hatred thrown in).

But the confused “anti-capitalist” orientated but anti-communist Brownshirts were abandoned once Hitler was in power (the leaders literally stabbed in the back in the infamous night of the long knives).

But US imperialism is not an on-the-rise power, fettered and stymied from its “natural growth” by older imperialists – it is in decline and rotten ripe for overthrow.

All that sustains it is the absence of understanding in the working class – a vacuum filled by the bourgeoisie’s never-ceasing anti-communist brainwashing, morning to night, birth to death, that remains unchallenged in any seriousness by any of the Trot or revisionist “left” politics.

British election

Their gibbering about “extreme democracy” or “left voting tactics”, or even “breaking with Labour” by “voting more left” is nowhere better demonstrated than in the complete collapse of voting revealed just held British election, in the so-called “Mother of Parliaments”.

Things have gone much further. The grip of the whole lying electoral process on the working class has been loosening for decades as cynicism and disillusionment has grown about the rank stink of the entire opportunist racket.

Workers have effectively been breaking with Labour ever since the treacheries of the 1945 Attlee government running imperialism; since Harold Wilson’s In Place of Strife attempts to rein in the unions; and especially in the sellout by the TUC and Labour of the great 1984 miners strike, a process almost worked through by the 1990s, as the EPSR noted eg analysing the 1996 Leicester City by-election (No883 10-12-96).

Vote levels from any working class turnout have dropped away election by election for the alleged “bourgeois workers party” of Labour, and even from much of the petty bourgeoisie, whose class position desperately clings to the “stability” of the bourgeois system enough to let itself be hoodwinked.

But the rejection of the whole thing this time went far beyond the usual pattern of deception.

Staggeringly the supposed “landslide” victory, heralded as a “historic turnaround for the Labour Party” was based on an actual fall in its vote levels from the last election and one of the lowest ever leaving the bourgeois commentaries scraping through statistics from Victorian times before “universal suffrage” to find equivalents:

At 60.5%, the overall turnout in this general election was at a historic low. In areas with a Labour incumbent, voter engagement was notably lower, reflected by an average turnout of around 55%. Moreover, over 75% of the constituencies with a Labour incumbent had a turnout below the national average.

Keir Starmer is not the only Labour candidate to lose votes in his constituency. The majority of the Labour MPs announced as cabinet ministers saw their popularity go down: Rachel Reeves, chancellor (6% decrease), Angela Rayner, deputy prime minister and levelling up secretary (4% decrease), Wes Streeting, health and social care secretary (17% decrease), and David Lammy, foreign secretary (19% decrease).

The result is such an absurd joke that even the sombre “taking it all as if it means something” TV presenters, “experts” and bourgeois papers were obliged to comment, when usually they keep very quiet about how many of the population voted, burying the turnout figures or leaving them out altogether.

Obviously they still avoided drawing out the farcical and hollow humiliation of the whole bamboozling pantomime.

Gushing sycophant admiration for the fabled “new suit” for the actually naked emperor has nothing on these mountebanks and frauds whose comfortable sinecures and salaried positions depend on them playing the whole game, spending weeks of the election campaign solemnly going through all the usual round of interviews, “analysis” and “assessments”.

But the “victors” in virtually all cases “won” their seats on around 20% of the “eligible vote” as the weasel phrase used by the “expert commentators” has it, (covering up the reality that a significant proportion of the population, and those largely from the proletariat, does not register to vote at all through contempt or deliberately imposed obstacles and difficulties, like homelessness and poverty and newly introduced measures such as the need to show an identity document which many in the poorer or minority populations do not have, making the actual vote proportion even less).

But even these figures do not tell the whole story; the “spread of results” as the professors say, made it clear that even these tiny votes levels were mostly negative. Those who did vote, were voting aggressively against the bourgeoisie, to kick its vicious, brutal and corrupt Tory rule but without giving any support to the “alternative”:

[It]was not just a historic win for the Labour Party (!!). Political parties other than Labour and Conservative got their highest vote and seat shares in this election as compared to the last 100 years. This increase suggests a notable shift in voter support away from the traditional two-party dominance towards alternative parties, indicating a possible fragmentation of the political landscape in the future.

Or to see it clearly, it was not a historic vote at all; they chose any possible other option where they could, like Greens etc.

The only positive votes, and even slight turnout increases came in those constituencies where pro-Palestinian candidates were standing and the hostility to the Zionist-orientated Labour Party’s grovelling servitude to the ruling class and its genocidal crisis warmongering could be given expression.

That was a hugely significant result, shocking the bourgeoisie to the core by electing four “independent” MPs, or five if the trouncing for Labour by the expelled former “left” leader Jeremy Corbyn is counted, and coming very close in other constituencies, and notably that of the reactionary careerist worm Wes Streeting.

Its world impact reverberated in America (now virtually paymasters for the has-been British bourgeoisie) where Trump’s newly selected ultra-right vice-presidential running mate J D Vance made a significant aside when selected, declaring Britain to now be the “world’s only nuclear armed Islamic state”.

Hyperbole that might be, (and wrong too – has he not heard of Pakistan? and does he not know the Trident launch codes require American approval?) but it was far more than just a populist joke.

It both demonstrated how closely a nervous US ruling class watches Britain, knowing it to be a potential weak point, and acted as a warning shot across the bows of the Labourites, in case they should hesitate at all in their allotted task of keeping the British population under control and in line for the US monopolies to plunder.

The Palestine election results would have been even stronger but for the electoral skulduggery in many constituencies, where mysterious new “independent” candidates appeared, splitting the vote and just as importantly confusing the campaigning, to head off the challenge.

The momentum behind “left” opportunist George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, built up around loud and firm denunciations of the Zionist genocide onslaught on Gaza, (and of the sick NATO-Ukraine war on Russia) was partly dispersed this way, not least in his own Rochdale constituency, just taken in the May by-election.

Huge resources poured in by the Labourites just about squeezed him out, by around 13.000 votes to 11,600 – and Galloway alleges that was only by electoral overspending and is legally challenging it.

And in the Stratford and Bow constituency, challenged for the WPB by the former Labourite whistleblower Halima Khan, no less than three “independents” appeared, quite obviously to draw off votes and sabotage a potentially significant anti-Labour result.

All kinds of suspicions attend the “independents” here and across the election, some seen laughing and chatting with the Labourites at the counts.

Khan had good potential support having been expelled from Labour after speaking out as a key witness in the al-Jazeera Labour Files documentary, exposing anti-Muslim and other racism (a sequel to its four part exposé of the Zionist-instigated campaign against the Corbynite “left”, escalating the poisonous and lying “left anti-semitism” demonisation campaign to purge Labour of anything resembling leftism and demands for socialism).

Corbynism was never going to be a real challenge anyway, the Labour “left” only ever being a way to bamboozle the working class and cover up Labourism’s reaction with impossible pie-in-the-sky promises about winning the socialist argument “one day” (as long as it does not jeopardise their careers as the likes of Diane Abbott and John McDonnell have been showing over Palestine, quickly abandoning all their principles when “disciplined”).

But suppression of the Corbyn movement reflects the extreme jumpiness of the ruling class, fearful that even such a tame “socialism” might unleash uncontainable movement (as the 2019 election showed, with a bigger vote than Starmer’s “landslide”).

Electoral confusion was made worse in Khan’s constituency by the posturing Trots in the form of the newly christened Revolutionary Communist Party, the previously Labour entryist Socialist Appeal) standing their own candidate Fiona Lali (one of the three “independents”) helping split the vote.

The RCP campaign’s choice to stand its candidate in this constituency was purely disruptive and completely parasitical, piggy-backing on the support built up for Khan for totally bourgeois idealist reasons and expressing a complete lack of grasp of revolutionary electoral tactics to boot.

A Leninist understanding of the election would grasp the point of delivering a blow to the bourgeois manipulation of the election and its sliding of a fascist minded Labour government into power by duplicity, rule-bending and all the trickery perfected over nearly two centuries of using “parliament” to fool the working class.

No support would necessarily be implied for Galloway’s backward enough WPB chauvinism to nevertheless join in campaigning alongside the best placed candidate to inflict a defeat on this racket, especially by a campaign that correctly stands against the Zionist genocide and the monstrous NATO warmongering in the Ukraine (supported and backed by the same reactionary ruling class).

If nevertheless the RCP wanted to make an independent point, then it had more than 600 alternative constituencies to choose to stand, many of them at least as potentially open to revolutionary arguments as Stratford.

But the RCP is not remotely “revolutionary” being a philistine petty bourgeois sect full of Trotskyist poison and duplicity, whose shallow pretences of “Leninist” theory are nothing but anti-communism, filled with hostility to the Soviet Union and other workers states (see multiple past EPSRs eg No880, No 882-4 and EPSR books Against Trotskyism Vol 5, and Vol 4, 6, 7).

Its current posturing is covering up its long history of support for Labour, ended only recently after more than four decades of entryist lurking, fooling the working class that there was a future for socialism through voting for Labour, and a long history before that of complete disaster as part of the Militant group, not least in running the Liverpool council on a totally reformist basis, leading to bankruptcy.

Only the desperate “sanitising” all hint of “leftism” by Starmer's “changing” the Labour Party finally forced them to their new posturing ultra-leftism (shouting “revolution” but devoid of all devoid explanation or understanding of what that entails or how the working class is to get there).

Even the bourgeois press can present enough of the treacherous history of “Sir” Keir Starmer to make clear what every advanced worker knows – that this election was a coup by media manipulation and sleight-of-hand, pulled off by a ruling class whose direct representation in the Tories has created such total hatred and contempt since 2010, through arrogance, incompetence, corruption, sleaze and inhuman indifference to the savagery of the cutbacks and poverty it has imposed, that it could not continue:

He is labelled an enigma, a man who stands for nothing, with no plans and no principles. His election manifesto, which The Telegraph hailed as “the dullest on record,” appears to confirm the sense that he is a void and that the character of his administration defies prediction.

But a closer look at Mr. Starmer’s back story belies this narrative. His politics are, in fact, relatively coherent and consistent. Their cardinal feature is loyalty to the British state. In practice, this often means coming down hard on those who threaten it. Throughout his legal and political career, Mr. Starmer has displayed a deeply authoritarian impulse, acting on behalf of the powerful. He is now set to carry that instinct into government. The implications for Britain, a country in need of renewal not retrenchment, are dire.

Mr. Starmer has seldom dwelt on the specifics of his legal career, and his personal motives are of course unknowable. But it seems clear, based on his track record, that Mr. Starmer’s outlook began to take shape around the turn of the millennium. By that time, he had gained a reputation as a progressive barrister who worked pro bono for trade unionists and environmentalists. But in 1999 he surprised many of his colleagues by agreeing to defend a British soldier who had shot and killed a Catholic teenager in Belfast. Four years later, he was hired as a human rights adviser to the Northern Irish Policing Board — a role in which he reportedly helped police officers justify the use of guns, water cannons and plastic bullets.

Feted by the judicial establishment, Mr. Starmer was hired to run the Crown Prosecution Service in 2008, putting him in charge of criminal prosecutions in England and Wales. Professional success brought him closer to the state, which he repeatedly sought to shield from scrutiny. He did not bring charges against the police officers who killed Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian migrant who was mistaken for a terrorist suspect and shot seven times in the head. Nor did Mr. Starmer prosecute MI5 and MI6 agents who faced credible accusations of complicity in torture. Nor were so-called spy cops — undercover officers who infiltrated left-wing activist groups and manipulated some of their members into long-term sexual relationships — held accountable.

He took a different tack with those he saw as threatening law and order. After the 2010 student demonstrations over a rise in tuition fees, he drew up legal guidelines that made it easier to prosecute peaceful protesters. The following year, when riots erupted in response to the police killing of Mark Duggan, Mr. Starmer organized all-night court sittings and worked to increase the severity of sentencing for people accused of participating. During his tenure, state prosecutors fought to extradite Gary McKinnon, an I.T. expert with autism who had embarrassed the U.S. military by gaining access to its databases, and worked to drag out the case against the WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange.

For his service, Mr. Starmer was knighted in 2014; the year after that, he entered Parliament. After biding his time there, he played a central role in kiboshing his own party’s position on the European Union, maneuvering to secure Labour’s support for a second referendum rather than accepting the vote to leave the bloc. This stance alienated many Brexit voters and helped ensure his party’s defeat in the 2019 election. It then fell to Mr. Starmer to recapture Labour from the left-wing supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and cleanse it of radicalism, using the same repressive repertoire that he developed as chief prosecutor.

Mr. Starmer more than met the brief. Since becoming leader, he has begun a merciless crackdown on the mildest forms of internal dissent. He expelled his predecessor, blocked left-wing candidates from standing for Parliament, proscribed various socialist groups, barred politicians from joining picket lines and introduced antidemocratic rules for leadership elections. He has also demanded a stifling level of ideological conformity. Lawmakers who criticize NATO face instant expulsion, and members who oppose Israel’s actions are cynically accused of antisemitism.

This purge has turned Labour into a mirror image of the Conservatives: obsequious toward big business, advocating austerity at home and militarism abroad. It has also foreshadowed how Mr. Starmer would operate in Downing Street. He has said he intends to retain the Public Order Act, which places unprecedented restrictions on protests and makes it easier to lock up activists. He has described climate campaigners as “contemptible” and “pathetic,” pledging to impose harsh sentences on them. He has even backed a proposal to punish protesters who vandalize monuments with 10 years in prison.

Some say such hawkishness is merely good sense or excuse it as the necessary cost of credibility. But the repressive reflex reveals a fundamental truth about Mr. Starmer: At every turn, he seeks to protect the regnant order from disruption. The Labour Party’s offering, which promises to alter things so little that it is enthusiastically backed by prominent business leaders, can be seen as an extension of that principle to the country as a whole. Mr. Starmer’s nebulous invocation of growth and change, without any clear route to secure either, is a feature not a bug. A Labour Party made in his image can be expected to do little to upset the status quo.

To say the least. But actually not so different to Labour’s record from early on, already cutting the dole and suppressing the working class pre-WW2.

But it would do no harm to remind the working class constantly that Britain’s own 1930s Nazi-thug movement, the infamous Blackshirts (cheered on by the Daily Mail) was founded and led by a Labour Minister, Sir Oswald Mosely.

But the country was still sufficiently supplied by its empire at that time, to continue on a reformist path for enough of the petty bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy, to avoid relying on pure repression.

Has-been Britain has no such resources now.

And just in case the vicious Labourites should fall short, another face of fascist reaction, even more crude and obvious is also being warmed up in the new Reform Party.

The revolutionary path is the only answer. Build Leninism

Alan Moss

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The Trump shooting attempt

It is looking more and more likely that the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump really was an isolated incident; yet another in the almost “normalised” stream of mall, school and public shootings, of which there are hundreds each year in ever more alienated US society.

In the febrile near civil war atmosphere inflamed by Trump’s Make America Great Again “populist” (meaning fascist) chauvinism and belligerence it is unsurprising that a frenzy of conspiracy theories has erupted around his near-miss failed assassination.

A long US history of a reactionary ruling class and its criminal/mafia connections “taking out” troublesome elements in mysterious and rapidly covered-up circumstances, from Martin Luther King to the two Kennedys has helped every kind of fevered speculation emerge.

A pseudo-shooting done by the Trumpites themselves to win sympathy is quickly ruled out if only because Trump avoided a fatal hit only by a chance last second unexpected head turn.

But as details emerge of the shooter and the event itself, the alternative “Democrat”-driven “deep state” conspiracy alleged by some more “left” petty bourgeois elements, while not ruled out, looks less and less likely.

Well known one-time UN weapons inspector, marine and pacifist campaigner Scott Ritter, and Workers Party of Britain founder, the chauvinist opportunist George Galloway, are among those who quickly voiced the notion that the circumstances and timing could “not have been chance”; and that the incompetence, apparent blindspot laxity and indifference to repeated prior public alerts displayed by the Secret Service security detail were too extreme to be anything but a set-up job by the “deep state” and the White House.

Their case is built on the undoubted reality of a coordinated “establishment” campaign to do in Trump’s popular appeal over years with a non-stop stream of relatively inconsequential prosecutions, character assassinations (insofar as that is possible!) and the at least plausible notion that the 2020 election really was stolen from Trump by ballot box stuffing skulduggery taking advantage of Covid pandemic fears.

Even during the Obama presidency all kinds of specious smears were created by the intelligence agencies, not least in the allegations of “Russian collusion in the leaking of the Hilary Clinton emails” (damning in themselves) and supposed bizarre sexual encounters in Moscow, filmed by the FSB to be used as a compromat hold on him.

All these allegations were entirely evidence-free as outlets like the Grayzone have shown (but obviously given credence by Trump’s own sexist boasting).

Failure of such dirty dealing to get anywhere now meant using the ultimate option of an assassination stunt it is then alleged.

Circumstantial evidence to back it up includes the multiple references by Joe Biden and the Democrat wing of the “elite” to Trump as an “existential threat to democracy and America” to be “put in the bullseye”, all, it is said, to create a societal frenzy in which someone was bound to make such an attempt.

But relying on such a chance random outburst seems highly fraught; and there is no evidence at all to demonstrate the shooter Thomas Brooks to have been a trained or setup “patsy” (as there might have been in Dallas for example).

Just the opposite. All the bourgeois press and police investigations find no evidence the 20 year old was partisan or fanatically political at all.

It does not even seem to be the case he was a right wing malcontent of the kind who came close to killing Ronald Reagan for not being reactionary enough, as the EPSR (then called the Workers Party) reported in 1981 (Workers Party Bulletin No82):

Every minute since he has been in office, Ronald Reagan has been trying to whip up the right wing into a crusading frenzy against communism.

He has ascribed every evil on the planet as due to ‘terrorism’ and slandered the USSR as the ‘instigator’ of all terrorism in the world.

Now Reagan knows better.

The ageing movie cowboy has been gunned down by a product of the very ‘American’ way of life Reagan so propagandizes.

His assailant John Hinckley is from an affluent oil executive’s family, politically well to the right, a religious family – good God-fearing fundamentalists, – and after high school went on to university, Texas Tech, where he read Mein Kampf, later joining the National Socialist Party (NAZI) of America.

But Hinckley had a gun, a ‘right’ the American bourgeoisie are fanatical about, and which Reagan defends vociferously, – most recently in public after the John Lennon killing.

Hinckley had taken Reagan’s policy of massive rearmament ‘against communist terrorism’ to its logical conclusion and had joined one of the many fascist groupings tolerated by the US capitalist state which specialise in terrorising black militants, trade unionists and all ’communists’.

But on being drawn into the NAZI propaganda insanity so freely available throughout the capitalist USA, Hinckley turned first against his own ’soft’ bourgeois allies, a typical fascist tactic.

The precise reasons for the lunatic’s attack are still being presented, but the Bulletin has already commented on the retreat by the Reagan administration from the ‘instant armageddon’ against the left internationally that was boastfully being promised in the first days in office.

The ultra-right already feel betrayed by Reagan that nuclear bombs are not at once dropping on El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cuba, Grenada, etc.

Despite echoes of this in Trumpism, it is obviously not the same; Crooks was not fanatically rightwing, and far more likely is a product of the appalling alienation of an increasingly defeated sentiment in middle-class America, tragically plunging into total despair at the crisis-wracked future and seeing little but a chance for some nihilistic suicidal fame as hundreds of others have done.

His phone records suggest just that, with multiple viewings of such school shootings and only a few of political incidents, likely for their potential publicity value rather than specific hostility.

Most of these incidents barely merit the news even regionally because they are so commonplace. Possibly a bigger target was selected purely for its sensationalist value.

And while the establishment New York Times and other bourgeois press carry vast amounts of anti-communist and Western propaganda (not least in uncritical pro-war anti-Russian pysops lies and heavily pro-Zionist accounts of the Gaza war) and therefore might be dismissed as “just part of the plot”, their apparently detailed investigations of the location subsequently seem to show a pattern of laxity by the security agencies more likely due to incompetence than deep state conspiracy.

Critical realist bourgeois journalism can sometimes deliver at least surface facts, here about the layout and deployment of the protection agents etc even if it is usually necessary to read between the lines in understanding their significance:

A week after Mr. Crooks opened fire at the rally and was killed by the Secret Service, his ideology and motives remain a vexing question for investigators and the people who crossed paths with him.

In dozens of interviews, former classmates, teachers and neighbors said they still could not square their memories of Mr. Crooks — an awkward, intelligent teenager who liked to tinker with computers and spent his weekends playing video games — with the image of the stringy-haired gunman at the rally, armed with his father’s AR-15-style rifle as he clambered onto a rooftop and took aim at the former president. Mr. Trump suffered an injury to his ear, and three spectators were wounded, one of them fatally.

“That’s where I’m struggling — I’ve looked at horrific pictures of an individual that I stood six inches away from, shaking his hand, calling on him in class,” said Xavier Harmon, who saw Mr. Crooks almost daily in the computer technology class he taught at a technical school.

Many of the young men who have attacked schools, movie theaters, supermarkets and churches in recent years deliberately or unintentionally hinted at their rage, violent fantasies or plans well before their attacks — a phenomenon that researchers call “leakage.”

Investigators have uncovered what now could be seen as concerning signs: The gunman’s phone showed that he had possibly read news stories about the teenage school shooter who killed four students at Oxford High School in Michigan. Mr. Crooks received multiple packages, including several that were marked “hazardous material,” over the past several months. He looked up “major depressive disorder” on a cellphone later found at his house.

He had also searched a bipartisan roster of political figures, including Mr. Trump, President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland, F.B.I. officials told members of Congress. He also looked up both the dates of Mr. Trump’s July 13 rally in Butler, Pa., as well as the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

But investigators have not found any evidence that Mr. Crooks had strong political beliefs or an ideological motivation.

Experts who study the histories of gunmen said the emerging picture of Mr. Crooks looked more like a 21st-century school shooter than a John Wilkes Booth.

“When somebody attacks a president, our gut instinct is to say, ‘That must be politically motivated,’” said James Densley, a founder of the Violence Project, which has compiled a comprehensive database of mass shootings. “What we might be seeing here is: This was somebody intent on perpetrating mass violence, and they happened to pick a political rally.”

 

A key question after an assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump a week ago is why the Secret Service excluded from its secured zone a nearby warehouse the gunman used for his assault.

But another possible flaw in the Secret Service’s plans for the campaign rally at the farm show grounds in Butler, Pa., is emerging. The protection agency expected the sizable contingent of officers from local law enforcement agencies to contain any threats outside of the secured zone but assigned almost all those officers to work inside it, according to numerous interviews with local law enforcement and municipal officials.

None of the law enforcement agencies that assisted the Secret Service that day — the Pennsylvania State Police, the Butler Township Police Department, the Butler County Sheriff, Pittsburgh Bureau of Police or the multicounty tactical teams — say they were given responsibility for watching the zone outside the Secret Service’s security perimeter.

More specifically, the local law enforcement officials say that none of them were assigned to safeguard the complex of warehouses just north of the farm show grounds. The gunman was able to use the roof of the warehouse closest to the stage — about 450 feet from the podium — from which to shoot.

“I am going to defend those guys, because it wasn’t their job to secure the building,” Richard Goldinger, the district attorney in Butler County, who oversees the multicounty tactical teams that were used at the rally, on July 13.

Rather, an overwhelming majority of the dozens of local and state officers called upon to aid the Secret Service were given other duties at or inside the secured perimeter — an area that was protected by a fence, metal detectors and the Secret Service itself.

With law enforcement focused elsewhere, a would-be assassin roamed freely outside the perimeter. The only officers who got close to him were ones who left their designated posts to do so.

Their job had been to direct traffic.

The assigned responsibilities of the local law enforcement officers raise questions as to whether these resources were effectively deployed. The assignments also suggest there was a breakdown in the Secret Service’s communication with local law enforcement.

Secret Service Director Kimberly A. Cheatle will almost certainly face sharp questions about why that rooftop was left unguarded during a hearing with the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on Monday. In an interview with ABC News this week, Ms. Cheatle said that local police — not the Secret Service — had been responsible for the area in which the warehouses were located.

“In this particular instance, we did share support for that particular site and that the Secret Service was responsible for the inner perimeter,” Ms. Cheatle said. “And then we sought assistance from our local counterparts for the outer perimeter. There was local police in that building — there was local police in the area that were responsible for the outer perimeter of the building.”

Local agencies quickly issued statements disputing her account, saying that no officers were deployed in the building the gunman used. She has not spoken publicly since.

Further reports have detailed 3d maps of the site and how security snipers had partially blocked views, all of which appears to reflect the weaknesses in the US’ fragmented federal and local policing structures rather than a carefully coordinated plot.

What the bourgeois analyses or reports avoid, and probably cannot begin to deal with, (and do not want to) is the overall pattern of complete societal breakdown tearing everything apart in the capitalist world.

This class system is riven with antagonisms and conflict at all levels at the best of times, and even more so as the greatest crisis collapse of all time unfolds.

And the morals it extols, and the practical lessons it offers in how to deal with those contradictions, through dirty dealing, vicious tread-on-the-head “competition” and individual advancement to get on, as well as winner-takes-all might-is-right principles at every level, including fascist blitzkrieg of entire countries, can only inflame all such derangement and tragedy.

This is the sick society which considers the term “loser” to be the greatest insult and condemnation of its victims, rather than of society itself.

Even if there were some national plot, concentrating on disentangling its details still does not really give the working class a better understanding, other than perhaps as further evidence of the dementedly stupid lengths that the crisis is driving bourgeois idealist frenzy to.

But the real understanding that is required is that of the material conditions and contradictions of the Catastrophe which is tearing the ruling class apart and which will relentlessly continue whatever happens to any particular individuals or groupings within it.

The clichéd science-fiction fantasy of going back in time to assassinate Hitler can only mislead; German Nazism was a product of the enormous material complexities of capitalist breakdown at the time and the balance of class forces within it.

While the existence of this or that individual might have altered details of how things unfolded, the overall plunge into fascism and World War Two was determined by the concrete conditions of crisis and collapse.

“Cleverly” demonstrating the “proof” with Trump is actually not clever at all since it distracts from the broader perspective of capitalism as a whole.

It might even mislead, as the theories about the Crocus Hall terror attack in Moscow did earlier this year, failing to see the real story of Third World revolt, however crude, developing as discontent with Russian capitalist society also develops, and failing to see Moscow’s participation in imperialism’s “war on terror” as a backward step for the proletariat (as is revisionist China’s unfortunately).DH

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Durham Miners Gala leaflet:

Stitched-up default “landslide” for reactionary Zionist-backing Labour is a soft COUP, replacing Tory warmongering incompetence, sleaze, and arrogance with more of the same, a Labour Party “changed” only by open apeing of the Tories & befriending bosses and City fatcats (and boasting about it). Capitalist crisis roars on, soon to expose in-your-face LYING pledges to “grow the economy” in Britain, weakest link in the imperialist chain and hammered by ever more cutthroat trade war. More homelessness, pollution, poverty and foodbank despair at home, and foul Zionist genocide and NATO/Kiev nazi war destruction abroad the only future on offer, and plenty more to come as world economic Catastrophe deepens & world war with it. Only class war ENDING of imperialism, to seize production & finance under control of workers states (dictatorship of the proletariat) can change anything. Defeat from anti-imperialist struggle (labelled “terrorism” etc) a step forwards but world needs to rebuild a polemical leadership party of Leninist revolutionary science. Fake-“leftism” needs exposing from Trotskyite anti-Sovietism to Stalinist revisionism.

Devastating capitalist economic Catastrophe, unfolding from the 2000 dotcom crash and emerging in full with the great Global Bank collapse of 2009, is the underlying basis for growing Slump austerity and the non-stop warmongering of the last three decades.

From Serbia’s destruction, the Afghanistan blitzing and the Iraq invasion to the inhuman Zionist genocide on Gaza’s Palestinians and nazi-NATO’s failing meatgrinder slaughter against Russia in Ukraine, this is the only “solution” imperialism has to its intractable breakdown and crisis.

Its gruesome barbarity and destructive depravity, inefficiency and wilful indifference combined with the ever more grotesque inequality, unfairness and repression, destroying lives, livelihoods and human aspirations of all kinds of the overwhelming majority, makes a mockery of all bourgeois pretences to be “looking after the interests and prosperity” of the world population in a “free and just” world.

Just the opposite, it stirs up ever more justified hatred, and hostility, which it bludgeons and smites with ever more degenerate violence and brutality, further adding to its inhumanity and arrogant contempt (the underlying fascist reality of all bourgeois rule, even in the best of “boom times”, especially for the ruthlessly driven and exploited Third World):

Endless “excuses” for specific belligerent onslaughts for “peacekeeping” purposes, or for “security reasons”, etc, keep on pouring out.

But questions are never now raised about why this “free world” system, — which supposedly so deservedly “won the battle of history” by prevailing against the allegedly “warlike communist system” to bring the world only “peacefully negotiated democratic settlements” to all of mankind’s problems, — just sinks ever deeper into more and more bloody conflicts, and ever-rising hatred (EPSR Perspectives for 2004).

All this devastation and horror will not and cannot be ended while the monopoly capitalist system remains in control of world affairs, its tyrannical world domination maintaining brutal exploitation of the vast majority on the planet and wastefully plundering, polluting and poisoning its natural resources to the point of planetary ecocide to feed its empty, philistine and vacuous consumerist “lifestyle” (for the few).

That can be changed only by the overthrow of this foetid and stinking bourgeois rule, over its 800 year rise a driving force for “entrepreneurial advance” and scientific progress (albeit mechanically one-sided) against feudal backwardness and superstition, but long become its opposite, drowning the world in irrationality while threatening mankind with hitherto unimaginable and appalling armageddon.

As long as bourgeois rule continues, far worse devastation, spreading everywhere, is the only future, as the insanely credit-inflated dollar reaches the total collapse it came near to in 2009 (on the precipice of a “financial nuclear winter” as then Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling described it subsequently).

Even more demented QE money “printing” than ever (after decades of dollar credit creation already since the Nixon abandonment of the gold standard), just about averted world economic collapse on a scale far beyond the 1930s Depression, combined with belligerent threats by the US Empire in all directions against any challenges to its ever growing and impossible to repay $trillions state debts.

But the tide of dollars has only deferred the implosion, making it even worse eventually. The contradictions of the capitalist system are unsolvable and ever deepening, its endless mindless accumulation and relentless expansion of capital always leading to a crisis of overproduction as Marx explained (see box) and destructive slump collapse to wipe out the “surplus” capital (with mountains of products desperately needed by most of the world but unusable because unable to “make a profit” for its owners).

In the imperialist epoch of relentless monopoly concentration in ever fewer hands, these have become gigantic conflicts between the major powers, great cutthroat trade wars turning to shooting war to force the burden of the crisis onto others.

It goes hand in hand with the whipping up of jingoism, anti-foreigner finger-pointing and blame mongering, diverting attention from the problems caused by the system itself onto scapegoats and others, readying workers for stampeding into war.

All reformist pretence that this capitalism can be reined in, modified, controlled, regulated, adapted or improved is a total lie – temporary tinkering minor changes excepted, and even those mostly fraudulent, like past NHS “improvements” created by “partnership with private funding”, which have only added to capitalist profiteering and thereby breakdown of its finances, (and leaving a legacy of badly maintained buildings on handover or expensive supply contracts in a nearly collapsing health service).

And all such minor changes pale into insignificance anyway against the reality of the crisis which prevents, or will wipe out any significant reformist changes towards “socialism”, even if they were “sincerely” aimed for, which has never been the case for much of the entire class-collaborating “labour movement”, concerned only to get a bigger share of the bourgeoisie’s imperialist colonial plunder for the better-off privileged and semi-petty bourgeois workers.

It therefore sees its interests as the same overall as the ruling class which is why TUC/Labourism has always been prepared to run the government and defend the British “Empire” or at least the tattered remnants of it post-war, as every Labour government has done, suppressing all manifestations of anti-imperialist struggle, such as the Malayan revolution post-WW2 or the Greek communist/partisans, both under Attlee; the Zimbabwean anti-colonial revolt under Wilson, and, the Irish national-liberation struggle (until its armed revolt defeated ailing British imperialism, winning the Good Friday Agreement and soon a united Ireland).

It was Attlee’s supposedly “left” Labour which was a key element in the (just celebrated) 1949 founding of the NATO warmongers’ alliance, set up to militarily encircle and hold back the victorious Soviet Union and expansion of the workers states in Eastern Europe, and since responsible for blitzing country after country including the Serbian remnants of communist Yugoslavia and Muammar Gaddafi’s erratically anti-imperialist Libya in 2011 (under bogus pretext of backing the Arab Spring!!).

Blairism, – coming in to rescue the ruling class in the mid-1990s when the already intensifying crisis and growing trade war competition, including with major European monopolies, had paralysed the Tories, drowning in sleaze and incompetence even then, – made this explicit, by abandoning all pretence of socialism as a target and imposing draconian “individual responsibility” repression and blame discipline on the working class, and pursuing an international warmongering programme from Sierra Leone to the blitzing of Afghanistan, and Iraq in total coordination with American imperialism.

Now Starmerism goes one step further after the continuing decline of British imperialism both relative to the other imperialist competitors and as part of an overall crisis wracked system.

The “anti-semitism” smear campaign against Corbyn’s “left” leadership after he was elected leader on a wave of popular opinion which produced 2017’s massively popular election near-success, is one of the most vicious and dirty tricks campaigns yet by imperialism, tapping the already long running international Zionist/CIA conspiracy to label all resistance to the 75 year long violent colonialist occupation of Palestine as “racism”, an egregious inversion of reality and history by the Jewish “state” which enshrines apartheid differences in civil and legal privileges for Jews only in the artificial “state of Israel” imposed by terrorised land theft and ethnic cleansing just 75 years ago and maintained by constant genocidal violence, blitzing, torture and intimidation.

Starmer’s monstrous “cut their water and food” crime-against-humanity comments (withdrawn or not) just after the Palestinian breakout from their two decade long Gaza isolation – is the measure of this “changed” Labourism, willing to support the monstrous butchery, maiming and terrorising of men, women and above all children, at an unprecedented level, and edging ever closer outright fascism (never forgetting that the Blackshirt movement of the 1930s, when British imperialism flirted with its own nazi movement for a while – until calculating that with its still large empire resources it could maintain enough reform bribery to manage without it and the attendant risks of stimulating anti-fascism and potentially even stirrings of communism. Even more so does the immediate flight to Washington for the NATO summit, to pledge full allegiance to the US led-international war drive and to get instructions on further opening up the British economy to US monopolies now that the British ruling class has finally overcome its agonising over Europe or the US for the oncoming trade war/-inter-imperialist warmongering.

But the election demonstrated how fraught this grovelling will be.

The result a watershed moment in long slow break by the working class from Labourism (underway for decades) with the vote actually dropping despite the “landslide” to leave a government “elected” with less than 20% support from the population (and even less when those who do not even register are counted in).

But it also indicated an historic level of contempt and dismissal of the whole fraudulent bourgeois “democracy” racket, which has long been the ruling class’s best weapon for keeping control, hiding its class dictatorship behind. And even those still voting largely did so for purely negative reasons to give the ruling class a good kicking, picking whatever candidate would do the trick rather that showing a jot of confidence in any of them.

The exception was the pro-Palestinian movement which stirred significant support (further discrediting the manipulated Labour coup). But it too needs a revolutionary perspective. DH

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